McCain’s arguments are so facile that one can hardly believe they are held with any degree of sincerity. There has to be something else involved, and a hint of this was revealed in the opening of his CSIS address, thanking his sponsors “for so graciously providing me a forum to share a few thoughts on the crisis in the Balkans. I’ve been having a terrible time finding media opportunities to get my views out, so I appreciate your help.”
One can well imagine the appreciative laughter, albeit tinged with an undertone of nervous uncertainty at the sight of someone who gets far too much pleasure out of being in the spotlight. Such narcissism, unseemly in anyone, is especially unbefitting in a president, yet it is key to understanding McCain’s evolution from conventional Republican realist to relentless interventionist.
During the 1990s, he earned the attention and adulation of the media by supporting a war most journalists approved of and doing so more consistently and vociferously than even the Clinton administration. He’s pursuing the same strategy now that we’re in Iraq. While the media has largely turned against this particular war, McCain’s criticism of Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration’s handling of the war has won him plaudits and given him credit as the “real” author of the surge.
If opportunism married to an inflated ego birthed his persona as the Ares of America’s political pantheon, then this psycho-political pathology soon found expression as a full-blown delusional system. By 1999, in defense of Clinton’s war, McCain was declaring, “I think the United States should inaugurate a 21st-century policy interpretation of the Reagan Doctrine, call it rogue state rollback, in which we politically and materially support indigenous forces within and outside of rogue states to overthrow regimes that threaten our interests and values.”
In 2006, McCain traveled to Tskhimvali, in the disputed region South Ossetia, where pro-Russian citizens want to secede from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and seek union with Russia. After his visit, he concluded:
I think that the attitude there is best described by what you see by driving in [to Tskhinvali]: a very large billboard with a picture of Vladimir Putin on it, which says ‘Vladimir Putin Our President.’ I do not believe that Vladimir Putin is now, or ever should be, the president of sovereign Georgian soil.
Imagine if the British, annoyed by American encroachments in Texas, had sent a member of Parliament to denounce the defenders of the Alamo. That, at any rate, is how the South Ossetians think of it. And what American interests or values are at stake in that dirt-poor, war-torn corner of the Caucasus? What American values are reflected in the Mafia-like “democratic” government of today’s Kosovo, where Orthodox churches are burnt-out ruins and the few remaining Serbs are under siege?
In the warmonger sweepstakes now taking place among the major GOP presidential contenders, John McCain out-demagogued even Rudy Giuliani, whose studied belligerence seems narrowly centered on the Middle East. McCain’s enmity is universal: if he were president, in addition to taking on the Arabs and the Persians, we’d soon be at loggerheads with the Russians. The G-8, he says, should be “a club of leading market democracies: It should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia.” Putin’s Russia, he claims, is “revanchist” and surely qualifies as one of those “rogue states” that “threaten our values.” If we take him at his word, President McCain would launch a campaign for “regime change” in Moscow, just as we did in Iraq.
Prefiguring the revolutionary Jacobinism of Bush’s second inaugural address, which proclaimed the goal of U.S. foreign policy to be “ending tyranny in our world,” McCain was straining at the bit to launch a global crusade while George W. Bush was still touting the virtues of a more “humble foreign policy.” Neither time nor bitter experience has mitigated his militancy.
Other politicians were transformed by 9/11. McCain was unleashed. His strategy of “rogue state rollback” was exactly what the neoconservatives in the Bush administration had in mind, and yet, ever mindful to somehow stand out from the pack while still going along with the program, the senator took umbrage at Rumsfeld’s apparent unwillingness to chew up the U.S. military in an endless occupation. He publicly dissented from the “light footprint” strategy championed by the Department of Defense. More troops, more force, more of everything—that is McCain’s solution to every problem in our newly conquered province.
Rumsfeld became increasingly un-popular not only with the American people—the abrasive defense secretary saw his poll numbers dropping to 34 percent from 39 percent in May 2004, as McCain and Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf took aim—but also with the media, which had grown tired of him. In the bitter winter of 2001, when the War Party was riding high, the Philadelphia Inquirer had enthused, “No doubt about it, Donald Rumsfeld is a stud muffin.” As Rumsfeld’s cachet faded, McCain felt safe in attacking him, and, after Rumsfeld had resigned, declaring him “one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.” As the war itself became more unpopular, McCain managed a feat of triangulation of Clintonian proportions, posing simultaneously as a war critic and a super hawk.
He was unrelenting in his criticism of the Bush administration, even as he pledged to carry its foreign policy forward: he continued to denounce the “tragic mismanagement” of the war, while hailing the surge—and strongly implying that the Bush White House had plagiarized his views. With the war enjoying the support of about a quarter of the American people, however, it was necessary to frame a narrative that would deflect the disadvantages of a pro-war position, while enhancing his image as a straight-shooter who doesn’t care about polls and just tells it like it is.
But “straight talk” has increasingly turned to reckless talk: on the campaign trail, he was caught on video singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann”—not one of his better moments. With his presidential campaign in the doldrums, and Giuliani and the rest of the Republican pack stealing much of his thunder, a new extremism seemed to possess him: in answer to repeated questions from one antiwar voter, McCain told a town-hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire that the United States could stay in Iraq for “maybe a hundred years” and that “would be fine with me… as long as Americans aren’t being killed or injured” in any great numbers, as in Korea.
Yet the longer we stay in Iraq, the more hostility is directed at American soldiers. The majority of Iraqis now believe attacks on our troops are justified, a far cry from McCain’s prewar prediction that it is “more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness.”
McCain isn’t bothered by the failure of his prediction, just as the absence of WMD in Iraq didn’t phase him in the least. He is an actor following a script that was written years ago and cannot be altered because of mere facts: he is McCain the Conqueror, the fearless war hero, the commander in chief who will lead us to victory and stay in Iraq, as he told Mother Jones magazine, for “a thousand years, a million years” because American grit will tame those obstreperous Iraqis, just as we tamed the Koreans, the Bosnians, the Japanese, and the rest.
With the extreme rhetoric appearing to work, an emboldened McCain recently told a crowd of supporters in Florida: “It’s a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be over right away. There’s going to be other wars. I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars.”
If McCain finally makes it to the White House, the U.S. will surely start new wars, and not just in the Middle East. With the world as his stage, the persona McCain has created—given visible expression by what Camille Paglia trenchantly described as “the over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel (from Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety)”—will have every opportunity to act out his fantasies of soldierly greatness.
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