John McCain and War

National Review Online ^ | February 04, 2008, 5:00 p.m. | Andrew C. McCarthy

[Yosemitest]

McCain Mirage
The senator is not ready-for-prime-time commander-in-chief.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Senator John McCain’s ascendancy in the Republican presidential race has been truly remarkable.
Yet, it’s no groundswell.

To this point, about two out of every three primary and caucus participants have voted against him.
If the Democrats and independents some states permit to crash the Grand Old Party were factored out, his standing in the Republican base would be even less impressive.
Still, you have to hand it to his admirers:

They have parlayed his thin support into an aura of inevitability.
The glow could intensify this week, when McCain is likely, finally, to rack up some more impressive numbers … in delegate-heavy blue states that rarely vote Republican when it counts, in November.
(Full disclosure: I support Governor Mitt Romney.)

As it happens, the received wisdom about McCain’s suddenly broad support mirrors the regnant narrative about his chief qualification for the job: It’s a mirage.

SINGING THE DEMOCRATS’ TUNE
The senator is portrayed as the GOP field’s only ready-for-prime-time commander-in-chief. Surely, we are told, this is what matters most in an era of national-security peril.
For McCain’s conservative supporters, it is the tirelessly restated rationale for overlooking that,

apart from a convenient flip on the Bush tax cuts,
the senator’s major contribution to debates on economic policy is class-warfare rhetoric
— liberally spiced with the same demagoguery (this time, against “the rich”)
by which his politics consistently turns issues from Iraq
to interrogation
to filibusters
to immigration
to campaign-finance
to global warming
into morality plays,
John the Virtuous pitted against hordes of unfeeling, self-indulgent, partisan rogues.

The sales job is a myth.
In reality, a McCain presidency would promise an entirely conventional, center-left, multilateralism.

If you liked the second Bush term,

if you liked Clintonian foreign policy,
you will find much to admire in a Commander-in-Chief McCain.
There would be the same agonizing over European and Islamic perceptions of America;
the same doctrinaire commitment to the alchemy of democracy promotion;
and the same fondness for heaping more unaccountable bureaucratic sprawl
atop the already counter-productive agencies and multinational institutions
that frustrate the United States at every turn.

Don’t take my word for it. Read McCain’s own Foreign Affairs essay, published late last year, in which the senator dilates on his philosophy. The leitmotif of “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom” is that America’s tattered standing in the world must be restored. Typical is this:

"We cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves.
We must be willing to listen to our democratic allies.
Being a great power does not mean that we can do whatever we want whenever we want,
nor should we assume that we have all the wisdom, knowledge, and resources necessary to succeed.
When we believe international action — whether military, economic, or diplomatic — is necessary, we must work to persuade our friends and allies that we are right.
And we must also be willing to be persuaded by them. To be a good leader, America must be a good ally."

Much scorn deservedly came Governor Mike Huckabee’s way when, in his own Foreign Affairs piece, he scalded the “Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality,” so “counterproductive at home and abroad.”
Yet McCain’s very similar (if less-bracing) riffs have drawn little attention. The Bush years, he says, have left us in desperate need “to restore and replenish the world’s faith in our nation and our principles.” “America” thus “needs a president who can revitalize the country’s purpose and standing in the world.” Even as such important European governments as France and Germany have become more conservative and drawn closer to American leadership, McCain laments that President Bush has “frayed” the “bonds we share with Europe” — thanks, no doubt, to “the kind of abusive tactics properly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions” that he intimates have been standard fare.

Close your eyes, and you can hear these same lines regurgitated by any conventional Democrat, whether it’s Sen. Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, or even Sen. John Kerry — the Democrats’ last standard-bearer who, you may recall, entreated McCain to be his running mate, the extent of their common ground being patent.
Contrary to the assurances of McCain’s admirers, his own essay tells us the senator is still the same guy who in 2000, upon being asked what he would do immediately upon being elected president, said he would turn, among others, to Sen. Kerry, Sen. Joe Biden, and Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser) to “to get foreign policy, national security issues back on track.”

