CAPITOL IDEAS: McCain Again
Bethell, Tom
c a P I t o l I D e a s McCain Again War, honor, and the presidential election. by Tom Bethell In early campaigning for the Republican nomination, in March 2007, John McCain said he...
...Jeff Flake of Arizona said: “I still have a hard time seeing the big picture and what constitutes success...
...His economic policies, after all, are more sensible than Obama’s (he promises to extend the Bush tax rate reductions, Obama promises to let them go back up) and we have to give the electorate credit for being able to recognize that...
...I imagine that that will all change in the postIraq era...
...It’s time for the Iraqis to pay that price for their own protection...
...But he didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war...
...Perhaps we want contradictory things...
...We have fought all wars without contemplating the use of our main arsenal...
...then held as a prisoner of war until his release years later...
...We don’t know who the enemy is...
...But the Republicans are preventing that from happening, thereby keeping us in Iraq...
...He thinks that Iraq is headed in the same direction...
...In Iraq today, what can winning possibly mean...
...His father and grandfather, admirals both, instilled this in him before anything else...
...A lot of conservatives do feel this concern about Iraq...
...Entitlement reform...
...It’s all one big honor system, as far as he is concerned...
...As I have said before, McCain would be good at opposing the profligate Congress...
...Boehner has tried to get the GOP caucus to “unite...
...In contrast, McCain still supports the war...
...The nays prevailed, and since then nuclear weapons haven’t been on the table...
...His article was published in the New York Times magazine in May...
...He said in April that he believes “the original decision to go into Iraq was a massive strategic blunder...
...When that works “it works brilliantly,” Ms...
...It hasn’t happened...
...Any mention of Iraq...
...Max Cleland, a former Democratic senator from Georgia who lost three of his limbs to a grenade, says that to the extent that McCain “signs on” to the Iraq war, “he is endangering America’s long-term interests, and probably his own election in the fall...
...But you would hardly know it from the Wall Street Journal’s interview with the House Minor ity leader John Boehner, published on Memor ial Day weekend...
...In former wars, victory involved one side’s surrender...
...c a P I t o l I D e a s McCain Again War, honor, and the presidential election...
...We don’t want to lose the war, and we do want to leave Iraq...
...Who is the enemy...
...He was looking unwell after the surrender and he told an inquirer that he felt “lost...
...The State Department still hasn’t bothered to study our own legal institutions and so cannot understand why they are essential if other cultures are to emulate us...
...Well, yes...
...TObama knows the war is unpopular and that . r a r f l g k t s e r a a C c n h o J n a he d foreign M policy i n position r s i of in Ba y rac a k Ob ap am t a there is nothing to be lost—at least politically—by saying that we should get out as soon as we decently can...
...All that stands between him Liberals who oppose the war are given credit for having good intentions and (perhaps) for sound judgment...
...My guess is none...
...He knew “how to fight,” he said, but he wasn’t sure that he knew how to relax...
...Matt Bai pointed out the striking contrast between the lessons that McCain and his combat-veteran Senate colleagues learned in the course of the Vietnam War...
...Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, another veteran, describes listening to declassified tapes of LBJ admitting in the mid-1960s that Vietnam probably couldn’t be won...
...And that does remind us of our own John McCain today...
...corrected...
...The belief seems to be that anyone who supported the Cold War should be in favor of any other war that the Executive chooses to engage us in...
...The prospect of life without combat was hard for him to contemplate...
...Bai wrote: If you ask him to define victory, his answer is that Americans soldiers will have stopped dying, and that the Iraqi military and government will be functioning on their own...
...All along, U.S...
...Boehner added: “We have to show the American people that we learned our lesson from the ’06 election...
...I’m sorry, Congressman, but how many people in Ohio’s 8th district even know what an earmark is...
...But conservatives whose default position is that war is a bad idea are often characterized as isolationists...
...by Tom Bethell In early campaigning for the Republican nomination, in March 2007, John McCain said he would rather lose a campaign than lose a war...
...The war in Iraq is unpopular...
...That we hear what they are saying...
...His tortured answer, translated into English, was yes...
...But we say almost nothing, and get little press coverage...
...Dana Rohrabacher of California told Petraeus...
...There is one remedy for that...
...Who will benefit from that strategy in November...
...J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 6 9 c a P I t o l I D e a s McCain’s grandfather, John S. “Slew” McCain, was with Halsey and Nimitz on the deck of the Missouri when the Japanese surrendered...
...Earmarks...
...One way or the other, honor is at stake...
...A CNN poll by Opinion Research at the end of April 6 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t o M b e t H e l l found that 68 percent oppose the war, 30 percent support it...
...Wattention McCain pays to this...
...Korea was a stalemate, and in the course of that war there was a debate about whether we should use nuclear weapons...
...My job is to lead the 200 of us on the Republican side into being real agents of change...
...In his new book, Hagel predicts that the present war will turn out to have been “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s history...
...McCain seems to see war as an opportunity for glory—or shame...
...In Iraq it’s as though we took this one step further, and want to conduct a nice-guy war, not just in uniforms against suicidal fanatics, but with an ACLU rulebook to boot...
