The Re-Vet

I'm pretty sure that re-vetting his entire staff to try to ensure that there are no more embarrassing incidents like SLORC lobbyists popping up in key campaign positions isn't how John McCain intended to kick off his presidential campaign. This hubub over lobbyists for the unsavory does, however, tend to highlight exactly how radical and absurd McCain anti-diplomacy views are.

To him and his campaign and many of his supporters, the idea of so much as having state-to-state negotiations with a rogue state like Iran or Syria is repugnant and absurd. And yet all kinds of other business gets done with all kinds of other nasty regimes. I'll confess that I own products manufactured in whole or in part in the People's Republic of China. And guess what? So do you. And all kinds of American firms are doing business in China. The Queen of Jordan is the toast of Washington whenever she comes to down, NYU is opening a campus in Abu Dhabi, SLORC has lobbyists in the United States. This is the world we live in. All of these regimes do some pretty awful stuff. And yet doing as McCain has and promising to reconfigure international relations around the idea that we only have real diplomatic relations with countries whose internal policies we approve of is impractical and absurd.

And of course McCain himself doesn't intend to apply it with any kind of logic or consistency. He's not saying that having a meeting with Chinese officials constitutes appeasement or that we should invade Saudi Arabia to turn it into a democracy. But he is saying we should create a League of Extraordinary Democracies to kick ass globally without the Chinese say-so and then it's just fantastical to think there won't be a response to that. Any kind of serious policy needs to be made in the actual world of diplomacy and business where we don't get to just pretend that these countries don't exist or don't have interests.

Comments

Ah, John McCain.. a sort of Republican Petey, no?

Posted by liliphant | May 16, 2008 10:20 AM

What is a "rogue state"? Could it be a country that indisputably and literally has all kinds of weapons of mass destruction, has used nuclear weapons in the past, constantly uses secret agents and sponsors indigenous organizations to overthrow democratically-elected governments in other countries, frequently invades other countries which present absolutely no direct threat to it, and ignores international treaties which it has ratified?

Posted by skeptonomist | May 16, 2008 10:26 AM

So, who would be the Mr. Hyde of McCain's League? Bill Kristol?

Posted by Shawn | May 16, 2008 10:28 AM

Yglesias: "I'm pretty sure that re-vetting his entire staff to try to ensure that there are no more embarrassing incidents like SLORC lobbyists popping up in key campaign positions isn't how John McCain intended to kick off his presidential campaign"

He's NOT kicking off his presidential campaign. McCain has been running for President for a year and a half--which makes his lobbyists-as-staffer problems all the more embarrassing.

Posted by Korha | May 16, 2008 10:36 AM

BTW, has everybody seen the McCain clip from 2 years ago calling for talks with Hamas? It's over at TPM.

Jeez. It's almost as if these people don't know cameras exist. I hope that gets plenty of airtime in the MSM. The hypocrisy is startling.

Posted by Joe | May 16, 2008 11:08 AM

Speaking of lobbyists, we have yet another sweetheart land deal for major McCain donors & lobbyists. Today, it's USAToday's turn to have a scoop.

(In a nod to McCain's media-friendliness, it's nice to see he's apparently had enough of these corrupt turns to give every major newspaper in America a chance to unearth their very own multi-million dollar land deal. Really, a McCain presidency seems to portend full employment for investigative journalists.)

I'd just like to note again for the record that Cindy McCain was in business with Keating, and William Black--the guy McCain pressured to go easy on Keating--has said he thinks Cindy's involvement with Keating was part of McCain's motivation to misuse his office.

So, was Cindy in business with the people McCain has done these land favors for? We'll never know because she won't release her financial information, and John McCain has been busy lying about his principled refusal to have her money support his campaign as he takes free rides on big money momma's jet.

Posted by anonymous | May 16, 2008 11:09 AM

joe, i once read an interview with augustus stanley owsley iii ("the bear"), the "chemist" for ken kesey's acid tests, san francisco hippies, and the grateful dead. he said something along the lines of "once i get a new thought about something, i tend to replace all my previous thoughts on the subject as if they never existed."

sound familiar?

Posted by howard | May 16, 2008 11:11 AM

Joe, I tend to think that McCain cares only a little about intellectual or policy consistency, and a lot more about a sort of attitudinal consistency. Whatever he can say at a given moment to make him feel/sound bold, truth-telly, and mavericky is what he'll say.

His position is that he's the only one around bold 'n' ballsy enough to actually say "___" -- what that blank happens to be at any given moment, and whether the blank he says now contradicts the blank he said 2 or 5 years ago, isn't really that important to him.

Posted by Pesto | May 16, 2008 12:00 PM

Matt:

Please stop your senseless bashing of the United Arab Emirates. It is a country with excellent governance and in many ways should be a model for the broader Arab world.

Oh yeah, and it doesn't run a secret prisons/torture centers around the world.

I think showing a wee bit more respect for imperfect, but generally very good, countries would enhance your point.

Posted by szr | May 16, 2008 12:51 PM

Just this morning the White House announced an agreement to send half a million metric tons of emergency food aid to North Korea as part of an effort to restart stalled nuclear talks.

Does John McCain have an opinion regarding whether or not its acceptable to hold direct talks with a charter member of the Axis of Evil? Or even, horrors, grant the Koreans a big pile of aid. I thought the strategy was to starve them into submission.

Posted by Toady | May 16, 2008 1:23 PM

I'll echo szr's comment. I haven't seen any reason why UAE would be lumped in with China or any other bad regime.

Posted by LnGrrrR | May 16, 2008 7:01 PM

"What is a "rogue state"? Could it be a country that indisputably and literally has all kinds of weapons of mass destruction, has used nuclear weapons in the past, constantly uses secret agents and sponsors indigenous organizations to overthrow democratically-elected governments in other countries, frequently invades other countries which present absolutely no direct threat to it, and ignores international treaties which it has ratified?"

Except for the part about having actually used nuclear weapons, I'd say Israel qualifies on every point.

Oh, and they don't ignore treaties they have ratified - because they don't ratify treaties like the NPT. Iran did.

What Israel does ignore is every single UN resolution adopted against it.

They also ignore the International Court's specific opinion that the "Wall" and the settlements and the settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein talks at Edinburgh University in January 2008 about the legality and status of Israel's wall, acquired land, borders, settlements and settlers in occupied territories. According to the highest world court, Israel's wall is illegal. Also decided, Israel has no title to Gaza, West Bank or East Jerusalem. The settlers and settlements are also deemed illegal by the International Court.

Illegal Israel - educate yourself in 7 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlo8WFWvkjY&feature=related

Now if we can just re-examine the legality of the original UN partitioning of Palestine - which a UN commission itself said at the time was not within the UN's authority under the Palestinian Mandate from the League of Nations - we might be finally able to resolve the issue of whether Israel is a legal state in any sense.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 16, 2008 9:15 PM

had to do it:
"This is the world we live in
And these are the hands were given
Use them and lets start trying
To make it a place worth living in."

Posted by sherwood | May 17, 2008 11:22 PM