maybe the administration and john mccain would have agreed? first of all, i think it s important to note he was quite bipartisan in his criticism of presidential administrations. he was very frustrated with the bush administration prior to the surge. he felt iraq was going down, and it was, and needed to be turned around and we needed not only more forces but a different approach. thankfully i think we were able to validate the confidence he had in that. he and senators lieberman and gram, the three amigos we called them at the time, were among the few who still supported what we were trying to do there and without their support led by senator mccain, i m not sure we could have maintained what was necessary on capitol hill. certainly he was frustrated in the previous administration about indecisiveness on syria. in case where s rhetoric outstripped what it was we were willing to do.
motivation there was always the greater good. but no one had the backs of america s new greatest generation, those who fought the wars of the post th9/11 era tha he did. no one did more to make sure they had what was needed to prevail on the battle field. no one did more than he did at the outset of the surge and even my own confirmation hearing, the very, very tough six or eight months until the results were very, very clear, just to keep the senate together. i think there was a point at which the support was literally one vote and he and the other members of the three amigos as i coin them, senators lieberman and graham who were out there always. he didn t just have our back figuratively, he had it literally. he was out there with us on every single congressional recess, all three of them were. and we experienced some very wonderful moments and some
and the low light is the same as charles, i mean, i would just add to that that the way the media didn t cover the issue outside of fox news and a couple other people, the way the administration really has not been forth coming in answering questions about it, how little we still really know just all together, just made added to what charles talked about basic foreign policy implications. made the whole thing really one of the low points of this year. bret: is your sense that this has ended the coverage? i mean all of these independent reports? today s report, if you read it, if you read this report, from senators lieberman and collins, it s pretty scathing, even more so than the independent report. everything has been scathing from beginning to end and yet people continue to overlook it. yeah, i would probably guess it s sort of peter out and people are going to forget