Last Man Standing
Hmm, I wonder if Sen. McCain recalled Last man Standing, the 1996 movie, where Bruce Willis played “John Smith”, a wandering gunman who decides to play off both sides of a gang war that takes place in the violence-riddled town of Jericho, Texas, when he said this on ABC’s This Week yesterday:
McCAIN: (From videotape.) We must succeed and we cannot fail and I will be the last man standing, if necessary.
STEPHANOPOULOS: That sounds like an open-ended, unconditional commitment. McCAIN: I’m going to support this strategy even if I’m the last man standing. Now, if this strategy fails, if we give it enough time, if it fails, of course, then other options have to be examined.
But wait, there’s more. McCain attributes motives to Al-Qaeda in Iraq that not even Dick Cheney attempts:
McCAIN: But if they gain control of Iraq, they’ll be sitting on one of the world’s largest supplies of oil.
It’s a pity the United States no longer sells war bonds as it did with the Liberty Bond in WWI, as it appears this would be a good time to buy, as Sen. McCain thinks this is going to be a very long effort
McCAIN: No, if you — we’re going to be in a struggle against radical Islamic extremism perpetually, certainly for as long as you and I are alive. I mean, it’s there, it’s all over the world.
Meanwhile, as this clip from Fox news Sunday reminded us, the Republican presidential candidates, sought to create a Grand Canyon sized gap between themselves and President Bush, in regard to Iraq:
WALLACE: The president has been taking fire recently from Republicans not only running for president but even thinking of running for president. Here’s a sample.
REP. TOM TANCREDO [R-CO]: (From videotape.) I’ve been disappointed in the president in so many ways.
MIKE HUCKABEE [R-Former Arkansas Governor]: (From videotape.) We’ve lost credibility. The way we bungled Katrina.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN [R-AZ]: (From videotape.) This war was very badly mismanaged for a long time.
NEWT GINGRICH [R-Former Speaker of the House]: (From videotape.) I don’t think that he drives implementation and looks at the reality in which he’s trying to implement things.
Meanwhile, over on NBC’s Meet The Press there is a fascinating interview with Colin Powell, which, should be read word for word. But just consider this:
RUSSERT: General, we went to war on this rationale. Why hasn’t there been accountability?
POWELL: We didn’t go to war on the sole rationale of the biological –
RUSSERT: Weapons of mass destruction?
POWELL: We went to war on the basis that we have a terrible regime and what makes — it’s been terrible forever — what makes it so terrible now, the aftermath of 9/11, is that they have demonstrated that they would use these weapons, they’ve used them against their own people, they’ve used them against the enemy, they had them at the time of the first Gulf War when I was chairman, and the intelligence community said and had every reason to believe that they not only had the capability of having them again, but they have stockpiles. And that was the precipitating cause.
Now, some in the administration have subsequent saying, “Well, yeah, but maybe the weapons aren’t there, but they’re bad guys, anyway, I’m glad the regime is gone.” I’m glad the regime is gone. I’m glad Saddam Hussein is gone. But the case that we took to the world, and the case that we took to the American people rested not just in his human rights abuses or his cheating on the Oil for Food program, it rested on the real and present danger of weapons of mass destruction that he could use against his neighbors or terrorists could use against us. That was the precipitating issue, in my judgment, and it turned out that those weapons are not there.
RUSSERT: If that was the case, and you were the commander- in-chief, would you demand to know what happened, what went wrong and why?
POWELL: There had been a number of investigations of it. Mr. Silberman, Judge Silberman did an investigation, we had a different congressional investigations underway, but the responsibility for looking into all that rests with the president of the United States, the national intelligence community, and the Congress. And I don’t know if Congress has been using all the oversight power that it has to look into these kinds of matters.
RUSSERT: Let me ask you about a quote from your former chief-of-staff, Lawrence Wilkinson. He said, “I recall vividly the secretary of state walking into our office.
He said, ‘I wonder what will happen if we put a half million troops on the ground in Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and don’t find a single weapon of mass destruction?’”
POWELL: Larry has a better recollection of that than I do, but I’m not going to dispute Larry. I wish we had put a half million troops on the ground. We would be in an entirely different situation whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not. We didn’t put half a million troops on the ground.
But there was always the possibility that we’re wrong. We believed we were right, and the basis of the facts that the CIA was using, the intelligence community was using, was consistent throughout 2001, throughout 2002, and all the way throughout 2003 — long after the war, the agency was still looking for these weapons of mass destruction stockpiles. Dr. Kay went over and spent a long time, thousands of people went over there to work with him, and then Charlie Duelfer took it over, and he looked for a long time, and they all came to the conclusion there are none, and they’re not buried in the ground, they weren’t shipped to Syria. We got it wrong.
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