Progressive World Review

Updated below

        In Charles Krauthammer’s column today, he attempts to defend a statement by John McCain that has been widely interpreted to mean McCain would be perfectly fine with the Iraq war lasting a hundred years,

Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted — “Make it a hundred” — then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so.” Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: “That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”

Krathammer then goes on to demonstrate how both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obamma (and others), have mischaracterized his statement to mean that McCain is actually advocating a hundred years of fighting,

• “He says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (Barack Obama, Feb. 19).
• “We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years” (Obama, Feb. 26).
• “He’s willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (Hillary Clinton, March 17).
• “What date between now and the election in November will he drop this promise of a 100-year war in Iraq?” (Chris Matthews, March 4).

        Leaving aside Krauthammer’s accusation, “It’s seldom that you see such a dirty lie,” given that campaign rethoric these days, commonly resorts to exaggerated sound bites, is there any legitimacy in connecting McCain with endless war?

        First, consider the examples McCain uses, Japan, South Korea and Kuwait.  In two out of the three we were invited, and as for the third country, they attacked us.  But when it comes to Iraq, they neither attacked us nor invited us, we invaded and occupied Iraq and they have been trying to expel us ever since.  Regardless of how long the fighting actually continues, and it may very well last as long as we continue to occupy Iraq, whether we’re there 5, 10 or a hundred years  we are still an unwanted, occupying force.  So the analogy offered by McCain and echoed by Krauthammer simply doesn’t apply.

        Additionally, McCain’s statement regarding Iran, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” leaves little doubt over his foreign policy objectives, i.e. the use of military force to bend the Middle-East to our will, regardless of the consequences.  Try as they might, the neoconservative war hawks like Krauthammer cannot polish a turd.  With McCain in the Whitehouse, we can expect four more years of the same, at least where the Middle-East is concerned.

* * * *

UPDATE:        One of the more common fallicies you’re confronted with when you dare to criticize the Iraq war is: “I don’t see you offering any better suggestions.”  The truth of the matter is, we didn’t break this.  We cautioned against this war in it’s planning stages.  We predicted the mess we’d be tangled in.  Year after year we screamed that this was wrong, we can’t win because the policy behind the war is fundamentally wrong.  And at each stage we have been accused of being naive, unpatriotic, appeasers, cut-and-runners, terrorist sympathizers, you name it and we’ve been labeled it.  And yet it has been the opponents of this war that have been right about everything that has happened.  And still they don’t listen.  When you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is: stop digging.  But the digging continues.  Simply throwing out: “I don’t see you offering any better suggestions.” doesn’t change the fact that the war critics have been right all along, and it certainly doesn’t justify continuing to make the same mistakes over and over again, the same mistakes that got us into this mess to begin with.

        But the thing of it is, a better solution has been suggested.  An alternate policy, crafted by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, headed up by long time Bush family friend and ally, James Baker, has been offered, but just like everything else, it was rejected out of hand by the Bush administration.  Rather than take the unbiased council of serious people who only want to find solutions, Bush instead, turned a deaf ear and soldiered on.  And even if no better plan was offered, that wouldn’t prove anything.  Some blunders are so great that they can’t be fixed.  And the Iraq invasion was just such a blunder.  There is no painless way out of this, not for America, especially for the families that have already lost love ones, and certainly not for the Iraqis whose country lay in ruins and verging on civil war.

        The best we can hope for now is to minimize any further damage the best we can and this won’t be accomplished by a leader like McCain, another neoconservative war hawk like Bush who is completely unable to grasp the situation as it stands.  While McCain has at times, been critical on how this war has been conducted, he has been, from the beginning, one of this war’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders so that all of his “experience” has been of little use to Americans and Iraqi both.  We are in need of strong leadership now, but strength isn’t measured in bravado and leadership isn’t measured in the stubborn refusal to admit error.

–Paul Wilden

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