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The Madness of John McCain | |
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Editor's Note:
If there is one candidate who represents a platform for
a world war, it is John McCain. If any on this list is
contemplating voting for this man, please consider this
article.
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Video Clip Of The Week
Vietnam Vets Against John McCain
Was John McCain really a war hero? Listen to what these
Vietnam vets and representative Bob Dornan have to say
about him. If these charges are not true, we believe
McCain should sue for libel. Are they true? Did he
collaborate? Was he a war hero?
Click to View: Vietnam Vets Against John McCain
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The Madness of John McCain
- by Justin Raimondo in The Amercian Conservative
John McCain's reputation as a maverick is no recent
contrivance. The senator first captured the media spotlight
in September 1983, not long after he'd been elected to his
first term in the House, when he voted against President
Reagan's decision to put American troops in Lebanon as
part of a multinational "peacekeeping" force. One of 27
Republicans to break with the White House, the freshman
McCain made a floor speech that reads as if it might have
been written yesterday—by Ron Paul:
The fundamental question is: What is the United States'
interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the
peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid
the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are
there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the U.S.
presence stabilize the region?... The longer we stay in
Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will
be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there
in the first place.
What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same
as will happen if we stay. I acknowledge that the level
of fighting will increase if we leave. I regretfully
acknowledge that many innocent civilians will be hurt.
But I firmly believe this will happen in any event.
Now insert "Iraq" where McCain said "Lebanon." It's as if
McCain the Younger foresaw our present predicament and
taunted his future incarnation, showing that wisdom doesn't
necessarily come with age.
In sketching out McCain's political career alongside a time-
line of American interventions abroad, one comes, at last,
to a turning point. But his course was set much earlier,
in his first visible venture into the realm of national-
security issues at the time of the Lebanese events:
Reagan's request for U.S. troops and the subsequent attack
on the Beirut marine barracks, where 241 military personnel
were killed. This vaulted McCain to national attention.
His initial opposition to the administration's resolution
authorizing the sending of troops was picked up by the
media, and he basked in the spotlight. As he put it in his
memoir, Worth the Fighting For:
It [his vote against the resolution] caught the attention
of the Washington press corps, who tend to notice acts of
political independence from unexpected quarters. My press
secretary, Torie Clarke, began receiving interview
requests from national print and broadcast media. Because
of my POW experience, I had always enjoyed a little more
celebrity than is usually accorded freshmen, but not so
much that my views were solicited or even taken seriously
by the national media. Now I was debating Lebanon on
programs like the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in the pages
of the New York Times and the Washington Post. I was
gratified by the attention and eager for more.
On the strength of his prescient skepticism of U.S. inter-
vention in a Middle Eastern nation known for its fierce
sectarian passions, McCain's star burned bright. U.S. News
& World Report lauded him as a "Republican on the rise,"
while on the other side of the culture-chasm, Rolling
Stone hailed the Arizonan for his dissenting voice on an
important foreign policy issue. His reputation was made
as that straight-talking, idiosyncratic, interesting
Republican congressman from the Southwest, a version of
Barry Goldwater the liberal media could like—and would
come to love.
Not yet, however: there was a dark interregnum during which
McCain and the media were at odds. There were shouting
matches between the voluble senator and reporters over the
"Keating Five" scandal and his wife's struggle with drugs.
But this adversarial relationship turned a corner, in 1991,
when the first Gulf War erupted. McCain reflected in his
memoir, "As self-interested as this sounds, I was relieved
when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August of that year gave
reporters some other reason to talk to me and something
else to report."
His position on that war was not the reflexive inter-
ventionism we have come to expect from him but a more
thoughtful approach, as cited in the New York Times of
Aug. 19, 1990: "If you get involved in a major ground
war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode
significantly. Nor should it be supported. We cannot
even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood
for Iraqi blood."
McCain preferred to use air power to keep Saddam Hussein
out of Saudi Arabia, rather than introducing ground troops,
and opposed the call that went out from the more militant
neoconservatives that U.S. troops, having freed Kuwait
from Saddam's clutches, should push on to Baghdad.
What changed his foreign-policy purview, however, was the
Kosovo War. Again he played the maverick role for all it
was worth, taking up the cudgels against many in his own
party. But this time, he was on the side of intervention.
