As many may have seen this morning, Josh Marshall at TPM has a brief nugget on John McCain's newest "key advisor and campaign surrogate", Max Boot.
Josh states that Boot is one crazy dude who has said some insane things over the years and fits in perfectly with the McCain camp. One such noteable from Marshall...
My favorite is when he told me -- circa 2002 -- that the US should seize and confiscate the Saudi oil fields and run them as a protectorate.
According to Josh, there are plenty of these types of "quotes" floating around over the years. I guess now's a good time to delve into the title of my diary.
In November of 2001, Max Boot wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "This Victory May Haunt Us". The subtitle of this piece is "Winning still requires getting bloody."
Boot's commentary starts off as such:
How quickly the fortunes of war shift. Last week gloomy commentators spoke of a "quagmire" and invoked Vietnam analogies. This week, following the liberation of Kabul, giddy commentators will no doubt be talking of bringing our boys home by Thanksgiving, Christmas at the latest. It may seem churlish in this hour of victory to raise doubts about how the triumphs of the past few days have been achieved, but the manner in which we have fought the war in Afghanistan may yet come back to haunt us.
This is not a war being won with American blood and guts. It is being won with the blood and guts of the Northern Alliance, helped by copious quantities of American ordnance and a handful of American advisers. After Sept. 11, President Bush promised that this would not be another bloodless, push-button war, but that is precisely what it has been.
I must state upfront that we should not confuse Boot's line of thinking with Obama's firm stance on the monumental blunder of taking our focus off of Afghanistan. Boot's more concerned with the level of spilt blood of the American soldier in direct correlation of the definition of "winning" a war.
And while John McCain says the "fundamentals of the economy are strong" and he intends that to mean the American worker, his newest "key advisor" questions the fortitude of the American people as a whole.
We got into this mess in the first place because of the widespread impression--born in Beirut in 1983, seemingly confirmed in Mogadishu in 1993--that Americans are incapable of suffering casualties stoically. This "bodybag syndrome" is our greatest strategic weakness; it is no doubt why Osama bin Laden dared to send his holy warriors to our shores to kill thousands of our countrymen.
How patriotic of Mr. Boot, who then goes on to insult the American soldier.
Our bombing campaign reveals great technical and logistical prowess, but it does not show that we have the determination to stick a bayonet in the guts of our enemy.
As evident, Boot is another neo-con nutjob with a "DRILL! DRILL! DRILL --- WAR! WAR! WAR!" mentality.
According to some, we are a country of "whiners"when it comes to the economical hardships we all face. According to others, we are afraid to spill enough blood to win a war.
Please, someone explain this to the jobless and homeless in America struggling to get by and to the familes of over 4,100 service men and women killed in Iraq.
Enough.