In Foreign Affairs is
McCain a Maverick?

I Like Valley Forge

    In 2003 the Bush administration callously and dishonestly led us into a malignant and entirely optional neo colonial war which they then fought in the worst way imaginable, worse even than its severest critics could have believed possible. 
    To claim then, as they frequently did, that you could not be a patriot and love your country unless you supported the policy makers has meant in practice that, for the first time in our history, George Bush and the Republican Party purposely politicized an American war for domestic partisan advantage.  
     After all, they actually vetted applications for positions in Iraq for their loyalty to right wing republican causes rather than for their expertise and capability for the jobs and contracts they were given.  This inveterate cronyism had results predictably disastrous for the success of our policy in Iraq.  From the outset the administration flooded Iraq with unscrupulous private contractors and lawless private security mercenaries with no bid, no oversight, cost plus contracts as unregulated middle men mainly to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense.   The massive taxpayer waste, the billions lost, the billions stolen, manipulated and unaccounted for has exhibited a cynicism, disinterestedness and disregard for the public good unprecedented in our history.  
    Meanwhile the republican controlled congress would tolerate no mention or investigation of these outrages, preferring that these malfeasances be covered up rather than corrected by blocking every investigation and fair accounting.    
    Then this republican party refused to honestly, democratically and consensually debate a better way ahead in Iraq even after it was clear that the path we were on there was failing disastrously. They would not discuss deficient troop strength or fairly assess and honestly correct the faulty intelligence they claimed misled them into the war.  And it’s not like there weren’t many other deficiencies they might have addressed as well.  
    To begin with, this second, false front war in Iraq stretched and overextended our forces to an unacceptable degree while needed equipment, men, materiel and expertise desperately required to prosecute the real war on terrorists in Afghanistan were shifted away from there to Iraq leaving troops in both theaters vulnerable to constant vicious counterattack.  
    The Defense Department’s procurement process was broken and corrupt and didn’t hurry necessary life saving equipment to the troops in the field.  Other necessities like body armor and plating for humvees, and their replacement MRAPs and even tourniquets for those wounded in the heat of battle were not promptly provided for even when urgently and frequently requisitioned.  Once the troops were back home, Walter Reed hospital and other aspects of the veterans administration were derelict in the support of the needs of the wounded.  Deployments were cruelly and capriciously elongated with little regard for the personal needs and well being of soldiers and their families. 
    All in all, our troops have not been treated this negligently and expendably in the field since the Continental Congress left George Washington to fend for himself at Valley Forge.
    Yet the administration and their supporters still claimed that you could not claim to support the troops in the field without unthinkingly supporting the destructive policy makers who were keeping them there in the worst conditions imaginable.  This was not only directly harmful to the troops and the nation but intentionally divisive and thoroughly degrading to all legitimate political debate in this country.  In the process they denied to Americans at home the precise democratic benefits of excellence and responsive government they said they were trying to extend to tyrannies overseas. 
It was almost as if they believed there was not enough democracy to go around in the world and if they spent it here there wouldn’t be enough of it left over for there.
     And it was mendacious.  Because as it turned out, self-evidently you could not support the troops unless you opposed the policy that put them in harm’s way in numbers too limited to ensure anything but their failure at the mission they had been given.  The problems in Iraq did not represent a well intentioned or temporary glitch in the supply chain, it was a willful policy of political expedience and cronyism emanating from the very top of the Bush administration which continued to add to great loss of American of life and ensure that the situation in Iraq (and Afghanistan) would remain dangerous and unsettled and have no possible hope of succeeding for four long years of battle.  
    More than any other politician, John McCain with his military contacts, might have been useful to get these destructive policies changed but wasn’t.  Rather, like his fellow republican pols in congress he remained a primary enabler of the defeat as, with their heads in the sand and their hands in our pockets, they were apparently more concerned with keeping the travesty of this war’s inauguration and execution covered up than make sure that every thing humanly possible was being done to ensure that the war itself actually be won.  
    On the contrary, prior to the war like Dick Cheney, John McCain, according to no known intelligence or even elemental perspective or common grasp of the world, erroneously insisted not only that there were weapons of mass destruction there but that the Iraqis were in bed with al Qaeda and still would be so glad to see us invade their country that our occupation would more resemble a high school homecoming parade than a war.
    Later - and still - despite all the evidence of his own massive but unatoned for errors, blown illusions and uncorrected misperceptions Senator McCain dares call everyone who saw far more lucidly prior to the war than he that the war in Iraq would be a colossal mistake “naïve” for not being as blind, tendentious and gullible as he was.
 
