“When I voted to support this war, I knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough,” John McCain recently told MSNBC, “and those that voted for it and thought that somehow it was going to be some kind of an easy task, then I’m sorry they were mistaken. Maybe they didn’t know what they were voting for.”

In fact, no one has been more mistaken about the war than McCain himself. Just read his predictions before it began, which Keith Olbermann and others have recently noted:

“I believe that the success will be fairly easy.” [CNN, 9/24/02]

“We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” [CNN, 9/29/02]

“We will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC, 1/22/03]

Since the war of roses and liberation turned into a quagmire, McCain has repeatedly tried to distance himself from George W. Bush’s “many, many mistakes” in executing the war, namely not having enough troops at the beginning. Now Bush is ready to implement McCain’s proposed escalation. Soon McCain will bear a long overdue shared responsibility for the conflict. If things don’t go as planned, there will be no one left for him to blame.