A new Financial Times op-ed, by Anatol Lieven and entitled Why we should fear a McCain presidency dovetails with what commentators across the politically spectrum, from the libertarian Matt Welch, who has a new book out on McCain, to the moderate right Ivo Daalder of Brookings, and over to Pat Buchanan, have been saying: McCain, as President would start new wars, bigger ones even.
This is uncomfortable to McCain supporters; the Senator's ideas on foreign policy, which I'd characterize as a "maximally aggressive US interventionist approach", will at best will lead to more war. As for the worst, well...
Meet, or revisit, "Dr. Strangelove" ; if Senator John McCain, Jr. is elected as US predsident in 2008 we'll all be thinking of Strangelove... a lot. [below: "Dr. Strangelove" presented classified US secrets on nuclear war fighting as 'fiction'. As George E. Lowe, who lived some of the reality behind "Strangelove" tells me, John McCain's father would not approve of his son's pro-war mania: Admiral McCain would, in fact, be turning over in the grave.]
As Jerome a Paris has posted today, Financial Times op-ed wroter Anatole Lieven is worried about McCain presidency for a number of hair-singeing reasons. As Jerome quotes Lieven,
The problem that Mr McCain poses stems from his ideology, his policies and above all his personality. His ideology, like that of his chief advisers, is neo-conservative.
Jerome goes on,
The author goes on to describe his plans for Iraq, his views on American exceptionalism, and his permanent call for warmongering, whether against Iran or other unnamed "rogue States."
[Lieven, continued]
Mr McCain’s promises, during last week’s visit to London, to listen more to America’s European allies, need to be taken with a giant pinch of salt. There is, in fact, no evidence that he would be prepared to alter any important US policy at Europe’s request.
[Jerome,]
This would be the continuation of the "dialogue = we let you talk and agree with us" diplomacy of the Bush times. To some extent, this is the natural diplomacy of the US, but it becomes a real problem when there are serious underlying disagreements on what common policies might be. While McCain has talked about global warming, nothing indicates that he would be willing to impose the kind of carbon constraints that Europe already has (whereas both Clinton and Obama have said they would); and of course, as regards Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or even Russia, his belligerant policies are highly unlikely to be supported by Europeans, thus leading quickly to more clashes.
But the article goes on that this is not the only problem with McCain, whose explosive personality makes him essentially unfit on the world stage:
[Lieven,]
Mr McCain’s policies would not be so worrying were it not for his notorious quickness to fury in the face of perceived insults to himself or his country. Even Thad Cochran, a fellow Republican senator, has said: "I certainly know no other president since I’ve been here who’s had a temperament like that."
For all his bellicosity, President George W. Bush has known how to deal cautiously and diplomatically with China and even Russia. Could we rely on Mr McCain to do the same?
[Jerome]
And the conclusion is quite dire:
[Lieven]
Not just US voters, but European governments, should use the next nine months to ponder the consequences if Mr McCain is elected and how they could either prevent a McCain administration from pursuing pyromaniac policies or, if necessary, protect Europe from the ensuing conflagrations.
Enter "Dr. Strangelove"...
Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha Nebraska, is the headquarters of SAC, The Strategic Air Command which for a period at the height of the Cold War controlled America's nuclear arsenal. Inside a small Christian chapel at Offutt are stained-glass windows depicting SAC and its B52's bombers engaged in a nuclear holy war. There is no other reasonable interpretation.
image, below: detail of 1960's era stained glass window, in the Memorial Chapel at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, former home of the Strategic Air Command (now renamed the Strategic Command) depicts iconography of sanctified nuclear war fighting. Note apparent mushroom cloud shapes, lower right.
If John McCain Jr. had been president during the Cuban Missile crisis it's likely the cruelty-free organic free ranging chicken eggs I ate for breakfast today would have been highly radioactive. Or, more likely I wouldn't exist at all, and the East Coast of the United States would to this day be a toxic, radioactive no-man's land. Kennedy was bellicose, but by many indications McCain is worse, not the least because the Cold war is over and Senator John McCain, Jr. seems unaware of that fact. As a man who says he worked closely with the Senator's father tells me, Admiral John 'Goddamn!' McCain, Jr. would be appalled at his son's behavior, turning over in the grave even.
