John McCain's 100-year war for the White House

Although Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still locked in their primary struggle, that hasn't stopped Democrats from launching attacks on Republican John McCain and his 100 years of war in Iraq.

I remember seeing that day's news reports showing McCain making his now-famous 100-years-in-Iraq statement, and thinking that this would be easy fodder for attack ads this summer. Well, it didn't take that long. The Democrats have jumped on this comment and are already running these ads, using McCain's words as their weapon of choice.

McCain and his GOP allies are furious. They claim the ads are unfair because they take McCain's words out of context. I'm sure John Kerry is getting a big laugh out of that one.

To be fair, attack ads are rarely fair, nor do they provide any context to the issues presented. Democrats usually suck at attack ads, since they too often see the world in shades of gray. There is no room in a 30-second ad for any gray.

In this case, McCain claims he conditioned his remarks by saying that American troops could stay in Iraq for 100 years as long as they aren't being killed, more along the lines of what we have in Germany and South Korea.

OK, let's give him that. But this begs some rather large questions.

First, how many years would McCain keep troops in Iraq under the current situation, where more than one soldier per day is coming home in a flag-draped coffin? If not 100 years, then how many? If he is president in five years, presiding over America's longest war and having to talk with families about their dead sons and daughters, how much longer would he stay?

Then, how would he turn Iraq into something akin to Germany or South Korea? McCain already has problems keeping the Shiites and Sunnis straight, but his ignorance here seems to run a bit deeper.

Take Germany for instance. American forces were able to peacefully occupy this country after World War II for one very significant reason: The Germans were more afraid of the Soviet Union than of America. The German people liked Americans and needed them to stay. That's a far cry from the situation in Iraq.

A similar situation exists in South Korea. Those people want American troops to protect them from the Communist North. There is a well-defined line between the north and south, which took tens of thousands of American lives to establish, but which is easily guarded.

There are no lines in Iraq to guard. The enemy is everywhere, Shiite and Sunni, native Iraqis and foreign jihadis. They are fighting us, and each other. There's also no overriding fear of a powerful neighbor for which Iraqis might want us to stay.

The neighbor we see as a threat, Iran, is actually their ally and a big supporter of the Iraqi government.

Even McCain seems to know better. In 2005, he rejected the long-term Korea model for Iraq because Iraqis were responding negatively to American troop presence. But in 2006, he switched sides and supported a long-term troop deployment like that in Korea.

In 2007, he flip-flopped again, telling Charlie Rose that "because of the nature of the society in Iraq and the religious aspects of it that America eventually withdraws."

Now it's 2008, and he wants to stay for 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years. Maybe by next year he'll be in favor of withdrawing again, if that's the way the political winds are blowing.

This explains better than anything the GOP anger over these ads. It's not that it's misleading, but that it's a political albatross that hangs around McCain's neck.

He will be defined by this 100-years comment. It will drown out everything else and keep him on the defensive.

Those independent voters who pushed McCain to victory in the primaries are decidedly not in favor of staying in Iraq for 100 years. And his attempts to explain it will only make him look like those waffling politicians he has criticized all these years.

Despite his numerous flip-flops on Iraq, tax cuts, etc., McCain has kept the illusion of the Straight Talk Express rolling down the campaign highway.

But now, his straight talk on Iraq is driving him straight into a ditch, for which it may take him 100 years to escape.

• Kirk Caraway writes for Swift Communications, Inc. He can be reached through his blog at http://kirkcaraway.com.