McCain in Lebanon
McCain seriously misstated his vote concerning the marines in Lebanon. He said that when he went into Congress in 1983, he voted against deploying them in Beirut. The Marines went in Lebanon in 1982, before McCain came to Congress. The vote came up a year into their deployment, when the Marines had already suffered 54 casualties. What McCain voted against was a measure to invoke the War Powers Act and to authorize the deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon for an additional 18 months. The measure passed 270-161, with 26 other Republicans (including McCain) and 134 Democrats voting against it.
I’m not even really sure why McCain felt the need to lie about this. It is, however, interesting that he brought it up at all. Back in the 1980s, McCain hewed more or less to a realist line that’s very different from the neoconservative foreign policy he’s adhered to for the past 10 years.
20 Responses to “McCain in Lebanon”
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September 26th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
“felt the need to lie about this” would suggest that mccain was conscious that he was lying.
why would you think that he is?
September 27th, 2008 at 12:02 am
I wish someone had asked McCain about Darfur. If he was willing to go into Bosnia because of genocide and ethnic cleansing, what’s his position on the Sudan? I’d like to know Obama’s position on Darfur as well.
September 27th, 2008 at 12:18 am
McCain used that example because (almost) every other example he gave was of voting for war. He gave a laundry list of things he supported, but had to throw something in there he voted against in an attempt to appear more balanced than the record would indicate. I believe the only other vote against war that he gave was “against becoming a peacemaker instead of a peacekeeper in Somalia,” which comes across to me as a semantically complex argument.
As to the revelation that he lied on his Lebanon record, just another maverick moment, I guess!
September 27th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Why seems utterly obvious - McCain wanted to give the impression that he’s not a knee jerk advocate of military response. The more telling point is that he had to go back to the very beginning of his career to find one - there just isn’t one from the past 15 year.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Funny McCain brought up this example. When those Marines were killed, Regan said we’d never leave until the job was done. 6 months later, we left. Bin Laden is quoted as saying this was his “Ah Ha!” momement with respect to the US. The way you beat the US is give them a black eye then wait them out. Working pretty well in Afghanistan, and since Bin Laden didn’t like Saddam Hussein too much to begin with, working pretty well for him there.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:11 am
It sounded like he also said he went to Iraq in 2003 and started criticizing the strategy then. If I remember right, he didn’t start criticizing the strategy until much later.
He may have been the first elected Republican to acknowledge that Rumsfeld needed to be replaced and that we had invaded with far too few troops, but I’m prett sure it was not in 2003.
September 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Owen, You remember correctly.
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