"A Shameful Thing"

John McCain's flip-flops, corrections, and red-faced clarifications are getting an increasing amount of attention. But let's not forget the mother of all memory hole shuntings. From McCain's foreword to Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (I'm still waiting for the candidate to be asked about this):

It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay. No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.

McCain isn't running on the Spring Chicken platform; no one supports him for his youthful glow. His purported and self-described strengths are gravitas, wisdom, and experience. But on the single issue one might reasonably have expected his formative life experience to matter, his "wisdom" could be mistaken for that of a Washington first-termer half his age. If he couldn't even get Iraq right, what else will he get wrong, and of what value is his vaunted experience?