McCain’s Iraq: self-delusion or a campaign strategy?

On Sunday the kind folks at ThinkProgress.org caught Sen. McCain repeating the exact same mistake he made last week, when he insisted that Muqtada al-Sadr called for the recent ceasefire in Iraq, when it was in fact the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki who raised the white flag. You can see the video here:

When he screwed up the first time, it looked like a mistake. But when he does it again, I find it hard to believe the McCain campaign is really this clueless. Could it be that the McCain campaign feels it needs to make the US occupation look like a success in order to win?

Or maybe he really is just clueless. Just a few weeks ago, McCain was corrected on-air after he mistakenly accused Iran of training al-Qaeda operatives and shipping them to Iraq.