I’ve grown increasingly frustrated of late with what passes for John McCain’s “straight talk,” in large part because it usually doesn’t make a lot of sense. Consider his latest gem.
John McCain, who’s positioning himself as the GOP primary’s uber-hawk, today made it clear that there’s only one option he considers unacceptable for Iraq: compromise. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reports that McCain has now become the latest hawk to pre-emptively attack the forthcoming proposals of the Iraq Study Group, which is reported to favor withdrawing troops from Iraq.
McCain told conservative radio host Michael Smerconish that he’s sticking by his position that more troops need to be sent to Iraq, and rejected any notion of “compromise” that may be floated by the Baker-Hamilton group, elaborating as follows: “Well in war, my dear friends, there is no such thing as compromise; you either win or you lose.”
To be sure, this sounds like “get-tough” rhetoric that may appeal to neo-cons and a segment of the GOP base, but it’s completely nonsensical. In war, the U.S. has done plenty of compromising, and for that matter, plenty of conflicts have ended without a clear victor or loser.
Who, for example, won the Korean War? Who won Vietnam? Does anyone seriously believe Iraq will produce an eventual “winner”?
McCain not only considers himself a serious policy expert on foreign policy and military affairs, the media largely buys into this notion. It’s time to drop the charade and acknowledge McCain as the extremist he is.
The depth of his policy expertise is remarkably thin…
In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.
“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,'” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.
…and his favored policies are as reckless as they are irresponsible.
McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the U.S. government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He’ll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats’ nanny-state regulations with the GOP’s red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism.
….If his issues line up with yours, and if you’re not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he’ll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable. Nowhere is that more evident than in his ideas about the Iraq war.
McCain has been banging the drum from nearly Day One to put more boots on the ground in Iraq. “There are a lot of things that we can do to salvage this,” he said on “Meet the Press” on Nov. 12, “but they all require the presence of additional troops.” McCain is more inclined to start wars and increase troop levels than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He has supported every U.S. military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon’s failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of “rogue state rollback.”
In 2000, Bush at least pretended to prefer a foreign policy based on “humility.” With McCain, there’s no pretense of modesty or nod to compromise.
As Digby put it, “If people like what Bush has been doing these past six years, they’re gonna love McCain.”