Posted on 12/14/2005 12:17:23 AM PST by nickcarraway
Does the political world realize just how big a hawk Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) really is?
Lost in the coverage of the former Vietnam prisoner of war’s campaign against torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the war on terror is a true appreciation of McCain’s full-tilt, nothing-less-than-victory support of the war in Iraq.
I interviewed McCain recently for a story in The New Republic magazine, and he spoke about the war in a way that was both tougher and more understanding than George W. Bush himself.
There are a lot of reasons why we should see the fight through to the finish, McCain believes. But perhaps the most pressing reason is also the simplest. “We cannot afford to lose,” he told me. “Just read Zarqawi. We lose it, and they’re coming after us.”
Get-out-fast proposals like the one from Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) baffle McCain. The idea of removing U.S. troops from Iraq, only to station them nearby, seems pointless. “To do what?” McCain asks. “I know of no military strategist who would tell you that that kind of arrangement would work.”
I asked McCain about Murtha himself. “Jack’s a lovable guy,” McCain told me. “But he’s never been a big thinker; he’s an appropriator.”
But why has Murtha decided to come forward now? “As we get older, we get more sentimental,” McCain says, “and Jack has been very, very affected by the funerals and the families. But you cannot let that affect the way you decide policy.”
That’s a statement George W. Bush simply could not make.
It could only come from a veteran like McCain who both knows the cost of war and who — after a lot of thought — has made the decision that it’s worth paying.
McCain isn’t reluctant to point out American mistakes in Iraq. But when he does, he doesn’t put it all on Bush. Listen to him talk about those missteps and he says “we,” not “he.”
“We never should have said ‘Mission Accomplished,’” McCain told me. “We never should have said ‘a few dead-enders.’ We never should have said ‘last throes.’ Part of it is our own making, by creating expectations which obviously didn’t come to fruition.”
And the president should still, in McCain’s view, get rid of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But in spite of all that, McCain believes that the U.S., and the cause of Iraqi independence, are moving forward in Iraq, a little bit at a time.
“I think the situation on the ground is going to improve,” he says. “I do think that progress is being made in a lot of Iraq. Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course. If I thought we weren’t making progress, I’d be despondent.”
What has been difficult for McCain — and many other administration supporters — to figure out is why the Bush administration hasn’t been more aggressive and more vocal in its defense of the war. For months, the president has made occasional statements on the subject while Democrats kept up a daily barrage of “Bush lied and people died.”
A lot of charges went unanswered for a long time. Why? “I’ve tried to figure it out,” McCain told me. “I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to be critical. But it seems to me it’s pretty obvious there were distractions. There’s a little bit of fatigue that hits every administration in the second term.”
And then: “Maybe there wasn’t an appreciation for the ferocity of the Democrats. I’ve never seen such ferocity, such bitterness and anger. It’s just phenomenal.”
And it’s likely to get uglier, because the opposition party sees a political advantage in continuing the fight. “You and I know the Democrats would not be nearly as active as they are if they weren’t looking at polling data,” McCain says.
Right now, beside the president himself, there is no other Republican in Washington who speaks about the war as passionately and with such determination as McCain. And that makes him — again after the president himself — arguably the most important hawk in the country.
Just look at the uproar caused by Murtha. The press immediately portrayed Murtha as a leading hawk on the war (even though he had already expressed great doubts about the fight) and suggested that Murtha’s announcement meant that hard-core supporters of the war were changing their minds on Iraq.
Now imagine if John McCain were to do something similar. A McCain turn against the war would have an immediate, explosive and enormously damaging effect on the public’s — and the government’s — resolve to keep going.
Not gonna happen, says McCain: “It will be a cold day in Gila Bend, my friend.”
He sounds like he believes it. And by the way, the average summer temperature in Gila Bend, Arizona, is 109 degrees.
Anyway McCanker has way too many warts politically to ever be President
Yes, it was.
I didn't see any article with this name.
Distractions or no support from the RINOS
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | December 13, 2005 |
Anyway McCanker has way too many warts politically to ever be President
He stands just as good a chance of getting the R nomination as Joe Lieberman has of getting his party's nomination. Somebody please bolt this loose cannon firmly to the deck so he can function as a USEFUL weapon against the Dims!!!
He's not a Hawk, he's a RINO...
“You and I know the Democrats would not be nearly as active as they are if they weren’t looking at polling data,” McCain says.
And of course once again the minority party is being lied to by the pollsters so they are actually out of step with real America.
As to the article itself: Hey Byron, you got snuckered by mcpain (media- yes even conservative media - Az.). You should have asked him why he wants to undermine our ability to gather information from prisons.
Byron York misses how dangerous and unhawkish, McPain has become with his politically motivated "anti-torture" amendment; and YES, I said politically motivated.
That amendment could never be seen, politically, as anything but a "how many times did you beat your wife last night" proposition. Any US administration having to take a position on McPain's amendment is forced to admit some sort of error.
From a political and public relations perspective, if you accept the amendment, then you are saying that torture is occurring or will occur unless the law has the McPain admendment added to it (so you have been torturing?); while if you oppose the amendment then you saying you want torture. McPain had to realize this and either (1)did not give a ^&%$## what it does to the administration and what it does to our detainee program in the WOT.
It is a political agenda for McPain because he knows that there is no defense against the vauge term "cruel and degrading treatment". What is one man's definition that meets his standard for "cruel and degrading" is another man's definition of "aggressive" and not cruel and degrading. But, the public adjudication of any judicial claim and judicial process will always find the defendent (US) as guilty until proven innocent, and our "proof" that we are only "agressive" will always be taken as nothing more than a lower, and too low of a standard and our "agressive" action will be saiod to really meet everyone else's definition of cruel and degrading. Getting the vauge term into US law insures international claims and international litigation on the claims that we are violating our own "law", and such claims and the resultant litigation will be brought out around the world and involving every WOT detainee the US ever has in its custody. Either McPain understands this or he really is an idiot.
Add to all this (it insure more legal claims and litigation on behalf of detainees), his amendment wants to grant detainees all the same legal rights as US citizens. In other words, McPain must be counting on giant size campaign contributions from the ACLU for his next campaign.
McPain is the most disasterous and dangerous Republican we have.
OK by me, I guess I had Deja Vu
America’s (second) most important hawk
The HIll | 12/8/05 | Byron York
Posted on 12/07/2005 11:31:23 PM EST by JeanS
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1536159/posts
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