II Pusillanimity

    John McCain, the presumptive republican nominee for president, is not a maverick or an oppositionist in any real sense of the terms.  In foreign affairs, quite the contrary, he has supported George Bush right or wrong.  Since polls show that most American people accurately believe Bush policies to have been completely wrong, how does that make McCain right?  
    Supporters of John McCain don’t seem to know exactly what the word “opposition” means.  To say you are against something while supporting the person or persons who are doing what you are allegedly against is not really opposition but tacit, backdoor support.  Such weak and pusillanimous opposition against a policy is actually far more likely to encourage its continuation than engender its curtailment.  Weak opposition is more encouraging to those inclined to do wrong than tepid support.
    As Iraq is a false front in the war on terror, John McCain has been a false front of opposition to George Bush.  His arguments against the management of the war were not strong enough to make a difference in policy while his stature and reputation in the middle of the debate kept all stronger arguments from coalescing against it.  He was not the leader of the opposition against the war but a phony fire wall, a façade, all noise and no action, erected to keep a more effective and successful policy from being able to rise and take hold.
    John McCain is no maverick.  He has agreed with all this mess, from its premise, through its destructive prosecution and on to all its ensuing irrationality and corruption.  Through all the mistakes, mismanagement and lies he has continued to support George Bush’s foreign policy, right or wrong.  For seven and a half long years he has served this wayward, graveyard engineer as a loyal conductor in his train - though he occasionally spoke out of the side of his mouth to passengers who wanted to hear it, “but I really disagree with him completely.”  
    Now he pretends he is “shocked, shocked” to find out that this train has been headed down the wrong track all this long time.  Elect him and he will reverse course without changing course; magically change tracks by continuing down the same track we’re on; and loyally continue the Bush foreign policy, properly judged to be the most inefficient to its purpose and self-destructive to our reputation in our history.  He encourages us to fully expect an entirely different destination to arise on the horizon by pursuing the exact same course we’re on in the opposite direction from where the majority of the country want to go.  
     Even though he can’t yet explain exactly how his policies would differ from Bush’s policies, he claims he is a ticket agent of change.  All aboard, get your one way ticket punched here, we are headed to stops in Baghdad, Teheran, Islamabad, Kabul and Pyongyang, the new John McCain orient/Islamo/terrorist express to nowhere is boarding now, no return ticket included or expected.  In McCain’s mind apparently all conflicts are forever and every deployment is open ended, the longer the better, common sense need not be applied.
     Certainly one has to pity the party loyalist enmired in a policy with which he doesn’t agree.  The question in McCain’s case is whether his opposition was fundamental or marginal.  Was he really just an accidental tourist in favor of changes and vital improvement in the war or was his opposition just for show and positioning because he resented the fact that Bush was in charge rather than himself.  If you only look at his innate concern for the troops, his record puts him more firmly in league with a hollow, lapel pin patriot like Saxby Chambliss than a real one like Max Cleland (could you image Cleland not bothering to visit Walter Reed?). 
     In Iraq, John McCain maintains he was for the troops but against Don Rumsfeld and the way the war was being prosecuted at the same time he was vigorously campaigning for the very president who had first lied about the war then mismanaged it and now was vowing to keep Rumsfeld in place for the duration of his term in office.  This is not opposition in fact but opposition for effect, trying to achieve the best of both worlds, fence sitting, failsafe opposition for style points rather than to any real purpose of achieving fundamental policy change.

