Forward Observer: McCain vs. The Tide

Encounters with local people while covering our last two unpopular and unnecessary wars, Iraq and Vietnam, illustrate why Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain's steadfast opposition to any kind of a timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq amounts to shoveling against the tide.

The first encounter came after I slipped out of the harness of the Marine unit I was embedded with during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and watched an American medical team treat Iraqi civilians.

I quietly followed the med team into a private home on the outskirts of Baghdad, where a male U.S. Navy physician began to examine a young woman who was having problems with her pregnancy.

Looking around the living room, I saw I was the only male other than the Navy man. I immediately withdrew to the rear porch outside, where all the men were gathered. I don't think any of them noticed my breach of local custom because they went right on talking as I stood in their midst.

One middle-aged Iraqi figured out that I was an American journalist and engaged me in conversation in excellent English. He obviously was a leader in the local farm community.

He offered to give me a tour of his big farm next door. We fell into easy conversation as we walked. He stopped for a moment and told me this: "You know, we had a meeting of all the parents in our area as soon as we heard the United States might invade us. We all agreed after a lot of talk that even if all our children were killed in the invasion, it would be worth it. We would be free."

We walked on. The farmer pointed to the parched fields and shrunken orchards of what had obviously been a productive operation at one point. He told me Saddam Hussein had ordered the river to be re-routed from Shiite to Sunni land. My new farmer friend was a Shiite.

His crops had withered, including the fruit trees, for lack of irrigation.

As we headed back to his neighbor's house, I asked him what he expected of us Americans now that we had taken over his country. The farmer's eyes lit up. "We need new roads, new schools, water. Everything," he said.

To give you all that, I answered, Americans would have to stay in your country a long time.

"No!" he shouted at me. "Help us. But don't stay in my country. We do it!"

A generation earlier, in 1972, I was a Washington Post correspondent sitting in the Saigon office of a South Vietnamese health official who had formerly worked day and night as a physician in an underground Viet Cong hospital.

She decided belatedly that the best way for her to help her country to become a democracy was to join the American-backed Saigon government. The war was in a lull then and she dared hope peace was indeed at hand.

How do you want my country to help Vietnam if the war is really over? I asked the intense physician. She had obviously asked herself that same question many times and had a quick and fervent answer: "Don't keep dumping fish on us. Teach us to fish and then leave."

That sentiment of "Thank you, Yankee, now go home" expressed by the Iraqi farmer in 2003 and the Vietnamese physician in 1972 is obviously dominating Iraqi politics right now.

It seems safe to a growing number of Iraqis to go to the market and let their kids play outside. They want their country back. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was obviously trolling for their votes when he publicly called for American troops to be out of his country by the end of 2010. This is close to the timetable supported by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

"The United States must adjust its role in Iraq to encourage the Iraqi people to take control of their own destiny," declared the Iraq Study Group, chaired by two elder statesmen, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, back in 2006.

"By the first quarter of 2008," the group's report said, "subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection [protecting our own troops still in Iraq] could be out of Iraq."

In their almost four years of serving in the Senate together, McCain has voted against a timetable for American troop withdrawals from Iraq while Obama has voted for it. McCain even voted against a bland proposal by fellow Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, a former chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a former Navy secretary, to require President Bush to submit reports to Congress every three months to detail how the Iraq war is going and his strategy for completing the mission.

In short, McCain, the old warrior who obviously knows more about war than Obama, does not feel the new wind coming out of Iraq.

His expressed willingness to stay in Iraq for 100 years, if that's what it takes to win, is making him look like yesterday's man.