Dover Bitch

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Correction: Wrong McCain quote

DB saw this timeline of Friedman Units and decided to look for a missing McCain entry I blogged about here and at Hullabaloo. To my horror, I realized that I pulled the wrong item from my notes and used an incorrect example of McCain calling for more troops at a time which coincided with Michael Hirsh's appearance on CNN.

I linked to this appearance from McCain on Meet Tim Russert and assigned it the date of Nov. 12, 2005, the day after Hirsh's visit to CNN. That appearance was actually from Nov. 12, 2006.

I regret the error. However, I was certain that McCain had been saying the exact opposite of what Hirsh described the military was supporting at that time and I was not wrong about that. I simply pulled the wrong quote.

Here is the example I should have given, from Nov. 10, 2005, the day before Hirsh's appearance on CNN:

To enhance our chances of success with this strategy, and enable our forces to hold as much territory as possible, we need more troops. For this reason, I believe that current ideas to effect a partial drawdown during 2006 are exactly wrong. While the U.S. and its partners are training Iraqi security forces at a furious pace, these Iraqis should supplement, not substitute for, the coalition forces on the ground. Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up, with more civil-military soldiers, translators, and counterinsurgency operations teams. Our decisions about troop levels should be tied to the success or failure of our mission in Iraq, not to the number of Iraqi troops trained and equipped. And while we seek higher troop levels for Iraq, we should at last face facts and increase the standing size of the U.S. Army. It takes time to build a larger army, but had we done so even after our invasion of Iraq, our military would have more soldiers available for deployment now.


Again, although the substance of my post isn't altered a bit by my mistake, I regret that I picked the wrong example from my notes.

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