Last week I was fortunate to have one of my questions asked of John McCain at CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. My question was for McCain to define victory in Iraq. The answer he gave was long and circular, including one of his conditions for victory was the U.S. pulling out of Iraq - in other words he thinks one of the signs of victory, how we'll know that we've won, will be when U.S. troops leave. Of course that begs the question, how do we know when to leave? When would be the polite time? And why are we now relagated to house-guest status, when once we were the leader of the free world?
 
I heard from a mother of a some sevice men recently and she expressed to me that her sons, both of whom have served in Iraq, don't want to go back (mulitple tours, years of their life gone, careers thrown off) and that the Iraqi people do not want us there. Not quite the message McCain and Bush have been trying to hammer into the American pysche I think.

The most ludacris of all of McCain's conditions for victory was the idea of a "normal" country, that when Iraq is more like a "normal" country we can leave. What exactly is a normal country and when will some Americans really realize that we don't fully understand the culture over there. For example, look what happened to the Palestinians - they get democracy, hold an election, and guess who wins? Hamas!

The problem with Democracy is you can't always predict what the populace will do. McCain's condition for victory denies the possibility that the Iraqi people will choose to go a different path on any number of issues - which then begs the question of what happens if we don't like what their eventual idea of "normal" is...

Living abroad as a child I got to experience different cultures and understand that how one community does something may not translate into another. Something I think McCain's foriegn policy (or lack there of) ignores.

If you want to see my response to McCain go to:
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-54079