Contrary to McCain's current claims, he never publicly demanded Mr. Rumsfeld’s head.

Frank Rich writes in The New York Times:

Though Mr. McCain maintains that Republicans were routed in the 2006 midterms because of Congressional overspending and corruption, that’s wishful thinking. With all due respect to Mark Foley, Jack Abramoff and the bridge to nowhere, that election was mostly a repudiation of a war that was as unpopular then as it is on the eve of its fifth anniversary in 2008.

That’s why Mr. McCain was already on the defensive in his early skirmishes with Mr. Obama last week, after Mr. Obama dared point out that Al Qaeda was not in Iraq prior to the American invasion. Mr. McCain was reduced to arguing that such annoying little details are out of bounds because they belong to “the past.”

You can’t blame Mr. McCain for trying. His role back then in enabling the fiasco was far more active than Mrs. Clinton’s, and it’s far more visible on videotape. He didn’t just vote to authorize the war; in response to a question from Tim Russert in September 2002, he lent his military credibility to the administration’s undermanned war plan. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, challenged that strategy in a February 2003 Senate hearing by calling for “several hundred thousand soldiers,” Mr. McCain did not speak up in support. That month he went on “Hannity & Colmes” to say that the war “will be brief,” that post-Saddam Iraq is “going to be paid for by the Iraqis,” and that America will “send a message” from Syria to Saudi Arabia that “democracy can take hold in the Middle East.”

The one part of his Iraq past that Mr. McCain does want us to recall now is his subsequent criticism of the war’s execution. But contrary to his current claims, he never publicly demanded Mr. Rumsfeld’s head. And when Mr. McCain did call for more troops in Iraq, he was again in sync with Democrats like Joe Biden, with whom he made that case on “Meet the Press” in August 2003.