http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/05/former-cfr-pres.html
May 15, 2008
Former CFR President Les Gelb Says McCain Speech in "La La Land"
by Adam Blickstein
Today, the National Security Network held a conference call responding
to John McCain's claim that we will achieve victory in Iraq by 2013.
Our experts also questioned other aspects of John McCain's misguided
foreign policy approach.
Below are a few quotes from the call, and a link to the full audio can
be found here:
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/files/mccain_iraq_call_audio.mp3
I think John McCain has been one of the most im****tant voices on
national security policy for many years now, so it really surprises me
to see him giving speeches like the one today that are almost in
"lala" land.
These unsup****ted generalizations and predictions that he would have
scoffed at as the old John McCain.
Lets just take a couple of examples, one is what he says about the
future Iraq.
He says most of the troops will be gone in four years, at that time
there will be relative security in the country and that it will be a
democracy.
But we have no idea how that is to come about.
It certainly isn't coming about by the present polices of the Bush
administration and the speech gives every indication he'll continue
those policies and so it's kind of a wild eyed, unsup****ted
prediction.
-Les Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations
I don't think McCain has an understanding of what a counterinsurgency
is all about...
To project that there will be substantially reduced violence in Iraq
and that Iraq will be a functioning democracy sounds almost like a
campaign promise.
For the troops that means a indefinite extension of the substantial
deployments in a country where they are seen as occupiers...
I am very disappointed Sen. McCain would make these kind of
projections, which are fantasies, without giving any hint of how he
plans to achieve them.
-General Robert G. Gard (RET)
When it comes to Iraq I think he's lost his perspective right from the
beginning.
If you go back and look at his statements back in 2003, before the
war, and predictions all throughout 2003 that it was going well and
would end shortly and then each year he seemed to be telling us it
would end very very quickly...
But now what he is saying it will end in four years.
Even if that were to be true, he's not shown us how you could get
there, that will have meant the United States be there for 10 years.
-Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
Action Fund
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Harry
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