The Madness of John McCain
A militarist suffering from acute narcissism and armed with the Bush
Doctrine is not fit to be
commander in chief.
By Justin Raimondo
03/02/08 "American Conservative" John McCain’s reputation as a maverick is
no recent
contrivance. The senator first captured the media spotlight in September
1983, not long after
he’d been elected to his first term in the House, when he voted against
President Reagan’s
decision to put American troops in Lebanon as part of a multinational
“peacekeeping” force. One
of 27 Republicans to break with the White House, the freshman McCain made
a floor speech that
reads as if it might have been written yesterday—by Ron Paul:
The fundamental question is: What is the United States’ interest in
Lebanon? It is said we
are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to
aid the government.
I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I
ask, how can the
U.S. presence stabilize the region?... The longer we stay in Lebanon, the
harder it will be for
us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops
there in the first place.
What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same as will
happen if we stay. I
acknowledge that the level of fighting will increase if we leave. I
regretfully acknowledge
that many innocent civilians will be hurt. But I firmly believe this will
happen in any event.
Now insert “Iraq” where McCain said “Lebanon.” It’s as if McCain the
Younger foresaw our
present predicament and taunted his future incarnation, showing that
wisdom doesn’t necessarily
come with age.
In sketching out McCain’s political career alongside a timeline of
American interventions
abroad, one comes, at last, to a turning point. But his course was set
much earlier, in his
first visible venture into the realm of national-security issues at the
time of the Lebanese
events: Reagan’s request for U.S. troops and the subsequent attack on the
Beirut marine
barracks, where 241 military personnel were killed. This vaulted McCain to
national attention.
His initial opposition to the administration’s resolution authorizing the
sending of troops was
picked up by the media, and he basked in the spotlight. As he put it in
his memoir, Worth the
Fighting For:
It [his vote against the resolution] caught the attention of the
Wa****ngton press corps,
who tend to notice acts of political independence from unexpected
quarters. My press secretary,
Torie Clarke, began receiving interview requests from national print and
broadcast media.
Because of my POW experience, I had always enjoyed a little more celebrity
than is usually
accorded freshmen, but not so much that my views were solicited or even
taken seriously by the
national media. Now I was debating Lebanon on programs like the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and in
the pages of the New York Times and the Wa****ngton Post. I was gratified
by the attention and
eager for more.
On the strength of his prescient skepticism of U.S. intervention in a
Middle Eastern nation
known for its fierce sectarian passions, McCain’s star burned bright. U.S.
News & World Re****t
lauded him as a “Republican on the rise,” while on the other side of the
culture-chasm, Rolling
Stone hailed the Arizonan for his dissenting voice on an im****tant foreign
policy issue. His
reputation was made as that straight-talking, idiosyncratic, interesting
Republican congressman
from the Southwest, a version of Barry Goldwater the liberal media could
like—and would come to
love.
Not yet, however: there was a dark interregnum during which McCain and the
media were at odds.
There were shouting matches between the voluble senator and re****ters over
the “Keating Five”
scandal and his wife’s struggle with drugs. But this adversarial
relation****p turned a corner,
in 1991, when the first Gulf War erupted. McCain reflected in his memoir,
“As self-interested
as this sounds, I was relieved when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August of
that year gave
re****ters some other reason to talk to me and something else to re****t.”
His position on that war was not the reflexive interventionism we have
come to expect from him
but a more thoughtful approach, as cited in the New York Times of Aug. 19,
1990: “If you get
involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think sup****t will
erode significantly.
Nor should it be sup****ted. We cannot even contemplate, in my view,
trading American blood for
Iraqi blood.”
McCain preferred to use air power to keep Saddam Hussein out of Saudi
Arabia, rather than
introducing ground troops, and opposed the call that went out from the
more militant
neoconservatives that U.S. troops, having freed Kuwait from Saddam’s
clutches, should push on
to Baghdad.
What changed his foreign-policy purview, however, was the Kosovo War.
Again he played the
maverick role for all it was worth, taking up the cudgels against many in
his own party. But
this time, he was on the side of intervention.