Monday, April 5, 1999, was a busy day for McCain: Larry
King, Charlie Rose, Catherine Crier, two appearances on
MSNBC, another two on CNBC, capped by an interview on ABC's
"Nightline." The next morning, he was up early for Don
Imus. "We've turned down far more than we've accepted,"
McCain enthused. It was "all McCain, all the time," as one
Republican strategist put it to the Washington Post, and
it sure wasn't hurting his presidential campaign.
"When I urged the president of the United States not to
rule out the option of ground forces, then I also assumed
responsibility for what may be the loss of young Americans'
lives," averred McCain. "I don't know how it affects my
campaign. But I've basically put my campaign on hold to
some degree."
This was disingenuous, at best. Far from putting his
campaign on hold, his newfound visibility gave it a shot
in the arm, and political operatives in both parties
saluted the pragmatism of his stance. "He looks president-
ial at a time when many Republicans don't believe the
current president does," said Whit Ayres, an Atlanta-based
GOP pollster. "He's where the country is," added Mark
Mellman, a Democratic pollster. "Americans certainly like
to win and they don’t like politicians sniping in the
corner when the question is whether we're going to win it."
"We're in it, and we've gotta win it!" McCain repeated end-
lessly as he berated his "isolationist" fellow Republicans
and demanded that they get behind the president and support
the war. Yet his support was framed by a critique of the
handling of the conflict that disdained Clinton's alleged
timidity in taking steps to ensure a victory.
Three weeks after hostilities began, McCain delivered a
speech to the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in which he declared that American intervention
in the Balkans had been effectively stymied: "I think it
is safe to assume that no one, including me, anticipated
the speed with which Serbia would defeat our objectives
in Kosovo, and the scope of that defeat." While conceding,
"yes, the war is only three weeks old, and yes, NATO can
and probably will prevail in this conflict with what is,
after all, a considerably inferior adversary," he warned
"victory will not be hastened by pretending that things
have just gone swimmingly."
According to McCain, there were two big problems with the
conduct of the war: first, "an excessively restricted air
campaign that sought the impossible goal of avoiding war
while waging one. The second is the repeated declarations
from the president, vice president, and other senior
officials that NATO would refrain from using ground troops
even if the air campaign failed. These two mistakes were
made in what almost seemed willful ignorance of every
lesson we learned in Vietnam."
We were, he warned, in danger of "losing" to the Serbian
army—with its outdated equipment and complete lack of an
air force—if we failed to launch air strikes that were
"massive, strategic and sustained." Furthermore, "no
infrastructure targets should have been off limits"—
factories, water plants, hospitals, schools, markets,
whatever. Yes, "we all grieve over civilian casualties
as well as our own losses," but "they are unavoidable."
But all of this was eminently avoidable, as critics of
the war—including many of McCain's fellow Republicans
in Congress—pointed out at the time. The war itself was
unnecessary. The U.S. was never threatened by the Serbs,
and the trumped-up charge of "genocide" was egregious
overstatement. Aside from that, the conflict lasted
little more than 11 weeks, and, contra McCain, the U.S.
was never in danger of losing. A "massive" bombing
campaign would have accomplished little aside from
inflicting untold suffering on innocent civilians and
incurring the everlasting enmity of the Serbian people—
and of decent people everywhere.
Yet McCain was persistent in demanding that the situation
called for American "boots on the ground"—a phrase that,
if you Google it, you'll discover what might be called
the McCain Panacea. To hear McCain tell it, there is
apparently no crisis anywhere in the world that cannot
be resolved by the presence of U.S. armed forces. This
full-throated, high-handed interventionism is a long way
from the hard-headed realism of the young congressman who
challenged the disastrous decision to send peacekeepers
to Lebanon by asking, "What peace?"
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It is impossible to know what is in McCain's heart. There
may be a purely ideological explanation for his changing
viewpoint. But what seems to account for his evolution from
realism to hopped-up interventionism is nothing more than
sheer ambition. This was the case in 1983, when he defied
the Reagan administration over sending U.S. soldiers to die
at the hands of a Beirut suicide bomber, and in 1999, when
the cry went up to take on Slobodan Milosevic. He was
positioning himself against his own party, while staking
out a distinctive stance independent of the Democrats.
