[UPDATED:] John McCain has never won a war, yet breathlessly claims he knows how to win one...

Today, John McCain had the gall to claim that he "knows how to win wars."

Yet another completely ridiculous claim that nobody in the MSM will bother to challenge.  John McCain served our country with amazing courage and dedication as a naval officer, fighter pilot, and a POW.  John McCain has done alot of things, and not because of his age, but one thing John McCain has never done is win a war.

John McCain did not win Vietnam.  Second, he hasn't always been right on matters of war.  Quite the contrary.

In 1993, John McCain opposed President Clinton's decision to send American troops into the Balkans.

"We need to be honest about one central fact: We have no way to predict the size, length and casualties of a peacemaking effort," he told the Senate on April 21.

"If we find ourselves involved in a conflict in which American casualties mount, in which there is no end in sight, in which we take sides in a foreign civil war, in which American fighting men and women have great difficulty distinguishing between friend and foe, then I suggest that American support for military involvement would rapidly evaporate."

Yeah, that's what John McCain said about sending American troops to Kosovo.  A military campaign he opposed in which there were no American casualities. 

"I never talk about Vietnam," he said last week during a talk in his Capitol Hill office. "I never relate stories about it. When I walked away from that place, it was over."

Except when campaigning in Pittsburgh when McCain has no problem pandering to sports fans there by claiming he told his captors the offensive line of the Steelers when asked for names of his fellow squandron mates (even though his autobiography suggested he gave names of the Green Bay Packers instead.  And apparently, simulatenously proving the torture does not yield credible intelligence at the same time.)

As for Bosnia, he said, there are better analogies.

"I think you can draw a parallel to the military challenge in Bosnia with what the Russians faced in Afghanistan," he said. "Even with ground forces and with overwhelming air superiority, they were unable to defeat a motivated, very capable enemy."

Yet, it never happened.

And we are to believe that John McCain "knows how to win wars" even when he can't get the basic facts of a warzone correct.

And he's such a foreign policy expert he's been chastising Russia's treatment recently of Czechoslovakia-- a country that ceased to exist only 15 years ago.  ("It's as if Russia doesn't believe that Czechoslovakia is a real sovereign country!")  You know, right around the same time that McCain was lecturing President Clinton about injecting the U.S. military in taking sides in a foreign civil war.

Oh, and pro-surge John McCain should really have a talk with pre-surge John McCain on Iraq, too:

“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]

“But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC, 1/22/03]

“But I believe, Katie, that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators.” [NBC, 3/20/03]

“It’s clear that the end is very much in sight.” [ABC, 4/9/03]

“There’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiahs. So I think they can probably get along.” [MSNBC, 4/23/03]

John McCain has never won a war.  John McCain has been wrong, deadly wrong on matters of war, including on the Iraq war.  Especially when he supported this President's unnecessary war in Iraq before we had finished our objectives in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama has been speaking for a year about how Iraq was harming our interests for success in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we needed more troops in that region.  John McCain?  After years of denying Obama's position that we needed more troops in Afghanistan, McCain just this week apparently realized that... we need more troops in Afghanistan.

Nobody can deny that John McCain is a war hero who served our country with extraordinary courage.  However, as true as that premise may be, it is equally untrue that John McCain's experience makes him well-versed on strategic decisions on matters of war.  In fact, his extensive record has indicated a rather naive understanding.

That's not leadership we can believe in.

[Update]:  Apparently, some in the MSM actually asked McSame as Bush how he's able to claim he knows how to win wars:

Asked later about the claim he knows how to win wars, McCain said such knowledge comes from his involvement in "all of the major national security challenges of the last 20 years." He mentioned the Iraq troop increase, the first Gulf War, the crises in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990's, and Vietnam, where he was both a Navy pilot and a prisoner of war.

Okay, McCain never made policy or strategic decisions in Vietnam (which he never mentions) and opposed the use of military force in Bosnia and Kosovo.  So, again, where exactly did John McCain develop his war-winning abilities?