The problem with John McCain’s 100 years in Iraq formulation isn’t that he’s calling for 95 more years of combat — he isn’t — but that he thinks you can have a long-term basing arrangement in Iraq similar to those we have in Germany or Korea. That betrays a fairly acute lack of knowledge about both Iraq and Islam. It may well be possible to station U.S. troops in small, peripheral kingdoms like Dubai or Kuwait, but Iraq is — and has always been — volatile, tenuous, centrally-located and nearly as sensitive to the presence of infidels as Saudi Arabia. It is a terrible candidate for a long-term basing agreement.

We bombed German & Japan until their cultures became
malleable. We nuked Japan twice. They were both willing to do anything, anything at all to make the bombing stop, including change.

Are we going to saturation bomb civilians in Iraq until they become a little more open to change?

South Korea had a large hostile force on it's norther border that had show it had the means and the will to conquer South Korea. They knew only our military presence was keeping them from conversion into a worker's paradise.

Is McCain ignorant of history, or is he just distorting it for political gain?

Because we had planned our occupations out before we went in. This was demonstrably not done for Iraq.

Now, 5 years in, our leaders still do not appear to have any deeper thoughts on the matter than "Find someone who says what we like to hear and put him in power... democratic processes? What are those? Get me Chalabi!"

And McCain has clearly demonstrated that he has no interest in fixing what he doesn't consider to be a problem.

Allow me to clarify, this is no mistake, it is an intentional Democrat Party Lie.

Ah for crissakes, lighten up, Floyd. Before this is all over, there will plenty of "lies" all around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Internee#Internment_of_German_Civilians_by_Allies_in_Occupied_Germany_after_WWII

Even before 1945 SHAEF had long ago worked out automatic arrest categories ranging from the top Nazi Party leadership to the local Ortsgruppenleiter, from the top Gestapo agents to leaders of the Hitler Youth, the Peasants' League, and the Labor Front. In May and June of 1945 about 700 civilians a day were arrested, and a total of over 18,000 in August. In September 1945, 82,000 suspects were being held in internment camps, available for possible trial and sentencing as members of criminal organizations. [1]

Well over 100,000 Germans were incarcerated by December 1945, according to Harold Marcuse. Members of the SS and functionaries of the Nazi party and its affiliated organizations who were covered by the category of "automatic arrest" were interned by the US occupation authorities in former Dachau concentration camp. The first of these prisoners were released at the beginning of 1946.

Their was German/Nazi partisans after WW2, but for the life of me, I can't remember the name of the group right now.

How many US troops were killed by insurgent action in Germany & Japan in 1950? Were active combat operations going on in either country? How about civil wars directly caused by the incompetent and poorly-thought out imposition of a puppet government?

McCain, as noted, does say "...as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." But the fact is they are being killed. And McCain has no idea what to do about it. Make no mistake - his plan for Iraq is exactly the same as Bush's: no plan at all.

What would such a plan look like? Get rid of the Iraqi federal government and do what we really did in Germany and Japan - build a liberal society from the bottom up, not the top down. First you start with the rule of law, then you hold local elections, then provincial, and only THEN do you hand over to a national government.

Of course, we can't do that now. But that's the only path to a Germany/Japan/Korea-like solution.

A hundred years of being there, a hundred years of presence, a hundred years of commitment, those are spins. Claiming "one hundred years of war" is too much. This is no "mild distortion".