John McCain has a huge investment in continuing to call the situation in Iraq a "war." So does George W. Bush.
For Bush, calling the situation a "war" allows him to continue to call himself a "war president," which gives him status and prestige he wouldn't otherwise have and allows him to break all kinds of laws and trash the Constitution.
For McCain, whose greatest claim to fame is that he is a "war hero," calling the situation in Iraq a "war" automatically boosts his credentials as the one who best understands the situation, or so his campaign thinks. It also allows him to manipulate the public with words they understand, like "victory" and "win." It enables him to characterize his position as one of wanting to win, while Obama, he claims, wants to "lose."
The press continues to call it a "war" as well, mostly because they have adopted the line of the president, but also because it is simply easier to call the situation a "war" rather than try to characterize it as the complicated situation it really is.
The reality is that the "Iraq War" as a traditional war in which one pits the army of one country against the army of another was over years ago, as soon as Saddam went into hiding and his military collapsed. Bush's "mission accomplished" moment was actually accurate in one sense: Saddam had been overthrown.
After that, the term "war" really no longer applied. At first, it was an occupation, then an insurgency coupled with a counter insurgency, and now back to an occupation. But that's too complicated for the press and most of their audience to comprehend. So they continue to call it a war.
And McCain will continue to call it a war as long as he thinks he can get away with accusing Obama of wanting to lose it, rather than wanting to have a sensible and realistic approach to ending the occupation of Iraq.
There's another reality here. John McCain is simply not qualified to be president. Wesley Clark had it right. Being shot down in a war decades ago, and spending years in a POW camp are not qualifications to be president. McCain knows nothing about the economy, by his own admission, has changed his mind on taxes and immigration, and now has shown his ignorance on what is happening and what needs to happen in the area he claims the most expertise: Iraq. He doesn't know what countries border Iraq and he doesn't understand that the Sunni awakening (which helped defeat al Qaeda in Iraq) preceded "the surge."
