McCain-isms

Via Moira Whelan at Democracy Arsenal, it looks like John McCain has messed up again.

At an Associated Press meeting yesterday, McCain was asked if he was “open to diverting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan” to catch Osama bin Laden. McCain replied that he would, but “I would not do that unless General Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that.” Only problem is,   Gen. Petraeus is in charge of Iraq, and Iraq only. This means that he has no say in where troops are  deployed outside of Iraq. At the moment, Petraeus doesn't run CENTCOM, which has the responsibility for overseeing the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. A guy named Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, not Gen. Petraeus, makes decisions like this. Whelan writes that,

By my count, this makes 6 times this month that McCain has screwed up basic foreign policy facts…the other 5 being various conflations of who exactly is fighting in Iraq....

This is not deep homework, and has nothing to do with running for President. For John McCain to make this many mistakes while holding an important national security post as Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee is simply unacceptable. These types of mistakes would prevent John McCain from getting a job as a research assistant at any think tank in DC, let alone delivering anything resembling a responsible foreign policy as president.

You might argue that McCain is simply being misunderstood, and that he meant to say that he would move troops to Afghanistan if Petraeus said he didn't need them in Iraq any longer. This argument was advanced  by conservative bloggers after he repeatedly confused Shia and Sunni a few weeks ago. No doubt the same excuse will be used again, but if the guy can't explain his ideas clearly, without follow-up clarifications by his staffers, does he really have a handle on what he's talking about?