Democrats Called For A Surge In 2003-04

John McCain is trying to pretend that he came up with the idea of the surge, that he was right before anyone else, that the war is going so great because of his surge idea.

It's all bullshit. As anyone with a brain remembers, Democrats were calling for more troops as far back as 2003 and 2004, as a way of stabilizing the situation so that we could leave.

Here is John Kerry, Democratic candidate for president, in April 2004:

More U.S. troops and a new president could be needed to win international support for U.S. efforts in postwar Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Sunday.
The Massachusetts senator said President Bush has created a "quandary" for the nation by failing to develop a broad coalition to fight the war, to secure Iraq and to let countries that didn't fight participate in rebuilding.

"It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air, to re-establish our credibility with the rest of the world" and bring other countries into Iraq, Kerry said on NBC's Meet the Press.

He also said that "if it requires more troops in order to create the stability that eliminates the chaos" discouraging the United Nations and other countries from helping, "that's what we have to do."

And here is Howard Dean in June 2003:

MR. RUSSERT: Let's talk about the military budget. How many men and women would you have on active duty?

DR. DEAN: I can't answer that question. And I don't know what the answer is. I can tell you one thing, though. We need more troops in Afghanistan. We need more troops in Iraq now. I supported the president's invasion of Afghanistan for the obvious reasons, what had gone on and the murder of people. But I do not support what the president's doing there now. We need more people there. We cannot be making alliances with warlords in the hope that we're one day going to have the democracy in Afghanistan. And what I would do in Iraq now is bring in NATO and bring in the United Nations, because our troops on the ground deserve better support than they're getting.

Yet McCain supported, campaigned for, and voted for the guy -- George W. Bush -- who thought we had plenty of troops in Iraq. McCain supported the guy who had Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, even knowing about his idiotic small-force theories.

So please. For McCain to pretend like he has been so far ahead of the curve on Iraq is ridiculous.