...For many conservatives, of course, the concern is that an inflexible, honor-bound McCain could go down to defeat on this issue alone...
...But the public doesn’t want to see American troops stuck in Iraq indefinitely, and that outcome does seem more probable with McCain than with Obama...
...We fear being called unpatriotic...
...Unmistakably, he also has the media on his side—a privilege that McCain himself used to be able to take for granted...
...When he talks about preferring to lose campaigns than wars, we know that he is speaking from the heart...
...It’s not clear that civilian-military distinction even exists in the tribal societies of the Arab world...
...That would be a great day, no doubt, but surely the overarching purpose of a war can’t be to stop more soldiers from dying in it...
...Matt Bai brought this up in a detailed examination of McCain’s foreign policy views...
...There was no more mention of Iraq in the wide-ranging Boehner interview, leaving us with the impression that if the Republicans have a problem, the Iraq war has nothing to do with it...
...And that is the worst thing that can happen to a man...
...He repeated that statement of principle in November, defending the troop surge: “I would rather lose an election than stay silent and watch my country lose a war...
...If he is right, as I’m afraid he is, and if staying on in Iraq is mainly an exercise in avoiding the shame of defeat, as was true with LBJ, then today it is the GOP If staying on in Iraq is mainly an exercise in avoiding the shame of defeat, the GOP is in the unsatisfactory position of arguing that mistakes can’t easily be S . d e t c r r o e c y b i s a t e n a s c e k t s i m - questions from once-loyal Republican law l i t s o h “ d e c f s u r t e P v D . n e G . p u e p s ome a k republicans, a at id least ae , are a beginning to e that a is in the ’ unsat l isfactory e position of arguing that makers” when he appeared before Congress in early There is one remedy for that, and it’s called an April, a Washington Post reporter noted...
...7 0 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 tom bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...And that means things like getting earmarks under control…balancing the budget, being willing to take on the tough job of entitlement reform, or the really tough job of a health care system that insures all Americans...
...It’s hard to avoid believing that it is the war above all that has dragged the GOP down in recent elections...
...and, yes, earmarks...
...It’s called an election...
...Now he is one step away from becoming Commander in Chief...
...Democrats in Congress want to defund it...
...diplomats have been inclined to minimize the distinctions between the West and the rest, wanting to believe that all the rest needed was elections and then they would copy us in lots of other ways...
...In the old days, soldiers wore uniforms and were distinguishable from civilians...
...Liberals who oppose the war are given credit for having good intentions and (perhaps) for sound judgment...
...our adversaries no longer do...
...Four days later he died...
...Come again...
...Recalling the time he sat in a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy, Hagel wished someone could have told him that he was “fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy...
...Strassel explained, “as when Mr...
...Awful...
...and the prize is this inexperienced, negotiationaddicted, cool young whippersnapper who was raised in Hawaii and proceeded on smoothly to Harvard...
...How many countries have fought wars without recourse to the big guns at their disposal...
...That’s not just on one side of the aisle with those kinds of concerns...
...He continues to “support” the war, and my belief is that if it becomes an overriding political issue in the general election, he could indeed lose the election—and on that issue alone...
...The problem is that these spend ing issues scarcely resonate outside the Beltway...
...His thinking seems to go like this...
...By November, we may be sure, we will still neither have won the war nor lost it...
...With his military record and his warrior family history, McCain seems not to notice the war’s unpopularity...
...So, if the country loses the war then it loses honor and McCain loses honor...
...actually won, since that Japanese surrender...
...When at war, a country’s honor is at stake, and, having supported the war, his own honor is at stake...
...Boehner rallied nearly every Republican to stand against House Democratic attempts to defund the Iraq war...
...If he does lose it will surely be Iraq that pulls him under, not the economy or anything else...
...The people of the United States have paid an awful price,” Rep...
...But as a Washington Post reporter wrote in April: Even the most basic question of the war is undefined...
...By contrast the business of politics is a petty and distasteful thing—gas tax holidays, currying favor with liberals on the climate-change issue...
...We still do...
...There could hardly be a more complex subject...
...In fact i h c u w o h s r e d n o e n o d n a r a d l r o W arfare W has I I changed w completely m since t had changed by Vietnam, but McCain’s involvement in that war more closely resembled a World War II experience, zooming off the deck of an aircraft carrier and strafing the countryside with bombs and bullets until he was shot down...
...At the political level, it can do great harm but little good...
...It’s the real McCain—his Code of Honor is involved...
...It was almost painful listening to Petraeus as he faced reporters yesterday and was asked whether Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were friend or foe...
...Asked by Kimberley Strassel how things were going for House Republicans in the wake of those special election defeats, he replied: “Awful...
...Perhaps Boehner should consider the possibility that Iraq is the true source of Republican unpopularity...
...Increasingly, the electorate disapproves of the war and wants to be rid of it...
...How many wars has the U.S...
...But conservatives whose default position is that war is a bad idea are often characterized as isolationists...
...But departure, under present conditions, will unavoidably be construed as defeat...
Vol. 41 • July 2008 • No. 6
