The Strategic Thought of John McCain

Hendrick Hertzberg takes a look at John McCain's pledge for American troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years and comes away unimpressed:

But what the context shows, I think, is that yanking that sound bite out of context isn’t really all that unfair. McCain's wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.

He'll see your fifty years and raise you fifty. But the cards are blank.

For McCain, a certain culture of honor, militarism, and nationalism are their own reward. The military is to be celebrated and supported not for what it does but for what it is. Thus, a given military venture doesn't need to have a real purpose or be "worth it" in any particular sense. It is what it is, and what we need to do is keep on doing it for as long as "it" takes and it doesn't matter if "it" is pointless or futile or even if "it" isn't anything in particular at all. The war is its own rationale.

Comments

I feel I am in love with my country again. I really do. Yes, I am former foreigner, but I came here as an infant. Is that wrong for a former foreigner to love America?

The polls show Obama (Democrats) and McCain (GOP) leading in NH.

http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/new_hampshire/election_2008_new_hampshire_democratic_primary

I will vote for Obama.

Posted by eorse | January 5, 2008 12:08 PM

Zeitgeist.

Posted by kay | January 5, 2008 12:09 PM

Please consider voting for Paul. I used to support Obama until I saw he was a member of CFR. He will not withdraw from Iraq.

Posted by John | January 5, 2008 12:20 PM

It reminds me of Roosevelt and Co's policy of fighting until Unconditional Surrender, except stripped of the context that made that sensible and even achievable.

Posted by aleks | January 5, 2008 12:37 PM

Of course Edwards would also withdraw from Iraq and as a bonus doesn't have the nutty agenda of Paul

Posted by Rob | January 5, 2008 12:38 PM

McCain is Johnny Rambo. He wonders if "we get to win this time." He is refighting Vietnam in Iraq, which is fitting since we basically are refighting Vietnam in Iraq.

Posted by jim | January 5, 2008 12:50 PM

Well, I think this sort of silly statement by McCain has big pluses but also big minuses.

On the one hand, I'm pretty nervous about McCain's neocon advisors maybe getting him to attack Iran or something equally crazy, and statements like this would help defeat him as the Republican nominee.

But on the other hand, this sort of statement would probably give huge cover to a Democratic nominee like Obama or Clinton to sound "moderate and sensible" by talking about staying in Iraq for "no more than 10 years" or so, which is what very powerful elements in the Democratic Party would want to hear.

Still, I think military and financial factors beyond the control of any American president will probably be what ultimately gets us out anyway, so it's probably not a fatal situation.

Posted by RKU | January 5, 2008 12:57 PM

"For McCain, a certain culture of honor, militarism, and nationalism are their own reward."

Yes, that seems about right, not just for McCain but for a large chunk of Anmericans including a minority of liberals. It's probably what one ought to expect in a country founded by immigrants from a seventeenth/eighteenth century fledgling empire who had increasingly less of an ethnic national dentity as time went on. An unflinching, thoughtless patriotism is an easy pole around which to construct a personal identity and a political rallying point. Plus, it's clearly what Jesus would do.

Posted by DCBob | January 5, 2008 1:55 PM

Senor Straight Talk has learned that to win he has to say whatever the fuck he thinks the audience he's in front of wants to hear. If that means swearing that Jerry Falwell is a swell guy, then so be it. Same deal with 100 years of Americans getting senselessly killed until they don't. And that's the way to go. You think Tim Russert and his merry band of Broders will ever suggest that McCain just might not be such a straight talker?

Posted by ed | January 5, 2008 1:56 PM

McCain's qualification in that quote "as long as no Americans are getting killed or wounded" is what made it sound so odd. Basically he was calling for an open-ended commitment of troops suffering casualties until such time as it is safe enough to leave them there forever. Either it is worth it to keep the troops in Iraq regardless of attacks because it is so important to stabilize that region (neocon position) or withdraw them because their presence isn't helping (rational position).

Posted by Col Bat Guano | January 5, 2008 1:58 PM

After reading the latest, gut-wrenching confirmation about our amoral, unspeakable actions in Iraq, as reported by Dahr Jamail, this self-absorbed happy talk about "hope" begins to seem almost obscene:

IF THE U.S. leaves Iraq, the violent sectarianism between the Sunni and Shia will worsen. This is what Republicans and Democrats alike will have us believe. This key piece of rhetoric is used to justify the continuance of the occupation of Iraq.

This propaganda, like others of its ilk, gains ground, substance, and reality due largely to the ignorance of those ingesting it. The snow job by the corporate media on the issue of sectarianism in Iraq has ensured that the public buys into the line that the Sunni and Shia will dice one another up into little pieces if the occupation ends.

[snip]

Not being privy to the U.S. machinations, Iraqis in Baghdad blame the Iraqi police and Iraqi army for the sectarian assassinations and wonder why the U.S. military does little or nothing to stop them. “The Americans [in Iraq and D.C.] ask [Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations knowing full well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing,” says Mahmood Farhan of the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group.

[snip]

It is important to mention that Maliki, a U.S. puppet par excellence, acts only as told. After the January 2005 elections, the government that came into power had chosen Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its prime minister. When Jaafari refused to toe the U.S./UK line, Condoleezza Rice and her UK counterpart Jack Straw flew to Baghdad, and before their short trip ended Jaafari was out and Maliki was in as prime minister.

