In August 2010, he declared that "though most Democrats still cannot bear to admit it, the war in Iraq is ending successfully because the surge worked. In 2007, President George W. Bush finally adopted a strategy and a team in Iraq that could win. He worked constantly to build public support for the policy. Just as important, the surge worked because it was clear that success was the only exit strategy: U.S. troops would meet their objectives, and then they would withdraw."

McCain has unique insights into certain subjects. As a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, for example, he brought a perspective to the torture debate that few Americans could offer. It also made sense to publish McCain op-eds when he was a presidential candidate setting forth a platform that citizens had to understand and evaluate, and when he's written on other subjects over the course of his long career, some of his best efforts were reasonable pieces to publish.

But McCain is not a prescient foreign-policy analyst, and newspapers should stop giving him a platform to confidently assert what will happen next in geopolitics. He thinks he knows his stuff. But his track record shows that he's emphatic in his pronouncements even when he is utterly, catastrophically wrong.

If, despite all this, newspapers insist on continuing to publish McCain, they ought to edit him carefully. Looking back, it's easy to see how a lack of rigor in his op-eds misled every reader who trusted him to write with precision and accuracy. Consider a passage from Beinart's critique of McCain's latest:

There’s an onion-like quality to the arguments GOP politicians often deploy against Obama’s policies in the Middle East. Peel away the layers of grave-sounding but vacuous rhetoric, and you’re left with almost nothing intellectually nourishing at all. Take Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham’s op-ed on Saturday in The New York Times. It starts with a lie: that Obama said “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with ISIS. In fact, Obama was speaking solely about ISIS in Syria. (“Do you need Congress’s approval to go into Syria?” asked a reporter last Thursday. “We don’t have a strategy yet .… We need to make sure that we’ve got clear plans, that we’re developing them. At that point, I will consult with Congress,” Obama replied.) When it comes to Iraq, by contrast, the Obama administration does have something of a strategy: It is launching air strikes to protect imperiled religious groups, bolstering the Kurdish Peshmerga even though that may embolden Kurdish leaders to seek independence, and using the prospect of further air strikes to encourage Iraq to form a government that includes Sunnis in the hope this will convince them to abandon ISIS. Later in their op-ed, McCain and Graham call for Obama to “strengthen partners who are already resisting ISIS: the Kurdish pesh merga, Sunni tribes” and push for “an inclusive government in Baghdad that shares power and wealth with Iraqi Sunnis.” In other words, they call on Obama to pursue the same strategy in Iraq that he’s already pursuing, while simultaneously twisting his words to claim that he’s admitted to having no strategy at all. What Obama was really saying in response to the reporter was that he doesn’t want to intervene militarily in Syria—where, as opposed to Iraq, the government is hostile and our allies are weaker—without a well-thought-out plan deserving of public support. McCain and Graham endorse that caution: “The president clearly wants to move deliberately and consult with allies and Congress as he considers what to do about ISIS. No one disputes that goal.” Then, two sentences later, they dispute that goal, slamming Obama for not displaying a “far greater sense of urgency.” It’s a wonderful illustration of the emptiness of much Beltway foreign-policy-speak. McCain and Graham want Obama to act both “deliberately” and “urgently” because they’re both happy words. (As opposed to “lethargically” and “rashly,” which are nastier synonyms for the same thing.) But when you translate these uplifting abstractions into plain English, you see how contradictory McCain and Graham’s demands actually are. You can either demand that Obama not bomb Syria until he’s ensured he has a plan likely to win international and congressional support, or you can demand that he bomb as soon as possible. You can’t demand both.

Beinart's critique continues here. America's op-ed editors ought to read the whole thing and take this lesson: When you inevitably give McCain column inches in the future, you ought to at least ensure that he's accurately characterizing whoever or whatever it is that he's ostensibly arguing against; that readers don't come away fundamentally misled about unfolding events or existing policy; and that McCain's affirmative arguments are specific and internally consistent.

Is that so much to ask?

When a politician takes to the op-ed pages of a newspaper, readers shouldn't get an intellectually inferior product. If there is some insurmountable obstacle to demanding more rigor from powerful actors, newspapers should stop publishing them.