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More Bellicose
Than Bush?
Given how often we are told that McCain has "credibility" and
"experience" on matters of foreign policy and national security,
it's worth asking what effect all that alleged experience has
had on him.
By Paul Waldman
13/03/08 "American
Prospect" -- - In May of 2006, as Iraq spiraled down
into an orgy of sectarian bloodletting, John McCain had a
solution. "One of the things I would do if I were president,"
McCain told a group of wealthy contributors, "would be to sit
the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.'"
If only someone had thought of that before. This is the man
Brian Williams of NBC News recently referred to as having "vast
foreign-policy expertise and credibility on national security."
McCain's insightful plan to end the Iraqi sectarian conflict was
just one comment, of course. But given how often we are told
these days that McCain has "credibility" and "experience" on
matters of foreign policy and national security, it's worth
asking what effect all that alleged experience has had on him.
Because when McCain actually opens his mouth to discuss these
issues, his ideas and beliefs often sound so simple-minded they
make George W. Bush look like Otto von Bismarck. And the one
consistent theme in McCain's thinking is his support for the
application of military force as the best way to deal with
foreign-policy challenges. Because it's been working out so well
for the last five years.
You might have thought the neoconservative idea that the way to
ensure America's security is by invading any country that looks
at us cross-eyed (or as McCain likes to call it, "rogue state
rollback") would have been thoroughly discredited by now. Yet in
McCain the lust for a new age of American hegemony, purchased at
the cost of yet more activation of our enviable war machine,
lives on. "There's gonna be other wars," he said in January.
"I'm sorry to tell you, there's gonna be other wars."
But is McCain really "sorry" about the prospect? "He's the true
neocon," Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution told The
Nation's Robert Dreyfus. "He does believe, in a way that George
W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power
above all, to change the world in America's image. If you
thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military
force, wait till you see John McCain."
McCain's brand of unflagging hawkery is ideologically akin to
that of the neocon armchair generals -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles,
and Kristols -- who avoided military service in their youth but
feel a tingly rush of blood flooding to their loins at the
thought of sending other people's children to war. It's no
accident that his most enthusiastic booster among the
conservative-opinion elite is neocon team captain Bill Kristol,
whose Weekly Standard was practically a part of the McCain
campaign communication apparatus in McCain's first presidential
run in 2000. Or that his chief foreign-affairs adviser is Randy
Scheunemann of Kristol's Project for a New American Century, a
kind of chicken-hawk boy's club devoted to "a Reaganite policy
of military strength and moral clarity."
McCain, of course, is no chicken hawk, which is what makes his
lust for war all the more curious. Contrary to the Jack D.
Ripper image of the gung-ho general demanding that the bombs
fly, the generation of military leaders who started their
careers in Vietnam tend to be rather reluctant to use force and
wary about the unintended consequences of military actions waged
without a clearly defined endpoint. This doesn't apply to all of
them, of course, but the pattern is unmistakable. Yet for
whatever reason, the memory of McCain's own time of suffering in
Southeast Asia does nothing to stay his hand when it comes to
future potential quagmires.
It certainly didn't in Iraq. These days, McCain insists that he
was an early critic of the administration's bungling, and that,
as he said in 2007, "when I voted to support this war, I knew it
was probably going to be long and hard and tough." But the truth
is that few were as enthusiastic or as dismissive of the
doubters as McCain. "We will win this conflict," he said in
January of 2003. "We will win it easily." When asked if the
Iraqi people were really going to greet American troops as
liberators, he said, "Absolutely. Absolutely."
So all of that supposed experience and knowledge didn't serve
him very well. And today, McCain displays no greater
understanding of the situation in the Middle East. He's apt to
say we have to stay in Iraq because if we don't, the terrorists
will "follow us home," an argument that may make sense to a
third-grader but displays no more grasp of the nature of
terrorism than that held by the collection of simpletons he
outlasted to become the Republican nominee.
Or take his famous statement that we could have troops on the
ground in Iraq for 100 years. When objections are raised,
McCain's tone inevitably changes to one of exasperation as he
explains that we've had troops in Germany and Japan since World
War II, and so long as our troops aren't being killed in Iraq,
it should be no problem with the American people or anyone else.
McCain doesn't seem to have considered that the very presence of
American bases in a Muslim country stokes anti-Americanism.
After all, that's why even George Bush realized it was a good
idea to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia, as he did in 2003
(and note that an administration always yelping about how
leaving Iraq would just give al-Qaeda what they're asking for
didn't mind acceding to Osama bin Laden's oft-repeated demand
that infidel troops depart the Muslim holy land). But I guess
that hearts-and-minds stuff is for wimps.
McCain likes to say he's been "involved in every
national-security issue this country has faced in the last
twenty-five years." Of course, he's now saying the same thing
about the economy: "I've been involved in economic issues
affecting this country for the last twenty-five years," he said
last week. "Of course I am probably better-versed on national
security issues, certainly far more than any of my potential two
opponents." If that's true, McCain has yet to display this
wealth of knowledge and understanding. Ask, say, Joe Biden a
question about foreign affairs, and he'll blabber on for hours
about all the different forces at work affecting a particular
region of the world. You may nod off midway through, but there's
little doubt the guy knows what he's talking about. Ask McCain,
on the other hand, and he'll do little more than repeat some
shopworn clichés. If he has a wealth of knowledge and
understanding, he's certainly doing a good job keeping it
hidden.
We can't always predict what presidents will do from what they
say on the campaign trail -- after all, when George W. Bush was
asked in 2000 how other nations should view us, he replied, "If
we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble
nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And it's -- our nation
stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and
that's why we have to be humble." Yet what's so troublesome
about McCain isn't the possibility that he's hiding his true
intentions but that he might actually follow through on what he
says and that his understanding of the world is really as
simplistic as it appears.
Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America
and the author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives
Must Learn From Conservative Success.
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