McCain's Last Stand

This is the part of McCain I can't figure out. If this man has too much scruple to indulge Middle America's torture fantasies, then how come he's not above peddling equally wrongheaded rhetoric about Iraq? There are a great many ways a man like McCain could play things, if he really thought staying in Iraq is the right thing to do. He could insist that we have a responsibility to prevent a bloodbath, or he could talk openly about our strategic and economic interests in the region. Instead, he says we have to stay in Iraq because a bunch of Internet liberals insulted an American general and because our occupation of Baghdad is somehow preventing terrorists in Jalalabad from finding a flight to New York.

I try to ask McCain about this outside his bus after his event in Aiken. "Senator," I say, "you've said many times that if we don't fight them over there, they're gonna come over here. Why can't they just come over here anyway?"

"Because," he snaps, "we're not allowing them to establish bases there or in Afghanistan."

"But they didn't have a base in Iraq before we went there."

"Uh, in case you missed it," he says, "they had bases in Afghanistan, and those bases were training grounds, in which Al Qaeda was very effective."

"But we're not talking about Afghanistan," I say. "We're talking--"

"We're talking," he says, sighing, "about the likelihood that Iraq turns into Afghanistan. Which is exactly the scenario that I envision, and most experts agree. Even General Jones and General Petraeus have said it's now the central battleground in the War on Terror."

"Yeah, but..." I begin, then let it go. The look on McCain's face says it all. His answer doesn't have to make sense; it just has to work with this crowd. If you can tour the countryside and get away with telling a bunch of poorly educated Middle American fear addicts that bin Laden will be showing up at their kids' soccer games if they don't keep up the war effort, then you do it. Because that's how you win elections in this country, by scaring the shit out of people. That's a far cry from "Straight Talk" -- but then again, that "Straight Talk" shit was a long time and many ugly poll results ago.

The cruelest irony of the McCain campaign is that had Bush not invaded Iraq, we might be looking at the runaway favorite for the presidency. McCain always made more sense as a "centrist" candidate, acceptable to Republicans and at least somewhat tolerable (by comparison to other Republicans) to some Democrats; in peacetime he would have blown away the likes of Romney and Giuliani on stature and credentials alone, and the main event with Hillary probably would have been a cakewalk.

But this war in Iraq has revealed McCain's Achilles' heel. A fighter pilot who had his broken body dragged to a hole after his plane crashed and was left to rot for five years by an exacting enemy, McCain appears genuinely incapable of viewing Iraq through any prism but that of soldierly experience. On the trail, he brings with him a team of comrades from his Vietnam POW camp and talks again and again about needing to continue the fight in the Middle East to honor the sacrifice of soldiers, and that "the best way to prevent future sacrifice is to win." But Iraq isn't Vietnam, and the notion that wars are fought not to protect real national interests but to avenge the suffering of soldiers is another of those problematic syllogistic formulas that politicians have used for decades to snow the public into military action. Just because we can find enemies overseas who are willing to deal harshly with our young men and women doesn't mean we should have been looking for them in the first place, or that it's right to keep letting them have that pleasure. But it's hard to see it that way when you're the one taking the bullets, as McCain was once.

Twice now, George W. Bush has ruined John McCain. Once was in a vicious, unforgivable political ambush here in South Carolina eight years ago. But this time, McCain is just collateral damage in Bush's invasion of Iraq, a war that has sent him back in time to combat nonexistent ghosts at precisely the moment he should have been seizing the present. It's a story we've seen too often with soldiers in both Vietnam and Iraq: They volunteer for duty, suffer for their country, then realize either too late or not at all that they have been betrayed not by the enemy but by their own commander in chief. That's sad for John McCain, who has chosen tragically to carry the cross of Bush's war in this race. But let's hope it stays his personal tragedy -- and doesn't become, by means of some terrible accident at the polls, ours.

[From Issue 1037 — October 18, 2007]