Monday, April 5, 1999, was a busy day for McCain: Larry King, Charlie
Rose, Catherine Crier,
two appearances on MSNBC, another two on CNBC, capped by an interview on
ABC’s “Nightline.” The
next morning, he was up early for Don Imus. “We’ve turned down far more
than we’ve accepted,”
McCain enthused. It was “all McCain, all the time,” as one Republican
strategist put it to the
Wa****ngton Post, and it sure wasn’t hurting his presidential campaign.
“When I urged the president of the United States not to rule out the
option of ground forces,
then I also assumed responsibility for what may be the loss of young
Americans’ lives,” averred
McCain. “I don’t know how it affects my campaign. But I’ve basically put
my campaign on hold to
some degree.”
This was disingenuous, at best. Far from putting his campaign on hold, his
newfound visibility
gave it a shot in the arm, and political operatives in both parties
saluted the pragmatism of
his stance. “He looks presidential at a time when many Republicans don’t
believe the current
president does,” said Whit Ayres, an Atlanta-based GOP pollster. “He’s
where the country is,”
added Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Americans certainly like to
win and they don’t like
politicians sniping in the corner when the question is whether we’re going
to win it.”
“We’re in it, and we’ve gotta win it!” McCain repeated endlessly as he
berated his
“isolationist” fellow Republicans and demanded that they get behind the
president and sup****t
the war. Yet his sup****t was framed by a critique of the handling of the
conflict that
disdained Clinton’s alleged timidity in taking steps to ensure a victory.
Three weeks after hostilities began, McCain delivered a speech to the
Center for Strategic and
International Studies in which he declared that American intervention in
the Balkans had been
effectively stymied: “I think it is safe to assume that no one, including
me, anticipated the
speed with which Serbia would defeat our objectives in Kosovo, and the
scope of that defeat.”
While conceding, “yes, the war is only three weeks old, and yes, NATO can
and probably will
prevail in this conflict with what is, after all, a considerably inferior
adversary,” he warned
“victory will not be hastened by pretending that things have just gone
swimmingly.”
According to McCain, there were two big problems with the conduct of the
war: first, “an
excessively restricted air campaign that sought the impossible goal of
avoiding war while
waging one. The second is the repeated declarations from the president,
vice president, and
other senior officials that NATO would refrain from using ground troops
even if the air
campaign failed. These two mistakes were made in what almost seemed
willful ignorance of every
lesson we learned in Vietnam.”
We were, he warned, in danger of “losing” to the Serbian army—with its
outdated equipment and
complete lack of an air force—if we failed to launch air strikes that were
“massive, strategic
and sustained.” Furthermore, “no infrastructure targets should have been
off limits”—factories,
water plants, hospitals, schools, markets, whatever. Yes, “we all grieve
over civilian
casualties as well as our own losses,” but “they are unavoidable.”
But all of this was eminently avoidable, as critics of the war—including
many of McCain’s
fellow Republicans in Congress—pointed out at the time. The war itself was
unnecessary. The
U.S. was never threatened by the Serbs, and the trumped-up charge of
“genocide” was egregious
overstatement. Aside from that, the conflict lasted little more than 11
weeks, and, contra
McCain, the U.S. was never in danger of losing. A “massive” bombing
campaign would have
accomplished little aside from inflicting untold suffering on innocent
civilians and incurring
the everlasting enmity of the Serbian people—and of decent people
everywhere.
Yet McCain was persistent in demanding that the situation called for
American “boots on the
ground”—a phrase that, if you Google it, you’ll discover what might be
called the McCain
Panacea. To hear McCain tell it, there is apparently no crisis anywhere in
the world that
cannot be resolved by the presence of U.S. armed forces. This
full-throated, high-handed
interventionism is a long way from the hard-headed realism of the young
congressman who
challenged the disastrous decision to send peacekeepers to Lebanon by
asking, “What peace?”
It is impossible to know what is in McCain’s heart. There may be a purely
ideological
explanation for his changing viewpoint. But what seems to account for his
evolution from
realism to hopped-up interventionism is nothing more than sheer ambition.
This was the case in
1983, when he defied the Reagan administration over sending U.S. soldiers
to die at the hands
of a Beirut suicide bomber, and in 1999, when the cry went up to take on
Slobodan Milosevic. He
was positioning himself against his own party, while staking out a
distinctive stance
independent of the Democrats. It was, in short, an instance of a
presidential candidate
maneuvering himself to increase his appeal to the electorate—and, most
im****tantly, the media.