III Lying in the Same Bed

    Lately for a variety of reasons the situation of our troops on the ground has measurably improved.  Yet here is the sober truth of the matter.  The improvements in Iraq were not caused by George Bush or the slavish do nothing republicans in congress or all the ego sucking acolytes and outside radio yodelers or even the maverick John McCain.  Quite the contrary, all these were perfectly unanimous in opposing every step of the way each and every open debate and with it every hope of real improvement; in fighting tooth and nail against any glimmer of light which might show into the gloom of their corruption; and in employing every parliamentary trick to oppose any good that ran counter to their fear mongering preferences and shallow preconceptions.  
    This made them deaf to the advocacy for more troops by all our military leadership not under the thumb of the administration, dumb when it came to covering up the causes and abuses of the war so that they might not be repeated and blind to the crying need for potential alternative directions and solutions.  George Bush and the republicans were authors and enablers of this fiasco, not proponents of the changes which by circuitous and torturous paths led to these belated improvements they are now trying to adopt credit for despite all their previous efforts to ensure that they never happened.  
    The truth of the matter is that the changes in Iraq policy were caused by the restlessness expressed in the votes of the American people and the steadfast opposition of the democrats in Congress.  Change in policy for the better did not come about in Iraq because of John McCain and the republicans, but in spite of them.  Only because Bush finally lost control of his duplicitous policy which had, like levees on the Mississippi, burst, giving way on all sides and flooding his own political prospects, did he finally ungraciously acquiesce to any policy change at all.  It was only the losing election of ’06 which finally caused George Bush to sack Rumsfeld and at long last either start fighting the war the way the generals suggested or get out.
    Perhaps it is not fair to single him out, but he has singled out himself.  McCain has told us he knew better and would do better than George Bush if he were president but can offer no concrete evidence that he did anything at all when he had a chance to help change the course of this war for the better.  In this respect, he is the switchman in the middle, the fulcrum on which the failed war policy hinged.  Because few were in better position to know how deeply fatal the flaws in the tactics of this war were better than John McCain, no one can be held more to blame for doing nothing about it for the first four long failed years in Iraq than John McCain.
    John McCain might have made a difference in the prosecution of the war, but didn’t; he might have asked tough questions about the intelligence before the war, but didn’t; he might have demanded investigations about waste and corruption and asked to see plans for post war Iraq prior to it, but didn’t; in fact there is no evidence that John “me too” McCain has made any positive contribution to the war in Iraq at all.  
    As one of the select few with the ear of the nation and the attention of the president, he might have actually paused for an hour or two to read the unvarnished intelligence reports which largely disproved the necessity of even fighting the war, but he didn’t.  And finally, as a veteran himself, he might have been far more vigorous in demanding our troops be better served in the field and our wounded be better taken care of when they returned home from the war, but he didn’t.  
    Despite his ballyhooed maverick status, if left only to McCain’s timid, have it both ways demurring, Don Rumsfeld would still be Secretary of Defense and George Bush would still be bravely trying to keep up our morale in support of his failed polices by disingenuously telling us while away on yet another vacation how splendidly it was going.  George Bush made the bed they all lied in.  And that includes John McCain.  Did he put party loyalty over patriotism and loyalty to country secondary with regard to the war in Iraq?
    In the end even in regard to torture he failed us.  Beyond the shadow of an aching doubt the torture policies of this administration at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo  have been an unwashable stain and disgrace on our history.  On this most brightly burning issue of the day, still gouging our reputation like an open wound; because he had experienced such things first hand in the service of his country, no other American in congress in either party had more credibility on this topic than McCain.  
    At first he did fine as you would expect from a war hero.  But after quite admirably standing up and opposing the administration’s pro torture position to begin with, he soon allowed his outrage to be tempered and trumped and tamed by party loyalty.   He allowed himself to be cozened into a back room out of the light and was made a dupe to meaningless compromise in a secret bargain.
    This enabled Bush later, with full measure of self-righteousness, as if he had been vindicated, like an arrogant and guilty corporation admitting no wrong doing and paying no fine, to be able to say that he had never authorized torturing anyone and if he wanted to would do it again.  McCain neither contradicted nor repudiated this weaseling characterization of reality and the law.
    When we needed these betrayals of the public’s trust to be dragged out into the light and thoroughly disavowed, and when we needed leaders to stand up for the historic principles of our fathers, McCain allowed our beliefs to be watered down in secret and betrayed in private.  When we needed someone to stand up and speak out for us they sat down mute.  Talk about appeasement.
    As the Uniform Code of Military Justice and international treaties like Geneva designed to help our soldiers as much as anyone else’s - or more since our troops are more plentiful and more exposed around the world – have been trampled underfoot one by one by this crude, morals shifting, constitution avoiding, jack booted crew, John McCain has marched with them every single step of the way.

