One way or the other, Iraq will determine this last phase of McCain’s political life, as surely as the war in Vietnam defined its beginning.
Mat Bai in tomorrow's New York Times Magazine...a must read on the rationale for War in the mind of John McCain.
Whatever their disagreements on policy, United States senators, even in today’s hyperpolitical climate, are reluctant to impugn one another’s motives or integrity.
That’s doubly true among those who experienced combat in the Vietnam War, a group that now includes four sitting senators — the Republicans John McCain and Chuck Hagel and the Democrats John Kerry and Jim Webb — as well as former colleagues like Bob Kerrey, Max Cleland and Chuck Robb.
There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.
Not all of McCain’s fellow veterans subscribe to the theory that the singularity of his war experience has anything to do with his intransigence on Iraq. (Bob Kerrey, for one, told me that while he was aware of this argument, he has never believed it.) But some suspect that whatever lesson McCain took away from his time in Vietnam, it was not the one that stayed with his colleagues who were “in country” during those years — that some wars simply can’t be won on the battlefield, no matter how long you fight them, no matter how many soldiers you send there to die.
So we have a sitting President whose rationales were formed during alcoholic binges and one who would be President who has an extremely skewed vision of American History due to an unfortunate circumstance of being taken captive....
“McCain is my friend and brother, and I love him dearly,” Max Cleland, Georgia’s former Democratic senator, told me when we talked last month. “But I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam. This objective of ‘hearts and minds’? Well, hello! You didn’t know which heart and mind was going to blow you up! “I have seen this movie before, and I know how it ends,” says Cleland, who lost three of his limbs to an errant grenade during the battle of Khe Sanh. “With thousands dead and tens of thousands more injured, and years later you ask yourself what you were doing there. To the extent my friend John McCain signs on to this, he is endangering America’s long-term interests, and probably his own election in the fall.”
Could McCain be Nixon reincarnated?.....
“As far as people who advise me,” McCain went on, though I still hadn’t asked a question, “probably one of my most trusted advisers for the last 30 years is Henry Kissinger, not known as a hawk or a neocon.” McCain infused the word with sarcasm. “I also remember the days when Ronald Reagan was portrayed as a hawk and a neocon. I remember the near hysteria in response to his ‘tear down this wall.’ I remember the ‘Oh, you can’t do that, when you call the Soviets an evil empire.’ I remember all those things. Same people who are now saying — ” He stopped himself midsentence, then began again. “I’m always open to new ideas and new thoughts, but my principles were grounded many years ago in places like the National War College and other places where I have learned and studied and talked to people I admire and respect.
“So,” McCain said finally, “with that preface, I’d be glad to answer any questions you might have, and again, it’s always good to be with you.”
It’s rare to see a presidential candidate vent in quite this way, but clearly some of the criticism over his policies on Iraq and foreign policy in general — mild criticism, to this point — had wounded McCain. When he looks in the mirror, he does not see a reckless or belligerent leader, and yet that was the man his detractors claimed to see. A few weeks earlier, the liberal radio host Ed Schultz made headlines by calling McCain a “warmonger” and then happily repeating the charge on CNN. As McCain and I talked, the Democratic National Committee had begun broadcasting an ad that repeatedly showed him saying at a New Hampshire campaign event that he would be fine with keeping American troops in Iraq for 100 years. The quote had been ripped out of context — he went on to say that such a troop presence would be possible only without casualties, in the same way that American soldiers had remained quietly for decades in South Korea and Europe — but it had already become a staple of Democratic attacks, and McCain could expect to see it about half a million more times before November.
McCain considers himself a “realistic idealist”; the author of the article takes pains to point out the various right wing categories where McCain refuses to pigeonhole himself….the isolationists led by Pat Buchanan, the realists willing to commit force only when the country’s vital strategic interests are at stake and the idealists who promote the use of force to promote American values abroad. Despite his affinity for Kissinger, McCain “rejects as outdated, for instance, a basic proposition of cold-war realists like Kissinger and Baker: that stability is always found in the relationship between states. Realists have long presumed that the country’s security is defined by the stability of its alliances with the governments of other countries, even if those governments are odious; by this thinking, your interests can sometimes be served by befriending leaders who share none of your democratic values. McCain, by contrast, maintains that in a world where oppressive governments can produce fertile ground for rogue groups like Al Qaeda to recruit and prosper, forging bonds with tyrannical regimes is often more likely to harm American interests than to help them.”
As we spoke in Tampa, I asked McCain if it was true, as his friend Joe Lieberman and others suggested to me, that he had been brought to a more idealist way of thinking partly by the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. “I think so, I think so,” he said, nodding. “And Darfur today. I feel strongly about Darfur, and yet, and this is where the realist side comes in, how do we effectively stop the genocide in Darfur?” He seemed to be genuinely wrestling with the question. “You know the complications with a place that’s bigger, I guess, than the size of Texas, and it’s hard to know who the Janjaweed is, who are the killers, who are the victims. It’s all jumbled up.
“So I’ve always tried to make a case for the realist side,” he continued. “And I think it was pretty clear that in Kosovo, we could probably benefit the situation fairly effectively and fairly quickly. And yet I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?”
McCain apparently has more qualms about taking action on the African continent as opposed to his support in Iraq due to America's history in the colonization of Africa. As for Burma "“It goes back to the Vietnam thing,” McCain told me. “I’m just not sure the American people would support a military engagement in Burma, no matter how justified the cause. And I can’t tell you exactly when it would be over. And I can’t tell you exactly what the reaction of the people there would be.”
But it was OK to lie to the American people to gain the support of the actions in Iraq?
WHAT WAS STARTLING about this conversation was that, while McCain was talking about the dangers of intervening in a Zimbabwe or a Burma, he might just as well have been talking about the invasion of Iraq. Didn’t that country, too, have a colonial history that had been carelessly considered, to say the least? Didn’t the war’s proponents fail to plan more than a few weeks out or to ask the hard questions about how their soldiers might be greeted in the streets?
“Yes, I agree with you,” McCain said, nodding again, when I put this question to him directly. “It was one of the penalties that we paid. But remember, the major reason to go into Iraq were the weapons of mass destruction. That was the conventional wisdom at the time, not only held by the United States but certainly many other nations.”
The conclusion: John McCain is fighting the Vietnam War over again. In his mind.
The lesson McCain drew from Vietnam all those years ago is that you cannot turn your back on a war when at last you figure out how to win it, and he is determined not to let that happen again. Far from having failed to internalize the legacy of Vietnam, as some of his friends in the Senate suspect, he is, if anything, entirely driven by it. “I don’t think you can isolate John’s views in Iraq from his experience in Vietnam,” Gary Hart told me. “Whether he is aware of it or not — and I want to tread carefully here, because I don’t like psychologizing people — I don’t think he can separate those things in his mind. In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War.”
There is no changing his mind. He "insists that he will never waver from his support of the war, no matter what the personal cost. “As I said a year ago,” he told me, “I would rather lose a campaign than a war.”
Let's make sure that happens. Like Vietnam, John McCain needs to become a memory, not the future of the United States of America.