John McCain on Vietnam - shameful, criminal

[SOS]

Bob Herbert quotes John McCain in his column today.
It's a quote from McCain's forward to David Halberstam's Vietnam chronicle entitled "The Best and the Brightest":

“It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.
No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”

And yet today, with his eyes on the White House, McCain calls for thousands more troops in Iraq.

hypocrisy - noun - the practice of claiming to have standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; see McCain, John.