Two months after the invasion, he crowed that "we won a massive victory in a few weeks, and we did so with very limited loss of American and allied lives." As for the "Mission Accomplished" banner draped behind President Bush during his victory speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, McCain pushed back against those arguing the conflict was not over. As he responded to Neil Cavuto of Fox News on June 11, 2003, "Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier?"



"I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict -- the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it's very appropriate."

"I remain confident that we will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

"I was there last August. I came back after talking with many, many people, and I was convinced we didn't have enough boots on the ground."

"I think we missed an opportunity during the first six months or so of our occupation of Iraq." (April 16, 2004.) "We're either going to lose this thing or win this thing within the next several months." (November 12, 2006.) "My friends, the war will be over soon, the war for all intents and purposes although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years."(February 25, 2008.)

"The facts on the ground are we went to Afghanistan and we prevailed there." (April 1, 2004) "Could I add, it was in Afghanistan, as well, there were many people who predicted that Afghanistan would not be a success. So far, it's a remarkable success." (March 2, 2005.) "Afghanistan, we don't read about anymore, because it's succeeded." (October 31, 2005.)

KING: If you were president and knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan, you know where, would you have U.S. forces go in after him? MCCAIN: Larry, I'm not going to go there and here's why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation. I think the Pakistanis would want bin Laden out of their hair and out of their country and it's causing great difficulties in Pakistan itself.

"Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested invading our ally, Pakistan?"

"We will do whatever is necessary. We will track him down. We will capture him. We will bring him to justice, and I will follow him to the gates of hell." (May 2007) "My friends, I want to stand before you now and tell you that if I have to follow him to the gates of hell I will get Osama Bin Laden and I will bring him to justice. I will get him!" (January 2008)

Appropriate, that is, to mark the end of a just—and justifiable—war. One month before President Bush initiated his campaign of "shock and awe," McCain warned that Iraq had the "definitive footprints of germ, chemical and nuclear programs." On June 11, 2003, he was firm in his belief that Saddam's non-existent WMD would turn up:But as the chaos and carnage of the Sunni insurgency spun out of control, McCain began singing a different tune. With just weeks, he reversed his March 7, 2004, proclamation that "I'm confident we're on the right course." Instead, he pointed out in April, "Things go wrong in war. Mistakes happen." His confident pre-war prediction ("I think we could go in with much smaller numbers than we had to do in the past. But any military man worth his salt is going to have to prepare for any contingency, but I don't believe it's going to be nearly the size and scope that it was in 1991.") was gone, replaced in April 2004 by:Despite the mounting U.S. casualties, McCain insisted that the victory he already declared won was just around the corner:Meanwhile in Afghanistan, McCain, like President Bush, had taken his eyes off the prize. With Al Qaeda still in the field and Osama Bin Laden still at large, McCain concluded that victory there, too, was already in hand. He boasted on April 10, 2003, "Nobody in Afghanistan threatens the United States of America." In November, he explained, "I think Afghanistan is dicey ... but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan." And over the next two years, McCain only dug a deeper hole for himself:In retrospect, statements like those about the war against Bin Laden's Al Qaeda should have been enough to silence John McCain. Instead, he lashed out against then-Sen. Barack Obama when the Democratic presidential candidate pledged, "that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights." As this August 2007 exchange with CNN's Larry King showed, McCain opposed the very kind of operation that Obama later ordered to kill Osama Bin Laden:McCain's criticism grew harsher as his general election match-up with Obama neared. Misrepresenting Obama's call for unilateral U.S. strikes in Pakistan against high-value Al Qaeda targets, McCain in February 2008 asked:Of course, President Obama was proven right, and John McCain, like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, was proven wrong. So much for McCain's comical boasts that:When John McCain wasn't bungling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was casually pushing the United States towards conflicts with Iran and Russia . When he wasn't singing "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," he was joking that unlike President Bush, "When I looked into Putin's eyes and I saw three letters: a K, a G and a B." In 2008, McCain upped the ante. First, he called from Russia's expulsion from the G8. And when Georgia and Russia fought over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that summer, McCain quickly announced, "We're all Georgians now."

But as later became clear, McCain had it wrong on the conflict between Tbilisi and Moscow. U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks and a report commissioned by the Council of the European Union found that Georgia "started [an] unjustified war."



"The shelling of Tskhinvali (the South Ossetian capital) by the Georgian armed forces during the night of 7 to 8 August 2008 marked the beginning of the large-scale armed conflict in Georgia," the report says. It adds later: "There is the question of whether [this] use of force... was justifiable under international law. It was not."

For his role in that episode, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in 2010 bestowed upon John McCain the honor of " National Hero of Georgia ." That was a nice reward from the country he put first.

And yet, John McCain's calamitous record of national security missteps and foreign policy failures hardly ends there. Before and after the invasion of Iraq, he mocked U.S. allies including Germany and the French ("They remind me of an aging movie actress in the 1940s who is still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it"). McCain repeatedly confused Sunni and Shiite in Iraq, wrongly claimed the U.S. troop surge predated the essential Sunni Awakening, and insisted that as with South Korea, Germany or Japan, American forces could remain in Iraq "for 'a thousand years' or 'a million years,' as far as he was concerned." And 18 months before tragedy of Benghazi (and three years after he traveled to Tripoli to meet with Muammar Qaddafi), McCain said of the rebels in Libya, "they are my heroes."

Nobody as consistently and tragically wrong as John McCain should regarded as an authority on matters of U.S. national security, let alone be a fixture on the Sunday talk shows. He's not an expert or even an elder statesman. Now, John McCain is just raging at the world like King Lear, only without the crown he desperately sought but never acquired. At the end of the day, the Vietnam POW Barack Obama lauded as a national hero is now just a sore loser, a small and bitter old man.

And that, along with the Keating Five and Sarah Palin, may truly be his epitaph.