SUSTAINING THE DEMOCRACY PROJECT
We must, of course, give Sen. McCain the obligatory nod for supporting the “surge.”
Admittedly, it is disquieting to hear McCain on the campaign trail battering former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld (whom, as Salon reminds us, he was praising for having “done a fine job” more than a year after the Iraq invasion).
And his periodic reliance on General Eric Shinseki

— a Clinton favorite who famously urged that “several hundred thousand troops” would be needed for Iraq
— raises many questions that have gone unexplored, such as:
why McCain told the Hartford Courant right before the Iraq invasion
that he had “no qualms about our strategic plans,”
rationalizing that lean force levels “were very successful in Afghanistan”;
and whether McCain is now saying Shinseki was right
to call for two or three times the force level envisioned by General David Petraeus’s strategy,
which McCain has vigorously supported.

Still, the senator must be given his due.
To have appeared to be driven from Iraq by al-Qaeda would have been a disaster of incalculable proportions for the United States.
When many around him, Left and Right, seemed ready to abandon ship,

the sheer force of McCain’s will
and the immensity of his stature
staved off defeat. With the increased troop levels he fought for, we have routed al-Qaeda in Baghdad. Of the four credible candidates of both parties remaining in the race, none has an accomplishment such as this to tout.
The senator’s advocates argue that he deserves enormous credit, and they’re right.

But does that translate into deserving the presidency?
In terms of the greater war on terror, which is the central foreign-policy challenge for the next administration,

the surge is vastly overrated,
and the rationale for it is confused at best.
We are not just at war in Iraq; we are at war with radical Islam.
We don’t need a Baghdad strategy; we need a global war strategy — or, at the very least, a regional one.
Victory is not an Iraqi “democracy”; it is an America safe from Islamic terror.

Sen. McCain tells us he is the best fit for taking this war to our enemies,

but what’s the evidence of that?
The point of the surge, as the soporific story goes, is to give Iraqis the space needed to make hard political choices. Here’s the problem:
Few people outside the Beltway care much about the politics of Iraq.
And for those who do, democracy is a bottom-up phenomenon that is the work of generations;
no central government — much less one run by Shiite fundamentalists — is going to impose democracy top-down.
Meanwhile, much of al-Qaeda’s leadership remains safely harbored in Iran,
and thanks to over two dozen paramilitary training camps,
al-Qaeda and the Taliban now mount about a quarter-million trained warriors in Pakistan and Afghanistan
(versus approximately 50,000 NATO troops — about half of which are in non-combat roles).

Sen. McCain admirably talks about “winning” in Iraq.
But the war isn’t limited to, or even principally about, Iraq.
The surge has pacified Baghdad, but we’re in serious danger of losing the wider war.
And, in fact, the jury is still out on whether the government Americans have been asked to sacrifice so much for in Iraq will actually be an American ally when it comes to Iran, the central problem in the region.

Sen. McCain suggests no strategy for winning the wider war.
He talks about fighting radical Islam, but he doesn’t evince much understanding of radical Islam — he seems to think, like the Bush administration, that it can be democratized into submission.

Fundamentalist Islam, which commands the loyalty of tens of millions of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, is anti-democratic:

It rejects the authority of people to govern themselves,
denies freedom of conscience,
demands imposition of sharia law,
places men above women and Muslims above non-Muslims,
and adopts jihad as the violent method of imposing its hegemonic ideology.
We must suppress its capacity to project power wherever that capacity is found — not just in Iraq.

There is no proof that democracy would cure what ails the Muslim world,

it is not our responsibility to take on such a dubious burden,
and it is preposterous to think we can win this war simply by urging Western democracy,
which many Muslim countries don’t want.
If you actually buy the “democracy will save us” theory,
it is equally foolish to believe democracy’s cause
is promoted by current State Department practices,
such as the installation of constitutions (in Iraq and Afghanistan)
that establish Islam as the state religion
and elevate sharia as a principal source of law.
And it is as counterfactual as it is counterintuitive to claim our interests are advanced by popular elections,
which have elevated Hezbollah into key government posts in Lebanon,
Hamas into control of much of the Palestinian territories,
and fundamentalist Shiites into control of Iraq.