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3186/32/

We actually have no right to expect a better future for our nation, unless and until we have first ended our involvement in the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, and held to account the war-profiteers, the liars and the war criminals in our midst.

Jamail's reporting makes me realize that John Edwards has to take another step, and soon, beyond apologizing for and regretting his decision to unleash the violence in Iraq: Edwards needs to tell us the truth about how we have been violently segregating Iraq, against its will, for our own (unspoken) purposes, and he needs to firmly and clearly repudiate this particular aspect of our "foreign policy." Chris Dodd set the example for Edwards, by taking action on FISA in part to make up for his lack of meaningful action to oppose the Military Commissions Act a year ago (which he came to deeply regret).

If no Democratic candidates confront, challenge, and repudiate the permanent American presence in Iraq that McCain is already selling, then they in effect concur with our colonial aggression, and will almost certainly have to fight a much more difficult battle later if they ever intend in future to end our domination over Iraq via the presidency. Clinton obviously won't speak up in this way (being in thrall to financial backers who support our domination of Iraq), Obama was lucky enough not to be in Congress at the time and has no vote to repudiate, but Edwards says he regrets his AUMF vote - so this is his chance to prove it, while drawing a more meaningful distinction between his opponents and himself on a crucial issue of our time that "hope" will not be resolving anytime soon.

Posted by pow wow | January 5, 2008 2:00 PM

What it really amounts to is that McCain is mentally lazy to the point of being near-infantile -- something we already knew just from his "Bomb, Bomb Iran" moment (and something pointed out in detail by Andrew Ferguson back in his 2000 Weekly Standard article, pointing out that McCain's greater ability to schmooze personally with the presss concealed the fact that his expressed policy views were even fuzzier and more ill-informed than Bush's). The fact that he apparently really does oppose torture -- although it certainly counts for something -- does not alter the fact that he would be another utterly disastrous President, at the time when we can't afford even a moderately disastrous one.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | January 5, 2008 2:26 PM

There was a debate earlier when McCain compared Vietnam to Iraq and intimated that we would have won in Vietnam if the politicians wouldn't have stabbed the troops in the back and said we shouldn't do the same in Iraq. Paul shot back and said we and the French were there for twenty years and killed a tenth of the population. McCain thinks we should have stayed longer and killed more Vietnamese.

McCain is still fighting the Vietnam War. If we can "win" in Iraq, maybe the 5 years of insanity-inducing brutality and loneliness would be worth it. McCain cannot accept that what he went through wasn't "worth" it. I don't necessarily blame him, but we don't want such an emotionally scarred person becoming President. He would bomb Iran just to salvage his emotional wreckage.

Posted by jjmckim | January 5, 2008 3:10 PM

For a while I thought the "100 years" comment was something similar to Romney's "double Guantanamo" a few months back. Basically saying to the GOP base "this is what you fuckers want to here, right?" But I agree with the above comments in that he may actually believe it, and will be fighting Vietnam forever.

He may be their most electable candidate, but the GOP kid themselves if they think he can stop Obama that easily. Hope has beaten venerable old war vets before, and not too long ago.

Posted by sweaty guy | January 5, 2008 3:56 PM

Yeah - let's work this through:

McCain wants to leave troops in Iraq long enough so that they are no longer fighting and dying in Iraq.

Then he wants to leave them in Iraq. For maybe 100 years.

And he won't mind, so long as none of them are dying.

Until they stop dying, he'll mind - but he'll still leave them there.

Ok, now I got it.

Posted by McKingford | January 5, 2008 5:44 PM

It was an unbelievable stupid thing to say, and should have immediately disqualified him from ever being President in the minds of just about everyone.

As for Maliki, my impression of Iranian strategy now is that they intend to get Hakim to make a deal with al-Sadr, then get al-Sadr and Hakim to make a tentative reconciliation with the Sunni insurgency to concentrate on driving out the US occupation.

To do this, they need to dump Maliki and his crowd of US puppets and replace them with people from Hakim's and al-Sadr's group, and possibly entice some Sunnis into the coalition. It might never hold for long, but it might hold long enough to drive out the US occupation.

The new coalition government can tell the US to butt out, and when it doesn't (and no matter is the new President, the US ain't leaving), activate both the Sunni insurgency and the Shia militias to make it happen. And if both groups join to do that, it WILL happen - the US cannot win against both groups acting in tandem.

This is the only way the Iranians will get a reasonably stable but still mostly pro-Shia and pro-Iran government in Iraq and also drive out the US military which is a constant threat to its national security.

Once that's done, the Iranians will pressure the Iraqi government to work with the Turks to screw the Kurds over, since Iran hates the Kurdish separatists as much as Turkey does. Also, the advantage to this is that the Kurds get screwed out of the Kirkuk oil - and more importantly, so does Israel, which seeks a pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa. Iran would love to nip that in the bud.

In any event, whatever looks like "reconciliation" in the near future in Iraq is going to be set up by Iran to deal the US out of the picture.

One way or the other, the US will be gone from Iraq within the next couple of years, regardless of who is the new President of the US.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 5, 2008 10:11 PM