McCain: Iraq Was A "Piece of Cake"

It's official: John McCain is from another planet.

RUSSERT: Go back, Senator, to 2002. The administration saying we would be greeted as liberators. John McCain saying you thought success would be fairly easy.

MCCAIN: It was.

RUSSERT: In all honesty…

MCCAIN: It was easy, it was easy. I said the military operation would be easy. It was easy. We were greeting as liberators. Look at the films of when we rolled into Baghdad.

This is what passes for serious, statesmanslike behavior in the D.C. beltway. Jeebus.

Now we know what he'll say six months or a year from now when the McCain doctrine of escalation proves to be a failure.

The Carpetbagger Report weighs in:

I’ve been anxious to know how McCain could possibly respond to some of his remarks from 2002 and 2003, beyond the obvious-but-honest, "I was completely wrong," which he wouldn’t dare say. To be sure, it’s a political problem. McCain said on CNN in September 2002, "I believe that the success will be fairly easy." A few days later, he said, "We’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies." Two months before the invasion, McCain boasted, "We will win this conflict. We will win it easily."

Now we know the spin — just so long as we consider the war having ended the moment Bush declared the mission accomplished, McCain (and his like-minded allies) were exactly right. The “conflict” really was "easy."

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