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If you’ve got a problem, McCain has a surge

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John McCain likes to frequently tell people he knows “how to win wars.” I’ve never been entirely clear on what that means — McCain’s never, you know, actually won a war — but it seems to have something to do with Bush’s “surge” policy in Iraq.

A couple of weeks ago, when McCain finally unveiled a policy on Afghanistan, he said we could “win” the war by doing what we’ve been doing in Iraq — namely, sending in more troops. In fact, to hear McCain tell it, escalating troop levels can solve any problem at all. And because McCain has stumbled onto this magical truth, it means, you guessed, he knows “how to win wars.”

McCain is so happy with this child-like formulation — more troops = problem solved — that he’s apparently willing to extend it to policies that have nothing to do with the military or foreign policy. Take domestic crime, for example.

ABC News’ David Wright reports: Answering a question at the Urban League about his approach to combating crime, John McCain suggested that military strategies currently employed by US troops in Iraq could be applied to high crime neighborhoods here in the US.

McCain at first praised the crime-fighting efforts of Rudolph Giuliani when he was mayor of New York City. Then he down-shifted into an approach that sounded considerably harsher.

McCain called them tactics “somewhat like we use in the military.”

“You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control,” he said. “And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement.” The way he described it, his approach sounded an awful lot like the surge.

Well, sure, of course it did. McCain loves the surge. If street gangs = Sunni insurgents, then it stands to reason that force escalation = problem solved, right?

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’m not sure McCain has thought this one through.

“You go into neighborhoods” — Who’s “you”? The National Guard?

“You clamp down [on the neighborhood]” — And how, exactly, will “you” successfully “clamp down” on an American city? Martial law?

“You make sure that the known criminals are kept under control” — Who determines which criminals are the “known” ones? And how, exactly, will “you” keep these alleged criminals “under control”? Is this some kind of permanent lock-down?

Baltimore is not Baghdad. A major city’s police force is not an infantry battalion. The problems afflicting inner-cities require long-term solutions, not “clamping down.”

McCain was, after all, talking to the National Urban League, which knows the difference between meaningful urban policy and whatever one wants to call the nonsense McCain was sharing yesterday.

Did it not occur to McCain’s aides to brief him on questions regarding crime before the event? Or did McCain just forget what he was supposed to say?

Comments

  • Dale

    says:

    Great, just what we need–more militarization of the police. Every cop will be SWAT. A 7-man team to get your cat out of the tree.

  • james k. sayre

    says:

    According to the Keith Obermann show on MSNBC yesterday, John McWar suggested back on 18 October 2001 that the anthrax used in the terror attacks on major network media and two Democratic Senators may have come from Iraq. So McWar was an early cheerleader for aggressive imperial war based on lies. It’s odd, that after the Bush regime’s initial investigation into the anthrax terror attacks revealed the anthrax had come from federal labs of the US Government, their investigation slowed to a molasses-in-January crawl, taking almost seven years to ending up, in the last couple of days, blaming a dead man for the deeds.

  • Five Feet High 'n Risin'

    says:

    Uh, last I checked, you can’t send the military (or any kind of government-sanctioned military force) into an American neighborhood to arbitrarily shoot people it suspects are gang members until they feel the problem is solved. It’s been tried, but it ends up costing local taxpayers a lot of money.

  • Martin

    says:

    I’ve never been entirely clear on what that means — McCain’s never, you know, actually won a war

    I’m willing to bet he took a few history of war classes at Annapolis. Therefore, he was taught how to win wars and knows how to do it. Sorta like Bush having an MBA and knowing how to run the economy.

  • jhm

    says:

    If he can’t suggest either a surge of a tax cut, then Hon. Sen. McCain is stumped for possible solutions.

  • Shalimar

    says:

    So McCain’s solution to problems is the same as Bush’s solution: Throw government money at them. How conservative of him.