The brace of arguments McCain made in his CSIS speech in sup****t of the
Kosovo War didn’t hold
together at the time—and fares even worse in retrospect. According to
McCain, the Serbs
threatened “our global credibility and the long-term viability of the
Atlantic Alliance”—the
former because two successive presidents had warned Milosevic against
committing “aggression”
against Kosovo, and failure to act would embolden other “rogue states” to
defy American edicts.
Yet McCain’s reasoning is circular: according to him, our government’s
edicts must be obeyed
because they are, by definition, non-negotiable—even by Americans. A
certain course, once
taken, must be pursued to the bitter end, even if it acts against our
long-term interests.
McCain’s worldview, which admits no possibility of error, is undiluted
hubris.
The illogic of McCain’s interventionism is further underscored by his
appeal to “the long-term
viability of the NATO alliance.” With the implosion of the Communist
empire a decade earlier,
the original rationale for the creation of the alliance vanished. Was the
unnatural
perpetuation of an outmoded alliance really worth the lives of 5,000
Serbs, mostly civilians?
McCain’s arguments are so facile that one can hardly believe they are held
with any degree of
sincerity. There has to be something else involved, and a hint of this was
revealed in the
opening of his CSIS address, thanking his sponsors “for so graciously
providing me a forum to
share a few thoughts on the crisis in the Balkans. I’ve been having a
terrible time finding
media op****tunities to get my views out, so I appreciate your help.”
One can well imagine the appreciative laughter, albeit tinged with an
undertone of nervous
uncertainty at the sight of someone who gets far too much pleasure out of
being in the
spotlight. Such narcissism, unseemly in anyone, is especially unbefitting
in a president, yet
it is key to understanding McCain’s evolution from conventional Republican
realist to
relentless interventionist.
During the 1990s, he earned the attention and adulation of the media by
sup****ting a war most
journalists approved of and doing so more consistently and vociferously
than even the Clinton
administration. He’s pursuing the same strategy now that we’re in Iraq.
While the media has
largely turned against this particular war, McCain’s criticism of Donald
Rumsfeld and the Bush
administration’s handling of the war has won him plaudits and given him
credit as the “real”
author of the surge.
If op****tunism married to an inflated ego birthed his persona as the Ares
of America’s
political pantheon, then this psycho-political pathology soon found
expression as a full-blown
delusional system. By 1999, in defense of Clinton’s war, McCain was
declaring, “I think the
United States should inaugurate a 21st-century policy interpretation of
the Reagan Doctrine,
call it rogue state rollback, in which we politically and materially
sup****t indigenous forces
within and outside of rogue states to overthrow regimes that threaten our
interests and values.”
In 2006, McCain traveled to Tskhimvali, in the disputed region South
Ossetia, where pro-Russian
citizens want to secede from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and
seek union with Russia.
After his visit, he concluded:
I think that the attitude there is best described by what you see by
driving in [to
Tskhinvali]: a very large billboard with a picture of Vladimir Putin on
it, which says
‘Vladimir Putin Our President.’ I do not believe that Vladimir Putin is
now, or ever should be,
the president of sovereign Georgian soil.
Imagine if the British, annoyed by American encroachments in Texas, had
sent a member of
Parliament to denounce the defenders of the Alamo. That, at any rate, is
how the South
Ossetians think of it. And what American interests or values are at stake
in that dirt-poor,
war-torn corner of the Caucasus? What American values are reflected in the
Mafia-like
“democratic” government of today’s Kosovo, where Orthodox churches are
burnt-out ruins and the
few remaining Serbs are under siege?
In the warmonger sweepstakes now taking place among the major GOP
presidential contenders, John
McCain out-demagogued even Rudy Giuliani, whose studied belligerence seems
narrowly centered on
the Middle East. McCain’s enmity is universal: if he were president, in
addition to taking on
the Arabs and the Persians, we’d soon be at loggerheads with the Russians.
The G-8, he says,
should be “a club of leading market democracies: It should include Brazil
and India but exclude
Russia.” Putin’s Russia, he claims, is “revanchist” and surely qualifies
as one of those “rogue
states” that “threaten our values.” If we take him at his word, President
McCain would launch a
campaign for “regime change” in Moscow, just as we did in Iraq.
