McCain Resurrected

Around the time McCain was rising from the dead to win the New Hampshire primary, the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 151,000 Iraqis had been killed during the first three years of the U.S. occupation. In a campaign season, it should have been news that an authoritative study places the number of Iraqis who died because of America's war in the six-figure range. But it wasn't. Do a search on "New England Journal of Medicine" and "Iraq" on Google News and you get a mere 149 hits, most of which refer to another Journal study, about U.S. soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Do a search on the phrase "surge is working," by contrast, and you get 430 hits. On the campaign trail, we hear every day that the surge is a success — an unchallenged bit of conventional wisdom that graduated to the level of cultural fact in the Los Angeles debate between Hillary and Obama, when Wolf Blitzer asked the candidates if a plan for withdrawal might mean that "all of that progress would be for naught."

An Iraqi might ask what progress we're risking, exactly, against the backdrop of 151,000 civilian deaths, but, hey, we're not Iraqi. We're American, and it's this American myopia that helped revive McCain's campaign. Back in the summer, when McCain boldly launched a "No Surrender" tour while all the other GOP candidates were fleeing the war issue like bitches, reporters thought the old man had finally gone senile. How else to explain a politician lashing himself to the mast of such an unpopular issue?

But McCain's entire career has been dedicated to the idea that America must always have the right to solve its problems by force. Throughout his political career, he has argued for increased use of force in virtually every military engagement the U.S. has been involved in since Vietnam. He complained about Bill Clinton's "excessively restricted air campaign" in Kosovo, campaigning strenuously for a ground invasion. During the 1994 flap over Pyongyang's nuclear program, he called for "more forceful, coercive action." Even before the latest Iraq War, McCain argued way back in 1999 that the only way to deal with Saddam Hussein was "to strike disproportionate to the provocation."

The most frightening example of McCain's fondness for force is on display in his own book, Faith of My Fathers, when he complains about the politicians who refused to allow pilots like him to attack, say, Soviet ships unloading arms in Vietnamese port cities. "We thought our civilian commanders were complete idiots," he writes.

Bombing Soviet ships, of course, would probably have started World War III, but McCain's vision, then and now, encompasses war as a way of life. There is significant evidence that McCain believes war is something righteous and necessary, a tonic for the national soul, intrinsically "noble" irrespective of context (he is still one of the only politicians to apply that word to the Iraq conflict). That is why it's no joke when McCain says casually, "There's gonna be other wars," or when he sings, "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." We have to assume that he will jump at the chance to expand this conflict and hit those politically sensitive targets his "complete idiot" civilian commanders once barred him from going after in Vietnam.

Back in 1999, McCain concluded a speech at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire by shouting, "Never again do we send our men and women to fight and die in foreign conflicts unless our goal is victory!" Which is interesting, because that is exactly — almost word for motherfucking word — how McCain ended his latest speeches on the campaign trail in Maryland and Virginia. In other words, John McCain knew his answer to the Iraq War mess before it even happened. For good measure, he insisted that "only military men like General Petraeus" have the right to say when soldiers will come home from Iraq — not, he added with a sneer, "some civilian running for president." Nor, presumably, America's civilian population, which is being asked to send its sons and daughters to kill and die in a faraway country.

No matter how moderate McCain seems on domestic issues, on the issue of war he's stark raving mad. He's a wounded, crusading Ahab, and civilian command and diplomatic restraint are his Great White Whale. If he gets put in charge of a Middle Eastern war that is easily widened, it's whirlpool time for all of us.

In a wider sense, McCain's candidacy is a referendum on America's fantastic self-image when it comes to our use of force. He is offering voters the chance to re-litigate these failures (both military and moral) in Vietnam and Iraq that muddle the cinematic happy ending. When I ask Sam Wilder, a sixty-eight-year-old veteran who supports McCain, if he thinks occupying Iraq is a good way to persuade Muslims not to attack us, he scoffs.

"We're not an occupying force," he says.

"How's that?" I ask. "We invaded the country and occupied it. We're ruling a foreign country by force. That's the definition. . . ."

"We're there training their force," Wilder says.

"But we're also there occupying the country," I say. "In an objective sense, we're occupying. A hundred thousand people are dead."

"Well," he says, "that wasn't the idea."

That idea — the principle of fighting first, thinking later and never, ever saying sorry — is what matters most to conservatives, and John McCain may be its last line of defense. If he fights hard enough to save it, you can bet that even Ann Coulter will come around to supporting him.

[From Issue 1047 — March 6, 2008]