There was a time when john McCain was a reasonable man. It was a while back, but I remember it well. It was, specifically, about seven or eight years ago, when we were in a terrible mess in Iraq. There were two options on the table at that point: stay the course or leave. McCain understood that both were wrong. The Bush Administration's path had, from the start, been criminally stupid. Many top members of the uniformed military had thought the war a bad idea, and even those who supported it were appalled that the dreadful Donald Rumsfeld had formulated a plan without a final phase of operations-Phase IV, in military parlance-to stabilize the country and hand it back to the Iraqis. But there we were, stuck, and McCain believed we couldn't just leave. His main concern was that we not hand al-Qaeda a victory. There was also a moral consider ation: having wrecked their country, we owed the Iraqis a fighting chance to rebuild.
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