John McCain is not a quick learner.
Following up on the news that John McCain seemed to spend his time in Syria
meeting with rebel kidnappers (and to be fair, that's exactly what Ronald Reagan would have done, except he had people for that), there's also this other tidbit from his Sunday show appearances
before the trip. It seems that McCain doesn't really care
who he was meeting with,
so long as we give "them" better weapons:
RADDATZ: Who's them?
MCCAIN: I know them. I've met them. They're there.
RADDATZ: But how do you pick out good rebels and bad rebels? You've got al Qaeda rebels running around.
MCCAIN: Martha, these are legitimate questions you're asking, but they are there. And you put them inside Syria....These jihadists – there aren't that many of them. They're just so good, because they've been fighting all over the Middle East for all these years and they are not afraid to die.... Look, we can do this.
That's a curious exchange, to say the least. First off, he seems to be pretty flatly saying that "them," as in the people who we should be sending heavy weaponry to, is whoever the hell he's met with. Since he doesn't know exactly who he met with this last time around, much less whether they're wandering around kidnapping people and doing who knows what else, he seems remarkably unconcerned about the sticky problem of ensuring we're not arming the Middle East's next up-and-coming warlords or hardline religious zealots. He's very
aware of the problem, mind you, but still apparently manages to cozy up to people on the wrong side of that line, a perfect metaphor for exactly what smarter people have been worried about here.
Then he follows up by complimenting the radical jihadists among the lot for their superior fighting strength, apparently emphasizing their outsized ability to influence things compared to their true numbers.
He seems wedded to this plan, though:
When Cooper asked McCain how weapons would be prevented from falling into the hands of extremists, the senator said extremist fighters compose a small fraction of Syria's rebel forces: 7,000 pro-al Qaeda fighters from the al-Nusra front among some 100,000 insurgents.
"Every single day, more and more extremists flow in … but they still do not make up a sizable portion," McCain told Cooper. "We can identify who these people are. We can help the right people."
That's certainly optimistic of him. He himself can't identify who the good and the bad people are during his own trips meant to encourage U.S. arms shipments, but he's pretty positive (or just not as concerned as he professed to be) that the extremists, who both are a small number and who are "just so good" at fighting, won't be getting their hands on the heavy weapons he's supposing we start handing out.
The situation in Syria is an ongoing atrocity and there's no good right answer here. That makes the simpleton nature of McCain's policy proposals all the more remarkable; he's reliably a one-man dog and pony show for the most violent and unpredictable of options, but remains bafflingly unaware, for someone constantly trotted out as a conservative national security expert, of just how rote, shallow and one-dimensional his policy prescriptions turn out to be. The options are always either bombing someone or, if we're feeling bruised from the last time we tried that, giving someone else the material to bomb someone.
The media is obsessed with the man and his foreign policy pronouncements—but why? Honestly, there's no "expertise" there you couldn't get from an average plumber or office worker or barista. Surely there's other people in the Senate who the Sunday shows could give a ring—or are they all afraid of what would happen to them if John McCain found out there was a camera somewhere in America that he wasn't in front of?