McCain turns Bush on Iraq war surge

EXCLUSIVE:

Sen. John McCain, who watched from a prison camp as America failed to deploy the overwhelming force necessary to win the Vietnam War, seized the moment after Republicans lost Congress in 2006 to push President Bush not to make the same mistake.

Mr. McCain sent a private letter to Mr. Bush on Dec. 12, 2006, that challenged the president to show the “will” to win the Iraq war by deploying 20,000 troops into Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle to beat back a growing insurgency.

The letter was the climax of a 3 1/2-year effort to persuade the president to send more troops to Iraq. The former Navy pilot, who had his arms repeatedly broken during nearly six years of captivity, couched his argument in the terms born of the Vietnam War.

“The question is one of will more than capacity,” wrote the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “If we are not willing to provide the troops necessary for victory, however, victory itself will be impossible.”

Mr. McCain, whose letter is made public here for the first time, added that “surging five additional brigades into Baghdad by March” was the answer.

Mr. Bush, who had resisted Mr. McCain’s call for a troop surge for years, now praises him for persisting in his argument that expanding the war in Iraq was the way to win it.

“John recognized early on that more troops would be needed in order to achieve the security necessary for the Iraqis to make the political progress we’re seeing now,” the president told The Washington Times this week.

“He supported that action even though many said it would hurt his campaign [for president]. He didn’t care about popularity; he cared about success for our troops and our country. And now that the surge has worked, it proves that John’s judgment was correct.”

Mr. McCain’s push to increase troops in Iraq began five years ago this month, just after his first visit to Baghdad and three months after Mr. Bush had proclaimed the end of major combat before a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.”

“We need a lot more military,” the senator said during a stop in Pakistan on his way home. “We need to tell the American people, and I think they’ll support it.”

A week later in Washington, he delivered the same message to any senior official who would listen: Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In November, Mr. McCain warned about the “lessons” of his own war.

“We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”

For much of his 3 1/2-year advocacy for the surge - an attempt to persuade the president to adopt a strategy that his commanders said was unnecessary, that Democrats in Congress angrily opposed and that Mr. McCain’s Republican colleagues bitterly resented - the former Navy pilot was an army of one.

But after Republicans lost control of Congress in November 2006, Mr. McCain gained leverage in his argument with a president who was soon to face an empowered majority of Democrats and a Republican panicked by the idea that the election was a mandate on Iraq.

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