It was, in short, an instance of a presidential candidate
maneuvering himself to increase his appeal to the
electorate—and, most importantly, the media.
The brace of arguments McCain made in his CSIS speech in
support of the Kosovo War didn't hold together at the time—
and fares even worse in retrospect. According to McCain,
the Serbs threatened "our global credibility and the long-
term viability of the Atlantic Alliance"—the former because
two successive presidents had warned Milosevic against
committing "aggression" against Kosovo, and failure to
act would embolden other "rogue states" to defy American
edicts. Yet McCain's reasoning is circular: according to
him, our government's edicts must be obeyed because they
are, by definition, non-negotiable—even by Americans. A
certain course, once taken, must be pursued to the bitter
end, even if it acts against our long-term interests.
McCain's worldview, which admits no possibility of error,
is undiluted hubris.
The illogic of McCain's interventionism is further under-
scored by his appeal to "the long-term viability of the
NATO alliance." With the implosion of the Communist empire
a decade earlier, the original rationale for the creation
of the alliance vanished. Was the unnatural perpetuation
of an outmoded alliance really worth the lives of 5,000
Serbs, mostly civilians?
McCain's arguments are so facile that one can hardly
believe they are held with any degree of sincerity. There
has to be something else involved, and a hint of this was
revealed in the opening of his CSIS address, thanking his
sponsors "for so graciously providing me a forum to share
a few thoughts on the crisis in the Balkans. I've been
having a terrible time finding media opportunities to get
my views out, so I appreciate your help."
One can well imagine the appreciative laughter, albeit
tinged with an undertone of nervous uncertainty at the
sight of someone who gets far too much pleasure out of
being in the spotlight. Such narcissism, unseemly in
anyone, is especially unbefitting in a president, yet
it is key to understanding McCain's evolution from
conventional Republican realist to relentless
interventionist.
During the 1990s, he earned the attention and adulation of
the media by supporting a war most journalists approved
of and doing so more consistently and vociferously than
even the Clinton administration. He's pursuing the same
strategy now that we're in Iraq. While the media has
largely turned against this particular war, McCain's
criticism of Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration's
handling of the war has won him plaudits and given him
credit as the "real" author of the surge.
If opportunism married to an inflated ego birthed his
persona as the Ares of America's political pantheon, then
this psycho-political pathology soon found expression as
a full-blown delusional system. By 1999, in defense of
Clinton's war, McCain was declaring, "I think the United
States should inaugurate a 21st-century policy inter-
pretation of the Reagan Doctrine, call it rogue state
rollback, in which we politically and materially support
indigenous forces within and outside of rogue states to
overthrow regimes that threaten our interests and values."
In 2006, McCain traveled to Tskhimvali, in the disputed
region South Ossetia, where pro-Russian citizens want to
secede from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and
seek union with Russia. After his visit, he concluded:
I think that the attitude there is best described by what
you see by driving in [to Tskhinvali]: a very large
billboard with a picture of Vladimir Putin on it, which
says 'Vladimir Putin Our President.' I do not believe
that Vladimir Putin is now, or ever should be, the
president of sovereign Georgian soil.
Imagine if the British, annoyed by American encroachments
in Texas, had sent a member of Parliament to denounce the
defenders of the Alamo. That, at any rate, is how the South
Ossetians think of it. And what American interests or
values are at stake in that dirt-poor, war-torn corner of
the Caucasus? What American values are reflected in the
Mafia-like "democratic" government of today's Kosovo,
where Orthodox churches are burnt-out ruins and the few
remaining Serbs are under siege?
In the warmonger sweepstakes now taking place among the
major GOP presidential contenders, John McCain out-
demagogued even Rudy Giuliani, whose studied belligerence
seems narrowly centered on the Middle East. McCain's enmity
is universal: if he were president, in addition to taking
on the Arabs and the Persians, we'd soon be at loggerheads
with the Russians. The G-8, he says, should be "a club of
leading market democracies: It should include Brazil and
India but exclude Russia." Putin's Russia, he claims, is
"revanchist" and surely qualifies as one of those "rogue
states" that "threaten our values." If we take him at his
word, President McCain would launch a campaign for "regime
change" in Moscow, just as we did in Iraq.
