This is actually the second time he has done it but the latest since the entire troop surge battle.

“We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement – that’s the kindest word I can give you – of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war… The price is very, very heavy and I regret it enormously.”

McCain’s current comments actually echo the thoughts and conclusions he reached about another War, his War, Vietnam. In Worth the Fighting For his memoir of his life after being released from a Vietnamese prison camp, he says the following:

The experience [studying at the War college] did not cause me to concludde that the war was wrong, but it did help me understand how wrongly it had been fought and led. I was not an embittered veteran before I entered the War College, nor am I now. But I did resent how badly civilian leaders had mismanged the war and how ineffectually our senior military commanders had resisted their mistake. (pg. 12)

Frankly that paragraph says quite a bit about how McCain must view Donald Rumsfeld, the civilian leader of the Defense Department. Meanwhile the book also offers the following excerpt which says a lot about how McCain’s view of Congressional leaders of the time mirror his view now:

I must admit that my personal regard for congressional leaders in general had declined during and after the Vietnam War… I had resented congressional opposition to the war and what we viewed as terribly misguided political interference in the war’s conduct. Particularly offensive, we believed, was Congress’s refusal to keep President Nixon’s commitment of support to South Vietnam after American troops were withdrawn. I blamed Congress for willfully breaking America’s word and gravely injuring our nation’s reputation and standing in the world, a lack of faith I considered shameful. (pg. 15)