Shadow War For The Fate Of The Earth
During the period of the late 1950's and early 1960's a grim internecine bureaucratic inter-service war was waged that possibly determined the fate of the Earth... so far.
One of the white hats in the grim fight to deprive the United States Air Force of sole control over America's nuclear war fighting capacity was, according to George E. Lowe, John McCain's father Admiral John McCain Jr.
According to Lowe, McCain's father was leader of a secret US Navy intelligence "Cabal" which fought the Air Force's psychotic Curtis LeMay and eventually won by developing a sea-based nuclear weapon arsenal aboard nuclear subs which rendered SAC's nuclear bomb laden B52's obsolete.
Now, in the 2008 election, US Senator John McCain bears more relation to the psychotic Curtis LeMay and according to George E. Lowe, who claims to have worked with McCain's father in the US Navy Admiral McCain would be "turning over in the grave" at his son's courtship of the apocalyptic Christian right which Admiral McCain fought along with the "secular utopians" in the military and in RAND who wanted to fight and win a global nuclear war. George Lowe's 2-volume book set It Can Happen Here: A Fascist Christian America, printed shortly before the contested 2000 presidential election, was startlingly prescient of what was soon to follow [excerpt from book].
Lowe makes a number of extraordinary claims - that the Navy "cabal" hwe was in under McCain's father introduced the idea of the "military industrial complex" to Eisenhower's speech writer, who put the idea into Eisenhower's retirement address. "Seven Days In May", a 60's era book (and later a film) which depicted a military coup by military factions similar to LeMay's was a product of the cabal's thinking according to Lowe, and as far as I can tell, Dr. Strangelove may have been as well.
It was a shadow PR war to prevent nuclear apocalypse.
Here's an audio excerpt from my recent interview with George E. Lowe.
John McCain Jr. is more akin to Curtis LeMay, and McCain is running for president... Senator McCain may or may not have early stage Alzheimer's but some leading [Democratic Party affiliated] historians now accord Ronald Wilson Reagan the honor of having been a "great" US president, so Alzheimer's may not disqualify an applicant for the position. But insanity probably does and a stronger case can be made that McCain's insane, dangerously so.
To wit: On April 2, 2006 Senator John McCain told Tim Russert, on "Meet The Press", that a US war with Iran "could be Armageddon" and yet less a year later John McCain was aggressively courting Armageddon-booster Pastor John Hagee and also engaging in increasingly menacing behavior to the point of McCain's "Boomb, bomb Iran" parody siung at a VFW hall. It is a jarring disconnect ; In April 2006 it seemed John McCain thought Armageddon a bad thing. In February 2007 McCain was courting a Christian pastor, leader of a large new pro-Armageddon political bloc. McCain's 180 about face on Armageddon could be called schizoid and it's not the only indication McCain's psychologically unstable.
Beyond psychological instability, John McCain's positions towards Russia, especially McCain's support for placing anti-missile batteries in Eastern Europe, would dramatically increase risk of global thermonuclear war; such anti-missile batteries would dramatically reduce the time window, already shaved down to mere minutes, Russian commanders would have in which to decode whether to fire ICBM's under their command in response to a perceived US attack.
And, as Wired Magazine, reviewing P.D. Smiths Doomsday Men, notes, we're already much closer to "midnight" than we like to imagine:
The Soviet doomsday device -- a giant cobalt bomb rigged to explode were Russia ever nuked, rendering the earth's surface uninhabitable -- gained fictional fame in Dr. Strangelove. However, P.D. Smith's Doomsday Men, available in the UK and due for stateside publication in December, tells the story of the real Doomsday device -- and it's still armed.
Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is "yes" then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system. [...]
We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s.
