I had the opportunity to read U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate John McCain’s, R-AZ, speech about Iraq that he gave on April 11. I think McCain is right on many points.

First, let’s get this out of the way:
Maybe we did go into Iraq with bad intelligence data and maybe the war has not been handled to the best of our ability, and maybe Rumsfeld should have been fired earlier. Maybe. But we are there now. We must win. We should do everything we can to win it now that we are in it.

McCain said he “would rather lose a campaign than a war.” That’s the upfront, straight talk view that I have come to admire from McCain. Will that sway voters into voting for him? Nope, not at all. Sometimes putting your country ahead of personal goals is best. Most veterans realize that.

We cannot give the enemies a timeline. We must give our allies in Iraq goals to meet. We can’t announce these goals to the media. It would be like announcing on the news that between 10:00-11:00 pm tonight, there would be a DUI checkpoint at the intersection of 9th Street and Vine.

Some of my friends may call it a “secret plan” and if it helps us win this battle, so what? Too often in today’s 24-hour news cycle the media believes they need to know everything. They don’t. Reporters are human and have their ideas and opinions about this war. You can see and hear it from many of their stories from Iraq. Their reporting shows these opinions and their personal observations. Trying to scoop the other reporters is, for the most part, utmost in their minds.

McCain said very correctly that, “America has a vital interest in preventing the emergence of Iraq as a Wild West for terrorists, similar to Afghanistan before 9/11. By leaving Iraq before there is a stable Iraqi governing authority we risk precisely this, and the potential consequence of allowing terrorists sanctuary in Iraq is another 9/11 or worse.”

McCain was one of the first to call for a troop increase in Iraq. This is something that took the Bush administration until January 2007 to start. Now McCain believes, as this veteran does, that we finally have the right strategy in Iraq. The politicians in Washington, and that includes Montana’s own U.S. Senator Max Baucus, D-Mont., U.S. Senator Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Congressman Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., must give the strategy a chance to work. This does not guarantee victory, but to not give the surge time to work is foolish. And, Mr. Baucus and Mr. Tester failed the troops by voting for the timeline that was attached to the War funding bill.

Remember how this country came together in the weeks after 9/11. Soon after, it was back to politics as usual. Now, those politicians are using our troops for political purposes and most of these low-lifers never even served!

McCain may not win the Presidential election with his views, but he has given us the straight scoop on what we, as a nation, must do in Iraq. The Bush Administration and the democrats should listen to McCain. He has been there and has the scars to prove it.