Senator McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee and party standard-bearer, recently suggested that if the US withdraws troops from Iraq, al Qaida would literally take over the country: "[I]f we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn't be establishing a base, they'd be taking a country, and I'm not going to allow that to happen . . . I will not surrender to al-Qaida." This is, of course, completely ridiculous, and Joe Klein rightly calls out McCain, saying:
They'd be taking a country? Last time I checked, Iraq has a Shi'ite majority. McCain thinks the Shi'ites -- the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps (and yes, the Iranians) -- would allow a small group of Sunni extremists to take over? In fact, as noted above, the vast majority of indigenous Iraqi Sunnis aren't too thrilled about the AQI presence in their country, either.
That's all absolutely right. Joe then goes on to say, though, "The sadness here is that McCain knows better. He knows the complexities of the world, and the region. But I suspect he's overplaying his Iraq hand in order to win favor with the wingnuts in his party."
That may be true. But it also may very well be true that McCain doesn't know any better. I don't know the Senator, and can't guess at his inner knowledge of Middle East political and religious intricacies, but considering his evident lack of intellectual curiosity on the economy, health care, science, and a whole host of other issues, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that he has an understanding of the *military* but not any sophisticated *Middle East foreign policy* knowledge. This isn't a knock on Joe -- he was the only major media figure I saw to make the point that McCain is wrong, but if McCain says this is what he thinks, I'm sort of inclined to take him at his word. And if Mike Huckabee -- or, of course, a Democrat -- were to demonstrate such a lack of basic knowledge, it would be viewed as a huge gaffe. Because, y'know, it is.