It is not in question that:

1) Those who were for the Iraq war at the outset were one hundred percent wrong.  
2) And those who didn’t oppose with their votes the way the war was being waged were one hundred percent wrong.  
3) Now the American people who are for bringing the majority of our troops home with all deliberate speed in a way commensurate with the best interests of the US, the well being of the 
troops in the field and the Iraqi people are one hundred percent correct.
 
    John McCain has been decidedly wrong on the first two counts.  What are the chances that he is not wrong on the third?  And he thinks this accumulation of errors is what recommends him as our new commander in chief?  Is it his original errors, his ongoing denial of them or his persistence in them (reminiscent of his boss) after the obvious nature of the errors have long since come clear to the world, which he thinks makes him most suitable for the job?
 
IV The McCain Mutiny

     In real life, you cannot separate people from their actions. John McCain, when push came to shove and talk came to a vote, has always served as useful cover for the very worst activities of George Bush.  He cannot legitimately claim he has opposed someone whom he has simultaneously given absolute support.  He states he has completely disagreed with the way the war was being fought and yet completely supported the president whose careless derelictions, devious anti-constitutional power grabs and dishonest political tactics were ensuring that the war would continue to be lost.  This raises blind loyalty to new levels of subservience.  Either he never really believed the charade of his own opposition or else he has consistently parlayed his own personal ambitions and the interests of his party above those of the nation’s.
    And this is hardly the only charge against him.  In addition to torture and the management of the Iraq war, John McCain has claimed to be against unauthorized wire tapping, deficit spending, against the Bush tax cuts, against republican pork and corporate welfare, against right wing religious extremism, etc,.  How then could he possibly champion the reelection of George Bush who was vociferously in favor of all these things he supposedly opposed?  Apparently he has completely supported the policies he opposes while opposing the policies he secretly supports.
    Now as the apparent republican nominee for president he has mysteriously come to embrace many of these positions he was previously vehemently opposed to.  How do you square these things?  Like the man caught in the whore house claiming how much he really loves his wife, his current position belies his declamation.  
    How do you pound this square peg in such a perfectly round hole?  Republicans may consider John McCain a great rebel, because he sometimes raised his voice in modest disagreement in a room full of perfectly quiescent and completely compliant automatons and yes men, but no one else does.  In a field full of white sheep the black one may stand out and even cause a temporary sensation, but that doesn’t mean he is not still one of them under the wool.  
    In fact, only in a party with a president who demands subservience to a fault and complete compartmentalization of ethics from politics would such collegial, polite, irresolute and suspiciously ineffective dissent as this be thought of as noteworthy at all.  John McCain’s differences from George Bush were differences only of degree and hue, slight, relative and contextual not of substance.  Just because the other sheep judge you an imperfect sheep, presumably because their standards are so high, it hardly makes you a steer.  So the question is not, why did John McCain oppose the president, the question is if he were a maverick how could he have not opposed the president more?   Where was the McCain Mutiny?
    John McCain’s supporters must be looking at his shadow in a fun house mirror and think they discerns two different people in the same person.  He claims a difference without a distinction.  He claims he has completely disagreed with the way the war has been fought but has completely supported the funding and fighting of the war in every respect as if these two positions weren’t contradictory and in the end haven’t both led to precisely the same result in history.  He is an amazing double minded man, this John McCain, a useful fool, he looks in a mirror and thinks he sees someone else standing there.
    A maverick is an unbranded steer on open range.  John McCain is a maverick that’s never known free range.  Truth be known he’s never even really strayed out of the republican barn very far or very often, eventually voting with ninety percent of everything George Bush has ever wanted.  And if he did slip out of the barn for a moment some mornings, stretching his neck through the fence rails in search of some greener nip of grass on the other side, he was careful never to let himself drift very far from either bunkhouse or cattle pen.  Now here he is backing rump first up to the red hot branding iron still claiming he is a maverick.  Like a rubber band man he is snapping back into line.  Mavericks that seldom stray and then return home on their own every evening for dinner without prod or lasso are not really evocative of what the term maverick was intended to mean.  
    In summation, as far as the eye can see and the mind can know, in foreign policy John McCain has loyally supported one of the worst presidents in American history in one of the worst wars in American history, and now would have us believe that he deserves to be elected not to make our foreign policy better but to keep it pretty much exactly the same.