O'Bannon Institute:
McGovern: War in Iraq is a 'total disaster'

Former Democratic presidential candidate talks about war, 2008 candidates during appearance at Ivy Tech

By Steve Hinnefeld
331-4374 | shinnefeld@heraldt.com
April 28, 2007

Thirty-five years after carrying the Democratic Party standard for president, George McGovern still speaks his mind.

He said the offenses committed by the Bush-Cheney administration — leading the nation to war in Iraq on false pretenses — are worse than those that drove his old nemesis Richard Nixon out of office.

And he said Iraq, like Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, posed no real threat to the United States until U.S. troops were sent there.

“I don’t know how the president can keep getting up in front of the country and smiling when he talks about Iraq,” he said. “It’s a total disaster. We’ve turned that country into an inglorious mess.”

McGovern, 84, spoke Friday at Ivy Tech’s O’Bannon Institute for Community Service, conversing with Herald-Times Editor Bob Zaltsberg in front of about 200 people.

He spoke with reporters before the public interview.

The son of a Methodist minister, McGovern began service in World War II, when he volunteered at age 19, flew 34 combat missions in Europe and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross as pilot of a B-24 bomber.

“I believed in that war 100 percent. I still do,” he said.

Later, he taught government at Dakota Wesleyan University and represented South Dakota for three terms in the House and three in the Senate.

He won the Democratic nomination for president in 1972 but lost in a landslide to Nixon, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Two years later, Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal.

“Strangely enough, I didn’t feel any elation,” McGovern said.

Asked about this year’s Democratic candidates, McGovern said he is impressed, especially by frontrunners John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

“I could gladly support any of those people,” he said, declining to pick a favorite.

Last year, McGovern and co-author William Polk published “Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now,” calling for the U.S. to leave Iraq in six months. He said there’s nothing the U.S. can do, at this time, to restore stability to Iraq, but it can at least remove the destabilizing influence of its armed forces.

“People say to me from time to time, what’s the hurry?” he said. “Well, you pick up the paper and read where 18, 20, 25 more young Americans have been killed — that’s what’s the hurry.”