We know how George W. Bush lied to the American people about the case for launching an invasion and now nearly 6-year long occupation of Iraq. Millions of Americans cringed when he insisted that Iraq sought to build nuclear and chemical weapons. Many us were taken back to that deadly, tragic day in 2001 when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney repeated the falsehood that Saddam Hussein supported Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.

In 2003, John McCain promoted Bush’s war agenda. Indeed, as early as November 2001, McCain wanted war on Iraq, but it wasn’t until the Bush administration had gotten the right handles on the public imagination with its campaign of fear, invoking “mushroom clouds” and talking about imaginary meetings between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government, that John McCain’s efforts would serve the administration’s direct interest.

In an op-ed for USA Today in February of 2003, just three weeks after the Bush administration knowingly lied about supposed Iraqi attempts to buy “yellow cake” from Niger, a claim US intelligence officials repeatedly tried to remove from the infamous State of the Union speech, McCain repeated Dick Cheney’s lie that Saddam Hussein was operationally tied to Al-Qaeda.
If John McCain really thought war was horrible, he would have resisted the idea of launching a war against a country that had not attacked us. If he really believed war was horrible, he would have demanded to see the evidence that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush used to justify the war. If he were a maverick who believed war was horrible, he would have worked not to justify a war based on lies or to cover up the truth with Bush administration talking points.

If John McCain had really put our country and the men and women who would be asked to go to Iraq first, he would have believed and acted upon the basic notion that US troops should only be sent into harm’s way in defense of our country, not into an offensive, ill-conceived war, that was ill-planned, and with no strategy for bringing the war to an end.

Now as McCain travels the country again attempting to use the deaths of the victims of the September 11th attacks for political gain, voters are realizing that if McCain becomes the US president, we can expect more of the same: lies and endless war.