The Madness of John McCain
The Madness of John McCain by Justin Raimondo from The American Conservative
A militarist suffering from acute narcissism and armed with the Bush Doctrine is not fit to be commander in chief.
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 timeline 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. intervention 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 interventionism 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 presidential 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 endlessly 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?”
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.
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