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McCain: I would have started Iraq war regardless of WMD David Edwards and Katie Baker According to presidential candidate John McCain, only the handling of the Iraq war was a mistake -- not the war itself. "It's not American presence that bothers the American people, it's American causalities," said McCain in an interview with Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday. The validity of this conjecture is questionable, as fifty-nine percent of Americans say the U.S. should “stick to a withdrawal timetable." But McCain said in a recent New Hampshire debate -- and reasserted as much on Sunday -- that as long as Americans aren't dying, he sees nothing wrong with US troops staying as many as 100 years in Iraq. "What I believe we can achieve is a reduction in casualties to the point where the Iraqis are doing the fighting and dying [and] we're supporting them," McCain said. He said it would be "hard to say" how many U.S. troops would need to stay in Iraq, but assured that they would be "out of harm's way."
When Russert asked him if, like Bush, McCain would have supported the Iraq war even if no weapons of mass destruction were believed present in Iraq, McCain seemed to dismiss the question as irrelevant. "If frogs had wings ... we can talk about lots of hypotheticals," he said. "The point is if we had done it right, you and I wouldn't even be discussing it now." This video is from NBC's Meet the Press, broadcast January 6, 2008.
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