For that, he was marginalized by the Republican establishment as disloyal and scorned by the party's powerful echo chamber on talk-radio and cable television, which all but blasted critics of the Rumsfeld strategy as helping the enemy.

Now, fighting for his political life in the 2008 Republican presidential campaign, the Arizona senator is taking a gamble in hopes that Republicans will see him belatedly as a leader ahead of the curve and reward him for his stand.

He is tying himself even more than before to the Iraq war, berating rivals who even slightly hedge their belief in President Bush's 30,000-troop surge and launching a "no surrender" bus tour this week through the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

It didn't hurt him at all that this week Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, dominated national news with his testimony before Congress that the troop surge is achieving its military goals.

"For almost four years we pursued a failed policy in Iraq," McCain said this week at his first stop in Iowa. "I condemned it, I was criticized by Republicans and others for doing so, and . . . I argued for the strategy that is now succeeding.

"This strategy is working. It is succeeding, and it must be given a chance to succeed," he said, winning cheers from an audience of more than 200, larger than local party officials had expected.

The week before, he used a debate in New Hampshire to show the party that he's the most gung-ho supporter of the troop surge, jumping to cut off former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney when Romney said he thought the surge was "apparently" working. "No, not apparently," McCain said. "It's working."

At a nearby restaurant, 29 Republicans gather by pollster Frank Luntz were impressed. Where only three had supported McCain at the start of the evening, almost all said at the end that they thought McCain had won the debate.