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It's sounding like Bush's first term surreality all over again. Lots of people not running for president of the United States know how many troops we have in Iraq. Is it really too much for McCain the war hero to figure it out? And seriously, who is advising him? Not the team that advised him presumably when he served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. What does getting US troop levels in Iraq off by more than 20,000 troops say about the competence of those who would advise McCain on national security should he become president? It's incredibly disconcerting how many of his recent comments reveal one who is far less knowledgeable about national security basics than many people believed. Posted by Laura at May 31, 2008 12:04 AMThe McCain campaign organized a rapid-response conference call with reporters in an attempt to limit the fallout from the senator's erroneous claim that "we have drawn down to pre-surge levels" in Iraq. The Obama folks pointed out that there are at present around 155,000 troops in Iraq, compared to a January 2007 force level of 128,569. The Pentagon is planning to get down to 140,000 by the end of July.
In a conference call with reporters, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said the issue was a "question of semantics," and that McCain would have been right if he had said that the Pentagon had "taken a decision" to draw down the troops or was in the process of drawing them down.
But verb tenses matter, particularly in the case of Iraq, where it is very difficult to predict what is going to happen next week, let alone next month. By the Scheunemann standard of linguistic analysis, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the Bush administration's claim of "Mission Accomplished" back in May 2003. As we now know, a few things happened after that date to make the claim somewhat premature.