Maddow: Republicans wish we were still in 'factually wrong' Iraq war

On her show Thursday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reviewed the Senate's fierce confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel.

She noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, were once close colleagues. Hagel served as McCain's national co-chair during the 2000 Republican presidential primary race, and McCain had even touted Hagel as a potential Secretary of Defense.

But at Hagel's confirmation hearing on Thursday, McCain ripped into his former colleague for speaking out against the so-called "surge" in Iraq. McCain demanded that Hagel state whether he was right or wrong to have claimed sending tens of thousands of additional combat soldiers into the country was a "dangerous foreign policy blunder."

The "factually wrong" Iraq war, according to Maddow, is exactly what drove a wedge between McCain and Hagel over the past 12 years.

"Senator McCain and a lot of Republicans in Washington are banking on the lesson learned from the Iraq war being that we should have started that war, we should have escalated that war, we should have kept that war going, and now -- ten years on -- our only regret about the Iraq war should be that we're not still there, the only thing wrong with the whole Iraq war experience is that it had to end," Maddow said.

"With bitter party-of-one John McCain taking point for the Republican Party on this, that weirdly revisionist agenda about Iraq today became the centerpiece of how they are trying to stop the defense secretary nomination of John McCain's old friend Chuck Hagel."

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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