This is the strategy of the Clinton years and the second Bush term:

Islam is the religion of peace, and democracy conquers all.
It is not a strategy for victory, but McCain appears fully bought-in.
His record conveys little indication that he grasps the inevitable connection between the dominance of Islam in a region and the sustenance of radical Islamic action in that region.
Indeed, in 1999, against the tide of conservative (and much other sensible) opposition,
he tried to push the Clinton administration into a ground war in Kosovo,
despite the absence of any vital American interests.
He thought it would enhance our image in the world to show solidarity with Muslims
— never mind that these Muslims included anti-Western fundamentalists.

McCain, moreover, continues to believe, as he wrote in Foreign Affairs, that the “long-elusive quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians must remain a priority.”
Why this is so is not explained.
McCain adopts the rose-tinted Clinton/Bush glasses through which Hamas appears as the sole cause of the quest’s elusiveness. This wishes away the stubborn fact that

the Palestinians as a society reject Israel’s right to exist
and accept terror attacks as the legitimate means to that end.
So while “Hamas must be isolated,” McCain intends to “intensif[y]” our “commitment to finding an enduring solution”
— meaning more negotiations with Fatah,
the Arafat legacy organization that maintains its own terror wing,
seeks rapprochement with Hamas,
and is committed by its charter to the destruction of the Jewish state.

Translation: Maintain the same failed status quo.
And therein lies the folly of McCain’s experience argument:

being involved in many past policy arguments
does not mean being on the right side of them.
What Americans want is a strategy to suppress jihadist power wherever it rears its head
and to prevent radical Islam from spreading its tentacles in our homeland
— which has a lot more to do with immigration enforcement
than peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
And we want such a strategy implemented
without a lot of temporizing over the likely reaction of the “Muslim Street,”
even if that upsets Europeans.

His democracy infatuation is such that McCain also plans to create a “League of Democracies.”

Evidently, this new multi-lateral behemoth would do what the United Nations is supposed to do, but doesn’t.
We are not told what criteria would break a country into the league (Russia and Iran, for example, insist they are democracies),
much less how those criteria would be enforced.
McCain does take pains, though, to assure us that the league “would not supplant the UN or other international organizations but complement them[.]”
Great.
This initiative, meanwhile, will merely redouble his promised effort to “institutionaliz[e] our cooperation [with the European Union] on such issues as climate change, foreign assistance, and democracy promotion.”
What’s not to love for a conservative?

THE DOMESTIC AGENDA
Sen. McCain’s initiatives on the international stage would be shored up by similarly dubious domestic policies.
On the intelligence front, that means yet another new bureaucracy.

This is rich.
Only four years ago, Sen. McCain insisted that the gross misfeasance of our $40 billion, 17-agency intelligence community could be cured by adopting the 9/11 Commission’s typical Washington fix:

the addition of another agency, which, it risibly explained, would streamline inter-agency intelligence flow.
Since then, the Office of the National Intelligence Director
— dominated by career foreign-service bureaucrats rather than operational intelligence types
— has predictably bloated into an empire that duplicates much of the CIA’s work (as well as its problems).
The result has been what you’d expect:
in nothing flat the directorate generated one estimate telling us that Iran was busy as a beaver building nukes,
then another telling us that Iran hasn’t been in the nuke business for years.

Now McCain wants to build on this, er, success with a “modern-day OSS” (the original OSS having been the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services).

Basically, this new agency would do what the CIA is supposed to do now, but doesn’t.
McCain, of course, promises that it would be the first “small, nimble, can-do organization” in the history of governmental bureaucracies.
He conveniently omits, however, that the original OSS ultimately became the enormous, sclerotic, no-can-do CIA …
i.e., the very entity that purportedly makes McCain’s new OSS necessary.
You’ll be shocked to learn the senator does not propose to eliminate the CIA.
Yet again, the notion is that we will get better intelligence by continuing to add new agencies
… even as Sen. McCain burnishes his image as the scourge of wasteful government spending.

