The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

by John McCain

paid a visit to the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, on station in the Arabian Sea, after that first visit to Afghanistan. Responding to the enthusiasm of a gung ho crowd of sailors and aviators, I said something I later regretted. “Next up, Baghdad!” I shouted, and was cheered. I was an advocate for invading Iraq, not because I believed that Saddam Hussein, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, was harboring al-Qaeda, but because I believed the U.S. intelligence community assessment that he had weapons of mass destruction, which he had proven willing to use in the past. He had refused to allow U.N. inspectors the access necessary to ascertain whether or not he had them. He was also as brutal a tyrant as any who lived, guilty of numerous atrocities, some of which he had committed when he believed the United States would not react. He routinely ordered his air defenses to shoot at U.S. overflights of Iraq. I also believed the overthrow of his regime and the establishment of an Arab democracy would strike as great a blow as any force of arms against extremism and despotism in the Middle East. But the principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it. None of that was known, of course, that day on the Roosevelt, when I was firm in my convictions, and self-assured. Even if we had been righ...

McCain on Iraq casus belli