In a must read piece in GQ, Robert Draper lays out the history of John McCain’s wild belligerence on Iraq, his mystical belief in valor as the indispensable quality, and his reckless willingness to act without estimating the consequences.

…far more than any other elected official in America—including George W. Bush—the Arizona senator was the driving force behind America’s military intervention. In 1998, along with Senator Joe Lieberman, McCain had co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act, which established regime change in Iraq as official U.S. policy. Three years later, he’d clearly seen September 11 as an opportunity to take out Saddam once and for all. In a speech for the Munich Security Conference—written before Bush delivered his famous January 2002 “axis of evil” speech—McCain had described an invasion of Iraq as a fait accompli: Saddam was a “terrorist,” Iraq was the “next front…in our global war on terrorism,” and the rest of the world was hereby on notice that “the initiative is now ours, and we are seizing it.” It was an astonishingly bellicose address, far more aggressive than even the Bush administration’s public stance at that time, and eight months after delivering it, McCain became a Senate co-sponsor of the resolution authorizing military force against Iraq. …

[In] July [2007], when several GOP senators sought to stage a vote that would cut off the surge and move toward a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, Cheney and other White House figures descended on the Hill. They implored the nervous Republicans to withhold any action until September, when David Petraeus would arrive to testify to the surge’s effectiveness. They begged them to listen to John McCain, to whom the task fell of selling his colleagues on the most politically toxic foreign-policy strategy of recent times.

“We were two votes away from setting timetables and pulling out of Iraq,” recalls Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). “And were it not for John, I think it could have turned away in our conference. I can’t say he carried ten or fifteen votes or whatever. But when I’d go to dinner with some of my colleagues after those meetings, the discussion would center on, ‘Wow, John said something I hadn’t thought about. And he’s right.’ You could hear that.”

The Republican coalition held. Petraeus testified in September that the surge had produced substantial gains in stability. And John McCain, now a middle-of-the-pack presidential candidate, was widely credited for his steadfastness.

And yet, at the same time McCain was arguing to stay the course, he was telling George Bush to dump al-Maliki, the Prime Minister — with no idea at all who would replace him. That is, he was willing to sacrifice lives to bring stability to the Iraqi government while at the same time arguing to destabilize it.

McCain and Graham visited President Bush at the White House. According to three individuals with knowledge of the July 11 conversation, the pair advised Bush to cut all ties with al-Maliki unless he showed immediate signs of engagement. Such a move on Bush’s part would be tantamount to encouraging a coup against Iraq’s first democratically elected prime minister, but McCain and Graham saw the situation as a desperate one. We’ve got a military strategy that’s working, they told the president. And it’s being undercut by an Iraqi government that’s dysfunctional.

Bush was sympathetic. He’d been giving al-Maliki pep talks for more than six months now, with little to show for the effort. But, he told the two senators, “Who’s going to replace him?”

We don’t have a good answer for that, they replied. But unless al-Maliki changes, we can’t get there.