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?