Beyond the Dome

John McCain has been getting a lot of grief lately for making verbal slips that may or may not reveal anything about his understanding of foreign policy. When he referred the other day to the “Iraq-Pakistan border,” which doesn’t exist, a reading of the full context suggests he probably meant the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. So at worst, he might have spaced out for a second, which a lot of us do.

At other times, though, he gets so worked up in lecturing Barack Obama that he gets fundamental facts wrong.

Last night, McCain got a lot of unwelcome attention when he mixed up the history of the U.S. troop “surge” and what its impact has been. In an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, he suggested that the surge led to the “Anbar Awakening,” in which Sunni tribal leaders turned against al Qaeda in Iraq:

Couric: Senator McCain, Sen. Obama says, while the increased number of U.S. troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?

McCain: I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

Except that it isn’t. As the left-leaning National Security Network and many others have pointed out, the Anbar Awakening began long before the surge. One account, co-authored by Col. Sean MacFarland, the military commander McCain cited in the interview, says the awakening started in September 2006. Bush didn’t even announce the surge until January 2007.

By last night, the story was all over cable news, and not in a way that was flattering to McCain. So this morning, McCain’s surrogates were ready for the question during a campaign conference call with reporters.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s foreign policy adviser, said the surge “enabled the awakening to survive,” citing testimony by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, before the House Armed Services Committee in April that attributed the awakening’s success to the surge.

And Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, said he met with Sunni tribal leaders in fall 2006 and claims they wanted to switch sides, but wanted to make sure U.S. and Iraqi forces could bring stability to Anbar province if they did. “One could not have happened without the other,” Hoekstra said of the relationship between the awakening and the surge.

So it’s not that the surge had nothing to do with the awakening — it just wasn’t the cause.

Petraeus’ testimony in April seems the fairest way to sum up the history of the awakening: “It started before the surge, but then was very much enabled by the surge, because that enabled us to clear areas over time.”

But that’s not what McCain said. “It began the Anbar awakening” is a pretty clear statement. If McCain wasn’t basing so much of his campaign on the argument that Obama doesn’t understand foreign policy and he does, he might get a pass. One could argue that if he had just said “it helped the Anbar awakening,” everything would be fine.

But when you’re running on your national security expertise, the bar is going to be higher.