If Bush's 2003 Iraq policy upset McCain so much, why didn't he seek the GOP nomination in 2004?

During Thursday’s vice presidential debate in St. Louis, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin repeatedly used the word "maverick" to describe both herself and the man at the top of the GOP ticket, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

We may not know enough about Palin to make an informed judgment, but with McCain, at least, there’s something to that maverick label. Or at least there used to be, before the Bush administration. McCain has broken with the majority of Republicans on some notable occasions, but given his track record of voting the way Bush wants more than 90 percent of the time over the last seven-plus years, it’s fair to say a lot of voters see his use of the word as a go-to prop he uses to deflect legitimate criticisms.

McCain was more accurate in calling himself a maverick in 2000, when he shook up the Republican presidential primary season by mounting a strong but ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the party’s anointed one that year, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. He could have challenged Bush again in 2004, of course, but nothing other than his own judgment stopped McCain from trying to unseat the incumbent president.

Fast-forward to the Sept. 26 presidential debate in Mississippi, where McCain forcefully lectured the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, and TV viewers about his early opposition to Bush’s war strategy. In essence, McCain argued for more troops on the ground, a position Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld opposed from the start. Bush was wrong, McCain was right, and if America had just listened sooner, my friends, everything would be so much better now.

That’s a nice way to frame things if you are in the McCain camp, but there’s something very, very wrong with this picture: This supposed Senate maverick hit the campaign trail for Bush in 2004.

If McCain felt so strongly about the need to send more troops to Iraq as early as 2003, why didn’t he challenge Bush for the 2004 Republican nomination? That would have been the mark of a true maverick. It wouldn’t have been easy, but if McCain felt so strongly about amping up operations in Iraq for so long, why did he wait another four years to take his views before the American people? Simple: He put George W. Bush’s re-election efforts and the Republican Party first, and the well-being of America’s combat troops second.

Rather than take his case to the American people, McCain hit the campaign trail to help Bush get re-elected. In the first two years of Bush’s second term, more than 1,500 American troops were killed in Iraq.

With a month to go before Election Day, McCain and his surrogate Palin cynically hide behind political phraseology, repeating that the surge worked, the surge worked and oh, by the way, did you know that the surge worked? I suppose that depends on who you talk to.

To borrow from Ernest Hemingway, “Ask the infantry and ask the dead.”

Could it be that just so long as it is .83 American troops are dying per day (the September 2008 average) as opposed to 4.23 (the May 2007 average), McCain and Palin think voters will forget about the deaths and money spent in Iraq, lulled into a false sense of quasi-victory by repeating over and over that “the surge worked”?

A brief history lesson is in order here. It wasn’t until after the 2006 midterms, when the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, that Bush fired Rumsfeld and embraced the “surge” idea McCain had been pushing. In his rush to take credit for greater stability in Iraq, McCain fails to acknowledge that things might have been even better there if Bush had followed the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and had withdrawn most troops by 2008 instead of surging in 2007.

Instead of 25 American troops dying in Iraq in September, the number may have been zero. Troops can’t die on foreign soil in a war they’re not fighting. There is simply no way of knowing what Iraq would look like today if the United States had already pulled out. The country might be more stable and secure than it is now, or it might be in the midst of an all-out civil war.

What we do know for sure is that more than 250 American troops have died in Iraq this year, more than 900 died there in 2007, and the U.S. is still spending roughly $10 billion a month to sustain in-country operations. When seen in the cold light of harsh facts as opposed to the catch-all smugness of a three-word phrase, even a maverick-of-convenience would be hard-pressed to classify the surge – much less the entire concept of the war in Iraq itself – as "working."