Rich on McCain
To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.
What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.
The key to understanding McCain’s strategic “thought” is that he loves war. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to start on any given day is the war he wants to start. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to escalate on any given day is the war he wants to escalate. The entire rest of his erstwhile worldview will just revolve around that. In the mid-nineties, he wanted to start a war against North Korea. In 1999, he wanted a land invasion of Serbia. But in 2002, he viewed North Korea’s nuclear program as no big deal (and certainly wasn’t mentioning the need to invade Serbia) because that might distract from the goal of invading Iraq. In 2006, he downplayed problems in Afghanistan to further his goal of sending more troops to Iraq. But now Afghanistan’s in the spotlight so we need to send troops there. But just last summer, he thought we needed to intervene in the war between Russia and Georgia.
It’s a consistent point of view in the sense that no matter the question, McCain’s answer is always “more war” but it doesn’t reflect any kind of coherent theory about national priorities or strategic issues. You never see people from the American Friends Service Committee brought on TV to talk about Afghanistan policy. But pacifists have a much stronger case to make on behalf of their approach than does the “all war all the time” crowd that continues to be treated by the media as possessed of vast credibility on these matters.
21 Responses to “Rich on McCain”
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October 11th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
With Peace Prize, it will not be easy for Obama to take to task these war mongers. But then again he is the guy who won the election and hence no need to get involved into this.
Just like Dunn, WH Communication Director, is ‘calling out’ media which misrepresents Admin Policy; we badly need some big guns to discredit (actually put them where they really belong) these moron Neo-cons.
Politically the life must be miserable to all this foolish talk on Conservative side which is really taking this country down.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Yeah, but McCain knew the Feds spent “three million dollars on an overhead projector for a planetarium.” So there! He knows how to cut waste! Sneer! Sneer! PWNED!
October 11th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Hum Matt, no link to this (excellent) column?
October 11th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
War is all this shortass knows. He’s never had a job, got boosted through life by his papa and grandpapa, married a fortune and has been riding his PoW stuff for 40 years.
Remember how safe it was to go to market in Baghdad? Safe enough for anyone to take a walk surrounded by marines armed to the teeth and half a dozen attack choppers hovering 500 feet up.
What a tiresome, spent little prick.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
You’d almost think that the Navy shoved McCain into retirement because they knew he didn’t have the strategic capacity to be an admiral. I’d be curious to know what today’s Navy top brass think about the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee when they’re off the record.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Remember McCain’s “I hate war,” line during the campaign?
I wanted to ask him, “What war? Can you please name a war the United States has fought that you hated? One? Either at the time, or in retrospect?”
October 11th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
I’m still waiting to hear the details of McCain’s super double-secret plan to get bin Laden, which he touted during the campaign.
October 11th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
We’re lucky McCain lost the election. Now, what will Obama do about Vietnamistan?
October 11th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Lieberman has the same views on war.
At least McCain isn’t a chickenhawk.
October 11th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
As long as McCain is weekly given the opportunity to promote his lies and crazy ideas, all is Fair and Balanced.
Thanks, media!
October 11th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Who cares what McCain believes. He is probably the most irrelevant individual inside the beltway. McCain has always been incompetent, has always been too lazy to study his briefing books, and too stupid to understand what he was being told.
The media built up McCain because he loved to stab Repubicans in the back. Now that the Republican are irrelevant, McCain is no longer needed to stab them in the back.
October 11th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Very few of the pundits, especially conservative ones, have ever served in the military, and so they project fantasies onto McCain and lionize him. McCain’s understanding of war is selective because he didn’t see the huge losses and the failures of the Vietnam War up close, because he was in a prison camp. That was a difficult ordeal to be sure, but he didn’t see up close the difficulties of fighting an insurgency or the failure of Vietnamization or how the South Viets really felt about us. You don’t hear people like Richard Engel opining about how great war is or, for that matter, John Kerry or Chuck Hagel or even Colin Powell.
October 11th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
This is where you can build a pretty powerful case for Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Keeping this man from controlling the US military was a gigantic service to world peace.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Yeah, Johnny McCain never did possess a very supple mind. Age and irrelevance can only make things worse. You could easily put him and buddies in box and not have to worry about them. George Will, on the other hand, has a brain. Thank god nobody likes him, and consequently, he doesn’t have any buddies.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Apply some elementary Aquinas: the best way to fight evil, is to do good.
The sort of Rosetta Stone of American strategic thinking is Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech, when he rang the 1930s bell in the 50s, and said that the whole history of failure in war could be summed up in two words:Too late. Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy. Too late in realizing the mortal danger. Too late in preparedness. Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance. Too late in standing with one’s friends.”
Great rhetoric, lousy strategic thinking: all about the last war, and naturally a really bad approach to the next four.
Somebody could come up with a smarter version of that, along the lines of “so what?”
Remember, we went into Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda’s camps and knock off the Taliban. We did that (although we let ‘em off the hook cuz Bush took us into Iraq) — what on earth are we trying to accomplish NOW?
Put it this way: if we left Afghanistan next week and a sha’ria government was installed in Kabul that controlled, um, Kabul, so what?
If we left Iraq tomorrow and the country split into a Kurd state, a Shi’ite state, and a Sunni mess: so what?
The truly weird thing about American policy from Egypt to Afghanistan is that the people who really hate us are the people who are supposed to be our friends: I’ve seen polls that show ordinary Iranians have a higher opinion of the US than the Saudis.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
And people think it’s because he’s not Bush that Obama won the Prize.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
War is pure idiocy, always has been, always will be. It’s the equivalent of a juvenile frat-rat dormitory “sword fight” and as such serves no useful purpose other than as an opportunity to show off that which is usually lacking anyway.
But war has one single virtue in America: it makes a handful of people incredibly wealthy, at the expense of either the taxpayer or future generations, or both. Recall the words of former G.E. CEO, also former Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson in 1944:
The revulsion against war … will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy.
Somehow the warmongers succeeded in doing just that, and today, 65 years later, we’re all suffering because of it. I only wish there was a remedy for testosterone poisoning — other than war.
No need to look to McCain for it, though.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:09 am
[...] Frank Rich doesn’t get it, but Matthew Yglesias does: [...]
October 12th, 2009 at 4:53 am
I’m grateful to John McCain for his service to this country as a soldier. But, because this man crashed an airplane in Vietnam more than a generation ago, we must eternally give credence to his views on war and how to conduct foreign policy? Has he ever led men into combat? While serving in Vietnam, was he ever involved in devising the military strategy there? Has he ever done so subsequently?
October 12th, 2009 at 8:00 am
McCain’s reputation is most closely associated with the two biggest foreign policy/national security failures in our history-Iraq and Vietnam. The man is an absurdity.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Thank you for saying what is so obviously true! NO ONE calls him out on this.
You could say much of the same for 90% of the GOP… and 50% of all Democrats for that matter.