Prefiguring the revolutionary Jacobinism of Bush’s second inaugural
address, which proclaimed
the goal of U.S. foreign policy to be “ending tyranny in our world,”
McCain was straining at
the bit to launch a global crusade while George W. Bush was still touting
the virtues of a more
“humble foreign policy.” Neither time nor bitter experience has mitigated
his militancy.
Other politicians were transformed by 9/11. McCain was unleashed. His
strategy of “rogue state
rollback” was exactly what the neoconservatives in the Bush administration
had in mind, and
yet, ever mindful to somehow stand out from the pack while still going
along with the program,
the senator took umbrage at Rumsfeld’s apparent unwillingness to chew up
the U.S. military in
an endless occupation. He publicly dissented from the “light footprint”
strategy championed by
the Department of Defense. More troops, more force, more of
everything—that is McCain’s
solution to every problem in our newly conquered province.
Rumsfeld became increasingly un-popular not only with the American
people—the abrasive defense
secretary saw his poll numbers dropping to 34 percent from 39 percent in
May 2004, as McCain
and Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf took aim—but also with the media, which had
grown tired of him. In
the bitter winter of 2001, when the War Party was riding high, the
Philadelphia Inquirer had
enthused, “No doubt about it, Donald Rumsfeld is a stud muffin.” As
Rumsfeld’s cachet faded,
McCain felt safe in attacking him, and, after Rumsfeld had resigned,
declaring him “one of the
worst secretaries of defense in history.” As the war itself became more
unpopular, McCain
managed a feat of triangulation of Clintonian pro****tions, posing
simultaneously as a war
critic and a super hawk.
He was unrelenting in his criticism of the Bush administration, even as he
pledged to carry its
foreign policy forward: he continued to denounce the “tragic
mismanagement” of the war, while
hailing the surge—and strongly implying that the Bush White House had
plagiarized his views.
With the war enjoying the sup****t of about a quarter of the American
people, however, it was
necessary to frame a narrative that would deflect the disadvantages of a
pro-war position,
while enhancing his image as a straight-shooter who doesn’t care about
polls and just tells it
like it is.
But “straight talk” has increasingly turned to reckless talk: on the
campaign trail, he was
caught on video singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara
Ann”—not one of his
better moments. With his presidential campaign in the doldrums, and
Giuliani and the rest of
the Republican pack stealing much of his thunder, a new extremism seemed
to possess him: in
answer to repeated questions from one antiwar voter, McCain told a
town-hall meeting in Derry,
New Hamp****re that the United States could stay in Iraq for “maybe a
hundred years” and that
“would be fine with me… as long as Americans aren’t being killed or
injured” in any great
numbers, as in Korea.
Yet the longer we stay in Iraq, the more hostility is directed at American
soldiers. The
majority of Iraqis now believe attacks on our troops are justified, a far
cry from McCain’s
prewar prediction that it is “more likely that antipathy toward the United
States in the
Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis
celebrating the end of
a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness.”
McCain isn’t bothered by the failure of his prediction, just as the
absence of WMD in Iraq
didn’t phase him in the least. He is an actor following a script that was
written years ago and
cannot be altered because of mere facts: he is McCain the Conqueror, the
fearless war hero, the
commander in chief who will lead us to victory and stay in Iraq, as he
told Mother Jones
magazine, for “a thousand years, a million years” because American grit
will tame those
obstreperous Iraqis, just as we tamed the Koreans, the Bosnians, the
Japanese, and the rest.
With the extreme rhetoric appearing to work, an emboldened McCain recently
told a crowd of
sup****ters in Florida: “It’s a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be
over right away.
There’s going to be other wars. I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be
other wars. We will
never surrender, but there will be other wars.”
If McCain finally makes it to the White House, the U.S. will surely start
new wars, and not
just in the Middle East. With the world as his stage, the persona McCain
has created—given
visible expression by what Camille Paglia trenchantly described as “the
over-intense eyes of
Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel (from
Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock
parody, High Anxiety)”—will have every op****tunity to act out his
fantasies of soldierly greatness.
Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_02_11/cover.html
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