100 years, with an asterisk

Here's McCain's golden soundbite:

(via CJR)

Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years…

McCain: Maybe 100. [crosstalk] We've been in South Korea – we've been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for 50 years or so, that'd be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’d be fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaida is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

The attack ads will gobble up the easy pickings- "100 years" and fine, whatever. He said it, then said 1,000 or a million years would be okay, and then he's putting a big fat asterisk on the end of it.

It's not American presence; it's American casualties

100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 – this part of the quote is the one that illustrates how McCain is not dealing with this question.

digby asks exactly the right question:

Why aren't Dems just saying, "Why should Americans stay in Iraq for a hundred years under any circumstances? Let's assume McCain meant that we should stay there indefinitely once the violence has ceased. What right would we have to do that? Aren't they a sovereign nation? Why should Americans pay for that?"

To this I would add my own all-but-screamed question: In what fantasy world will we spend decades or centuries or millennia in Iraq without there being American casualties?

And a more substantive follow up: Given that none of the goals of our Iraq policy (WMD, denying a haven for terrorists, preventing the deaths of Americans, preventing nuclear proliferation) have played out - what policy decisions will McCain offer that will increase the value of our policy or lessen its cost?

Put simply: why is this war worth what we are paying for it?