Foes target McCain's 100-year war remark

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Made popular 1871 days ago in Opinion

boston.com — "You know, John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years."

-Sen. Barack Obama, Lancaster, PA, Town Hall meeting, March 31, 2008.

The charge that John McCain wants to wage a "100-year war" in Iraq has become a recurring theme of the Obama campaign. The candidate has made the claim several times on the campaign trail, as has Susan Rice, one of his top foreign policy advisers. McCain has never talked about wanting a 100-year war in Iraq. But he has talked about a prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq, similar to the stationing of U.S. troops in Germany after World War II or in Korea after the Korean war.

Almost daily, Democrats hammer John McCain for supporting a 100-year war in Iraq, putting their spin on McCain's answer months ago to a voter in New Hampshire to draw the starkest distinction possible on one of the defining issues of this year's presidential election.

The presumptive Republican nominee says that his Democratic rivals are distorting his views. He explains that he never favored such a long war, but rather envisioned an open-ended military presence of peacekeepers, similar to US military commitments in Korea and Bosnia and even Japan and Germany.

But some academic and political analysts say McCain's argument fails to distinguish between other US occupations and an extended presence in a disputed, volatile flashpoint.

One historian who opposes the war said yesterday that the Arizona senator's analogy has no true precedent in those earlier conflicts.

"Were the US to succeed militarily in Iraq, yes, US forces will remain in Iraq for decades to come," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations and US history and retired Army colonel whose son, an Army soldier, was killed last year by a suicide bomb there. "My difference with McCain is I don't think we will prevail militarily in Iraq."