It’s a foolish idea, but it’s the sort of thing one expects from an irascible senate maverick

— an old Washington hand who is quick to exploit the trendy concern-of-the-moment, demagoguing anyone who dares worry about the bigger picture.
Take the senator’s “McCain amendment,” the 2005 legislation that extended Fifth Amendment rights to terrorists overseas.
In its 2000 Dickerson decision, the Supreme Court held that if a person has a Fifth Amendment privilege, he is entitled to Miranda rights —
i.e., the right to an attorney, at the expense of the American taxpayer, during all questioning.
That means any terrorist we capture overseas could plausibly claim Miranda protection under the McCain amendment.
In short, leaving aside that the chief effect of McCain’s grandstanding was to intimidate our interrogation officers
(stoking a fear of investigations that prompted purchases of litigation insurance and a drastic reduction in intelligence-collection),
his legislation could eventually shut down interrogations.
A future court, or even Justice Department, could very well read the McCain amendment in conjunction with Dickerson to require that defense attorneys be inserted into the interrogation mix shortly after capture
— long before the “advanced psychological techniques,”
with which the high-minded senator plans to replace those “abusive” Bush tactics, have any chance to work.

When confronted with this possibility, Sen. McCain and his backers snicker that such suggestions are absurd.
Critics are duly expected to melt, and many of them do.
Some of us, however, have actually had to fight the jihad in the courtroom.
That the senator clearly had no intention whatsoever to lay the groundwork for Mirandizing the battlefield will, you can bet, have little impact on a judge

asked down the road to rule on the admissibility of a terrorist’s confession or on a jihadist’s claim that his McCain Amendment rights have been violated.
If you think otherwise, you haven’t been following the federal courts for the past half-century.

Senate Democrats serially insist that the McCain Amendment prohibits waterboarding.
Sorry to break the news, but the legal argument that it requires Miranda is no less viable. That’s why the legislation’s ambiguity was so irresponsible.
McCain’s campaign against coercive interrogation methods

— tactics that saved American lives after 9/11;
tactics, such as waterboarding, that were rarely ever used
and that had been stopped two years before the McCain amendment;
and tactics that Sen. McCain himself has conceded are excusable in a truly dire national emergency — was reckless.
Sure, the media ate it up, just like they’ll eat up the League of Democracies, the new OSS, and the new wave of overtures to transnational progressives in Europe.
But it’s reflective of an unattractive heedlessness.

Similarly, Sen. McCain wants to close the terrorist holding facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Interrogations there have produced intelligence that has saved American lives.
Bringing the terrorists detained there into the United States would risk vesting them with the same due process rights as the American citizens they are pledged to kill

— including generous discovery of our intelligence,
and our methods and sources for obtaining it.

What is the upside to giving them this precious information?
For Sen. McCain it is — again — what he sees as America’s reputation in the world.
But look: America has selflessly freed millions of Muslims from tyrannical regimes.
Most of us are a lot more concerned about protecting Americans

than about America’s reputation in Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Europe, and the rest of the vaunted “international community.”
The world doesn’t hold a candle to our record of promoting human freedom (to say nothing of our relieving Europe of its duty to fight in, and pay for, its own defense).
And the world’s elites will continue giving us no credit regardless of McCain’s exertions.
If Gitmo upsets other countries, the problem lies with them, not with Gitmo.

The mystery is

why anyone would think the foreign-affairs part of Sen. McCain’s brain is not in sync with the part that produced:
McCain/Feingold legislation that eviscerates core free-speech rights
on which a functioning democratic republic depends;
or proposals for massive, unregulated immigration (from someone claiming the mantle of national security paragon, no less);
or global-warming legislation, the latest iteration of the senator’s Big Government regulatory penchant (we are talking, after all, about someone who has suggested federal government intervention in everything from professional boxing to major league baseball);
or opposition to the Bush tax cuts in class-warfare rhetoric so strident it would make Hillary Clinton blush (including a swipe just last week against “greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished”);
or the Gang of 14 deal, which undermined a conservative effort to end Democrat filibusters against the Bush judicial nominees.

The surge can only camouflage so much.

Sen. McCain’s readiness to be the commander-in-chief fit for today’s perils is the grand hope his supporters offer to overcome substantial conservative doubts.
It’s a mirage.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is an NRO contributing editor. The views expressed above are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any candidate or organization.

[Yosemitest]

And y'all still don't understand why conservatives won't support McCain???

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

To this point, about two out of every three primary and caucus participants have voted against him<. If the Democrats and independents some states permit to crash the Grand Old Party were factored out, his standing in the Republican base would be even less impressive

Yup. Complete and absolute electoral annihilation, dead ahead.

Thanks, "moderates."