  • Equal Opportunity Cynic

    says:

    Silly liberals, treating crime prevention as a police action. Real Americans know that the “war on crime”, just like the “war on terror” and the “war on (some) drugs”, is a pretext for the advent of the glorious fascist military state!

  • Becca

    says:

    Actually, I’m rather disturbed and alarmed by this statement by McCain. Doesn’t anybody else see what he’s advocating here?

    Martial Law.

    Pure and simple.

  • axt113

    says:

    Yeah I saw that too, if I wasn’t already terrified of the thought of a McCain presidency this would have sealed the deal. The sad thing is people are so concerned about the Celeb ad and whether Obama injected race into the campaign that they totally missed this.

  • Dee Loralei

    says:

    Sounds like he’s talking about the “capture and hold” areas of Iraq. Maybe he’ll suggest walling off certain parts of the city and only allowing legitimate citizens in, people who can prove they live or work there, with armed checkpoints, too.

    #5, Five Feet High, yea was called posse commitatus, we ain’t got it no more.

    When we welcome our new insect overlords(tell me Johnny Mac doesn’t look like a praying mantis), they’ll give us martial law. YAY!/ snark

  • Mick

    says:

    Did it not occur to McCain’s aides to brief him on questions regarding crime before the event? Or did McCain just forget what he was supposed to say?”

    I’m pretty sure before November, he’s going to introduce a campaign idea of privatizing local law enforcement:

    “Law enforcement is bogged down with bureaucracy. Did you know an officer of the law in this country actually has to actually fill out a giant stack of paperwork every time he draws his gun?? That’s not justice we can believe in. I propose Federal Sanctioned Civil Enforcers (Note: Ex-military vigilantes did not poll well with focus groups) to help put crime in a headlock where it belongs!”

  • Bruno

    says:

    Martin @7 said: …I’m willing to bet he took a few history of war classes at Annapolis. Therefore, he was taught how to win wars and knows how to do it. Sorta like Bush having an MBA and knowing how to run the economy….

    that is an excellent point, and something even low information voters will understand:

    Bush has an MBA and supposedly knows how to run the economy, and look how that turned out.

    McCain took some classes at Annapolis and knows how to win wars. Since he graduated 5th to last, which makes you wonder if he ‘really’ paid attention. Do we really want to take another chance with a party animal? (McCain was a party animal at the academy, besides being a trouble maker)

  • The Answer is Orange

    says:

    As I’ve said (perhaps too many times now) it’s interesting that the people who’d be subject to the United States of Emergency would for the most part … not look like the guys on your dollar bill.

    Vote for McCane. He’ll keep the scary brown folks in their place, just like they did when he was a young man.

    If you follow the link you’ll see he starts off praising Guiliani for his approach to crime (though I recall it was really a police chief whom he later fired), launches into his plan for shitting on the Constitution and then refers to Guiliani again.

    Hmm…

    A 7-man team to get your cat out of the tree.

    Nah, they’ll just send one guy with some explosives to make sure there is no cat and no tree.

  • libra

    says:

    I’ve never been entirely clear on what that means — McCain’s never, you know, actually won a war — CB

    It’s like he knows how to fix economy — he’s got Greenspan’s book. Hasn’t got around to reading it yet but, surely, one day — when he doesn’t have to spend all his time (between naps) campaigning — he will. I expect he’s got Sun-Tzu’s “The Art of War” stashed somewhere also, from his student days. As soon as he figures out in which of his 8 residences it’s located…

  • Blaidd Drwg

    says:

    @ Martin #7: Let’s not bring up McLaim’s Annapolis record, shall we? He was, after all 5th in his class – – – 5th from the bottom that is…

    @ #9 Shalimar: I always thought it was the DEMs whose solution to a problem was to throw gubmint money at it. After all, isn’t that what our buddies Rush, Sean, and Michael tell us, 12 times per hour?
    (That’s Michael Savage, BTW, whose real name – before he changed it to go into radio was Michael Weiner (pronounced ‘WEEner’, or maybe ‘WHINer’))