McCain was wrong about the war in Iraq!

Republican operatives have been desperately trying to undermine the public's support for Barack Obama by insisting he was wrong about the "surge."

This desperate approach could only work if the public is afflicted with historic amnesia since as
Frank Rich notes the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has been wrong about the entire war and occupation!:

It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

Rich also notes that Germany's enthusiastic reception of Obama had less to do with what he said than that his candidacy represents a clear break with the Bush's failed unilateralism in foreign policy.

"We have one president at a time,” Mr. Obama is careful to say. True, but the sitting president, a lame duck despised by voters and shunned by his own party’s candidates, now has all the gravitas of Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago.” The opening for a successor arrived prematurely, and the vacuum had been waiting to be filled. What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

The entire column is linked.