McCain: U.S. Troops Home by 2013

ABC News’ Bret Hovell Reports: Sen. John McCain delivered a speech from the not-so-distant future Thursday morning, chronicling what he hopes his first term in the White House will look like, most notably, U.S. troops home from Iraq by 2013.

“By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom,” McCain said in Columbus, Ohio.

“The Iraq War has been won,” McCain said. “Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension.”

The style of the speech – in which the presumptive Republican nominee listed the things he hopes to have accomplished at the end of his first term – reads like his current stump speech, but with verbs in the past tense.

Osama bin Laden will have been captured or killed, McCain said, because of closer cooperation with the government of Pakistan and better intelligence gathering in the region.

“There still has not been another terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001,” McCain added.

Other accomplishments he hopes to achieve include the formation of a League of Democracies to bring to bear pressure on governments that do not share democratic values. He said that that group will use economic pressure to encourage the government of Sudan to allow a peacekeeping force into Darfur which will stop the genocide there.

McCain also talked about his economic plans, including lowering the corporate tax rate, and creating a new, flatter tax code. He said that he will have been able to eliminate pork barrel earmark spending as well.

“After exercising my veto several times in my first year in office, Congress has not sent me an appropriations bill containing earmarks for the last three years,” McCain said.

The Arizona Senator also listed improvements to education and health care, progress towards energy independence and security along the United States' southern border. He said he’ll have press conferences once a week, and will even submit to questioning from a joint session of Congress, “to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the Prime Minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons.”

McCain also criticized the “hyper-partisanship” in Washington “that treats every serious challenge facing us as an opportunity to trade insults.”

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Bolding mine.

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In Iowa, Obama said 2013

I guess that makes McCain likely to bring them home a year before Obama.

How about McKinney for President!

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