In response to Barack Obama's address today on Iraq and Afghanistan, Republican presidential nominee John McCain declared, "I know how to win wars." Now for the first time, the man who brought you Ahmad Chalabi and 100 years in Iraq offers all his war-winning secrets in How to Win Wars for Dummies. Insightful chapters like […]

The news that President Bush will begin drawing down U.S. troops in Iraq below pre-surge levels this fall is being greeted as an October surprise for John McCain. But even with the successes of the surge, events on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are validating Barack Obama's call for a strategic refocus on Afghanistan. […]

If John McCain has many more days like Tuesday, his only chance to get to the White House will be as a tourist. On the same day he dropped jaws with his joke about killing Iranians with cigarettes, McCain amazingly slammed Social Security as "an absolute disgrace." Then even as McCain's first-term balanced budget pledge […]

The steady stream of bad news about Afghanistan this week served to highlight two inescapable truths regarding the conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. First, Barack Obama was right that the ongoing commitment of American forces in Iraq is preventing the United States from successfully pursuing Al Qaeda along the Pakistan frontier. Second, the […]

Back in 2003, General Tommy Franks called Bush Iraq intelligence fabulist Douglas Feith "the f**king stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Two years later, Colin Powell's one-time aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said of Feith "seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Defending Condoleezza Rice's - and by extension, President Bush's […]

One day after he proclaimed that it is "not too important" when U.S. troops return from Iraq, John McCain commemorated an unfortunate five year anniversary. In the annals of McCain's dismal record of flawed forecasts and calamitous calls on Iraq, June 11, 2003 stands out. On that one day, George W. Bush's would-be Republican successor […]

Four years after Kansas Senator Pat Roberts triumphantly cleared the Bush administration of misusing pre-war Iraq intelligence, the Phase 2 report of the Senate Intelligence Committee he once chaired today reached a much different conclusion. After Roberts successfully stonewalled past the 2004 and 2006 elections the studies examining White House statements on the Iraqi threat […]

Aided and abetted by the conservative echo chamber, John McCain this week launched a campaign to rewrite his dismal history of faulty forecasts and disastrous predictions on Iraq. Demonstrating that experience is truly no substitute for judgment, John McCain like President Bush was sadly wrong at almost every turn in promoting the invasion and occupation […]

If nothing else, John McCain is an irony producing machine. On the very day Scott McClellan described the Bush administration "propaganda" used to sell an "unnecessary war" in Iraq, talking points McCain himself regurgitated, the Arizona Senator challenged Barack Obama to join him on a Baghdad visit. More ironic still, John McCain hasn't merely been […]

As FireDogLake, Huffington Post and others detail, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan revealed that it was President Bush himself who authorized the selective leaking of the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate. As he disclosed both in his book and during interviews today, McClellan says Bush admitted declassifying portions of the NIE to allow […]