McCain, The NeoCon's NeoCon, or "Fixing the World By Bombing it To Rubble"
An article in The Nation by Robert Dreyfuss along with a newly released book, with an accompanying article, Be Afraid of President McCain: The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick, by Matt Welch of the libertarian Reason Magazine give more detail on what many already suspect to be the case - John McCain is frighteningly and probably pathologically bullish on war.
Dreyfuss and Welch emphasize that John McCain is radically pro-war, a "neocon's necon" who could be expected not to curb George W. Bush's military interventionist policies but, rather, substantially expand upon Bush's approach. On the campaign trail John McCain has forecast more wars and both Dreyfuss and Welch agree, along with Pat Buchanan for that matter, that McCain is giving us straight talk on this. As Dreyfuss's article quotes the Brookings Institute's Ivo Daalder:
"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."
The extent to which John McCain has clothed himself in the sort of "war of civilization" rhetoric favored both by the hard Christain right and NeoConservatives can be seen in a newly released McCain campaign video which presents a slickly packaged, atmospherically produced message cruder than anything bellowed out, in sermons, by John Hagee ; we're in World War Two again, McCain is Churchill, we will NEVAH ! surrender. That simple.
What's creepy is how close the ad appears to come to the distilled essence of foreign policy sentiment McCain's emitted during his 2008 presidential bid, which reduces to an inchoate, utopian, existential fantasy of redemptive war.
Interviewed by Bill Moyers about his new book on McCain, Matt Welch describes McCain as "the most pro-war candidate of the last decade" and I suspect Welch might even be conservative in his assessment. It's sobering to consider the possibility of a president even more radically bellicose than Bush, and for many reasons.
McCain's understanding of economics appears foggy at best, and purely for financial reasons another four or even eight years of interventionist wars would effectively reduced the United States to second-world status, but the slide would not be at all smooth. McCain has appropriated the Christian right's religious war rhetoric or, perhaps, it was somewhat native to him in the first place.
Robert Dreyfuss, in his Nation article, emphasizes the extent to which John McCain was at the lead in the growing NeoCon movement while George W. Bush was still mucking about in a 'compassionate conservative' Texas backwater. McCain's NeoCon views, writes Dreyfuss,
crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook...
Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder... For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.
What Daalder describes is a man, McCain, who seems to hold foreign policy views that, in many ways, are on the level of sophistication one might expect of a teenager or very young adult, in which international conflict is reduced to proper application of military force. Daalder's article goes on to describe McCain's plans for replacing the CIA with an agency designed to, in essence, use "dirty" tactics to fight "dirty" wars (which the CIA always did to an extent anyway, but never as its sole raison d'etre) and also McCain scheme for bypassing the UN by creating a new international body more compliant with US interests.
Interventionist war is, for John McCain, as source of inspiration and hope. It is a form of redemptive, militaristic nationalism raised to the level of a personal religion, and it might seem reductively easy to read McCain's POW experiences into such an approach but that may not be far off the mark. As Welch writes,
In addition to calling for tens of thousands more troops in Iraq than Bush has committed, McCain has pushed to keep military options against Iran "open," criticized the "repeated failure to back...rhetoric with action" against North Korea, supported a general policy of "rogue state rollback," and lamented the Pentagon’s failure to intervene in Darfur... he sees Iraq and Iran as integral to a new twilight struggle against Islamic radicalism, while holding onto the belief that too much multilateralism can screw up a perfectly good war.
"A world where our ideals had a realistic chance of becoming a universal creed was our principal object in the last century," he wrote in Worth the Fighting For. "In the process, we became inextricably involved in the destiny of other nations. That is not a cause for concern. It is a cause for hope."...
Regarding the U.S. president’s war-related prerogatives, McCain has a nearly unbroken record of deferring to them, from the moment he volunteered to testify against The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case (even though his only expertise was in being a prisoner of war) to his rollover when Bush insisted that his ballyhooed anti-torture bill deny habeas corpus rights to War on Terror detainees and give the White House authority "to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions."
****
extra credit:
Below - A 90-second commercial I've created, about McCain's 180 degree reversal, between 2000 and 2008, on hate speech.