After writing a blog post on McCain's bizarrely ludicrous visit to Baghdad, I was reminded of something I'd read a few months back: a letter from a U.S. Marine to his friends and family back home. In the letter, the Marine wrote down a list of "Most" this-or-thats in his experiences in Iraq. One of them:
Biggest Hassle — High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and "battlefield" tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no effect on their preconceived notions of what's going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they've been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.
And something struck me about McCain's PR visit to Baghdad that should have occurred to everyone but clearly hasn't: that McCain's visit was not only a purely political showcase, but as a result has distracted our troops from their real work and possibly even put them in danger.
The same happened with Bush's fake visits to Louisiana and Mississippi after Katrina hit, a political visit to a place where serious work is going on. The result after Katrina: serious rescue work was halted to provide for the politician's PR piece, and people almost certainly died as a result. McCain has likely had the same effect in Iraq. Did those 100 soldiers, three helicopters and two gunships have nothing better to do that day? One can only imagine American troops in Baghdad today engaging in a firefight, wondering where the hell their air support was. Was a soldier in Iraq maimed or killed today because his much-needed support was in the Green Zone babysitting a vain political hack?
We'll never know for sure. But it's not hard to imagine.
Good work, McCain.
This post is a version of my blog post for today in The Blog from Another Dimension.