Thanks heaps and heaps and heaps.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

Ping.

[DanielRedfoot]

Flame away!!

John McCain is an idiot with a resume.

The founders would cringe at the state of this mess.

Every time I calm down and think I will actually Cast my Vote for McCain, he opens his mouth and I recoil again.
And he is not even running at this point....

[Yosemitest]

I'm flaming my best.

[Stepan12]

And y'all still don't understand why conservatives won't support McCain???

Brit Hume did a report on how McCain trashed Conservatives again to get the Spanish vote.

He won't stop in that.

[TigersEye]

McCain is a conniving little weasel.

[lentulusgracchus]

What's interesting, indeed grimly fascinating, is, how did this guy climb to the nomination? Last August he had nothing, literally nothing. He was dead even with Fred Thompson, who hadn't even declared yet, in campaign cash (zero); he was taking taxicabs to "campaign events".

So who made McCain the king?

The answer has to be in that comment about "independents" and Democrats crossing over to push him forward in the early northern-state primaries. Those states usually vote Democratic, but here they are picking a Republican nominee.

Anyone else see a problem with that?

Like the author, I foresee a Democrat landslide (unless Obama's the nominee), carefully engineered over the last six or seven years by Dems in media and in Congress -- primarily the Clintons and their congressional Mephistophilis, Rahm Emanuel.

Which is what Rush and friends are trying to engineer with crossover voting in Democratic primaries (with credit to Markos Moulitsas of The Daily Kos, for popularizing the crossover-to-screw-with-them idea back during the Michigan primary).

[lentulusgracchus]

McCain is a conniving little weasel.

Gay conservative Democrat Camille Paglia (who despite being "all that" manages to hold a civil conversation once a month over lunch with Rush Limbaugh) once described McCain as "positively bulging with protofascist impulses". With all his interventive, big-government enthusiasms, it seems she was certainly right.

I fault Arizona voters for returning him to office his last two terms, after they had plenty of chances to see how far to the left he'd swung. Twenty years ago, his ACU/ADA ratings were similar to those of his conservative junior colleague, John Kyl. Since about 1994 they have migrated steadily to the left, from the 80's on the ACU scale down to about 60.

I don't fault McCain for disagreeing with the Administration occasionally; I do myself. But I do fault him for abandoning his conservative base to play presidential patty-fingers with the Left, who are abusing him as a "useful idiot".

I think McCain's problem is basically that he's an impetuous airdale type who doesn't worry too much about things like thinking, and may not even have all the political candlepower that the job he's asking for requires. Remind you of anyone?

[lexusppd]

The part McCarthy leaves out is the damage done to America if either of the other 2 win. This idea of my way or the highway that many Conservatives have is both wrong headed and dangerous. Helping McCain to win and then trying to push him right or even trying to replace him in 2012 is far far more sensible then caving in and heading for the caves for the next 4-8 years.

[stockpirate]

This is soooooo true.

We really are screwed, unless of course God should see fit to replace McCain....

[TADSLOS]

Go here and understand why McCain is a huge proponent of the League of Democracies:

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

once described McCain as "positively bulging with protofascist impulses".

[MBB1984]

We will end up with two leftists running for President. I believe given that choice, the American people will eventually choose the democrat. The silver lining is that we should be able to save the Republican party and lead the fight against a leftist administration. If McCain were to win the GOP would be complicit in promoting a leftist agenda.

[bert]

John McCain is not, that is, is not, a leftist.

Lies will not advance youe cause

[wolfcreek]

Carnegie is in lock-step with the Council on Foreign Relations. (all Presidential candidates are members at CFR)

[dforest]

This McCarthy piece says it all. McCain needs to go at the convention.

I know too many people not interested in voting for him.

McCain is detestable and a fool like no other.

[TADSLOS]

Carnegie is in lock-step with the Council on Foreign Relations. (all Presidential candidates are members at CFR)

Yes, and by a strange coincidence, none of them are in lockstep with the U.S. Constitution.

[dforest]

Welcome to FR. What flavor Kool Aid do you drink?

Your post is typical of a McCainiac and has no merit to a conservative.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

This idea of my way or the highway that many Conservatives have is both wrong headed and dangerous.

Thank you, Oh 4-Day Wonder.