Prefiguring the revolutionary Jacobinism of Bush's second
inaugural address, which proclaimed the goal of U.S.
foreign policy to be "ending tyranny in our world," McCain
was straining at the bit to launch a global crusade while
George W. Bush was still touting the virtues of a more
"humble foreign policy." Neither time nor bitter experience
has mitigated his militancy.
Other politicians were transformed by 9/11. McCain was
unleashed. His strategy of "rogue state rollback" was
exactly what the neoconservatives in the Bush admini-
stration had in mind, and yet, ever mindful to somehow
stand out from the pack while still going along with
the program, the senator took umbrage at Rumsfeld's
apparent unwillingness to chew up the U.S. military in
an endless occupation. He publicly dissented from the
"light footprint" strategy championed by the Department
of Defense. More troops, more force, more of everything—
that is McCain's solution to every problem in our newly
conquered province.
Rumsfeld became increasingly un-popular not only with the
American people—the abrasive defense secretary saw his
poll numbers dropping to 34 percent from 39 percent in May
2004, as McCain and Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf took aim—but
also with the media, which had grown tired of him. In the
bitter winter of 2001, when the War Party was riding high,
the Philadelphia Inquirer had enthused, "No doubt about
it, Donald Rumsfeld is a stud muffin." As Rumsfeld's cachet
faded, McCain felt safe in attacking him, and, after
Rumsfeld had resigned, declaring him "one of the worst
secretaries of defense in history." As the war itself
became more unpopular, McCain managed a feat of triang-
ulation of Clintonian proportions, posing simultaneously
as a war critic and a super hawk.
He was unrelenting in his criticism of the Bush admini-
stration, even as he pledged to carry its foreign policy
forward: he continued to denounce the "tragic mismanage-
ment" of the war, while hailing the surge—and strongly
implying that the Bush White House had plagiarized his
views. With the war enjoying the support of about a quarter
of the American people, however, it was necessary to frame
a narrative that would deflect the disadvantages of a pro-
war position, while enhancing his image as a straight-
shooter who doesn't care about polls and just tells it
like it is.
But "straight talk" has increasingly turned to reckless
talk: on the campaign trail, he was caught on video singing
"Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann"—not
one of his better moments. With his presidential campaign
in the doldrums, and Giuliani and the rest of the
Republican pack stealing much of his thunder, a new
extremism seemed to possess him: in answer to repeated
questions from one antiwar voter, McCain told a town-hall
meeting in Derry, New Hampshire that the United States
could stay in Iraq for "maybe a hundred years" and that
"would be fine with me... as long as Americans aren't
being killed or injured" in any great numbers, as in Korea.
Yet the longer we stay in Iraq, the more hostility is
directed at American soldiers. The majority of Iraqis now
believe attacks on our troops are justified, a far cry from
McCain's prewar prediction that it is "more likely that
antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world
might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis
celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its
ruthlessness."
McCain isn't bothered by the failure of his prediction,
just as the absence of WMD in Iraq didn't phase him in
the least. He is an actor following a script that was
written years ago and cannot be altered because of mere
facts: he is McCain the Conqueror, the fearless war hero,
the commander in chief who will lead us to victory and
stay in Iraq, as he told Mother Jones magazine, for "a
thousand years, a million years" because American grit
will tame those obstreperous Iraqis, just as we tamed
the Koreans, the Bosnians, the Japanese, and the rest.
With the extreme rhetoric appearing to work, an emboldened
McCain recently told a crowd of supporters in Florida:
"It's a tough war we're in. It's not going to be over
right away. There's going to be other wars. I'm sorry to
tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never
surrender, but there will be other wars."
If McCain finally makes it to the White House, the U.S.
will surely start new wars, and not just in the Middle
East. With the world as his stage, the persona McCain
has created—given visible expression by what Camille
Paglia trenchantly described as "the over-intense eyes
of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line
of Nurse Diesel (from Mel Brooks' Hitchcock parody,
High Anxiety)"—will have every opportunity to act out
his fantasies of soldierly greatness.
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