I  Flailing at Terror

     John McCain has some good, able and noble qualities but great insight into and knowledge of the intricacies of foreign affairs is apparently not foremost among them. Just because you have served your country honorably and bravely in service does not necessarily translate directly to a nuanced view of diplomacy and insight into the way the great gears of the world mesh together.  If being a good military man led to being a great diplomat, MacArthur would have been president instead of Truman.  One is not necessarily more admirable than the other as both are necessary, but proficiency in diplomacy or in military matters are not interchangeable.
     George Bush illustrates the opposite case – a non military man who doesn’t understand foreign affairs either.  We may as well face it because he never will, but George Bush will never best be known as the one who nearly won the “war on terror” but as the one who has done nearly everything he could to make it more difficult to win.  At the same time, just to round out the argument, many presidents who had no military experience have made excellent commanders in chief.  
    It is the promise to bring the attackers of 9/11 to justice that George Bush made to the American people and on which he reneged that is the standard by which he will be judged.  Instead of doing the difficult but necessary hard work of concluding a promising start with success in Afghanistan, his administration got severe attention deficit disorder and pursued the path of least resistance by attacking an already beaten Iraq where they thought a victory would be easier to achieve.   Like dumb jocks at school looking for an easy grade, they duped us into attacking Iraq not because it was the hard and necessary thing to do but because it was the easiest elective course they could find.  Then they proceeded to become entangled in their own machinations, cut classes, got caught cheating and flunked the course.
    He might have been famous as the man who visited righteous American vengeance to bin Laden and his henchmen but instead George Bush will be known as the brave executioner who delivered the final death blow, the coup de grâce, to a thoroughly beaten down, down trodden, incapacitated, aged, negligible, unarmed dictator irrelevant to history named Saddam Hussein.  George Bush will be forever known as the man who let bin Laden go.
     Amazingly John McCain supported this entirely erroneous conception eagerly and without significant complaint.  From what we know of him he is infected with views and sees the world with much the same blindered preconceptions and narrow ethical limitations and false political constructs of the corrupt neocon mandarins George Bush has surrounded himself with. 

II  The Caddyshack policy

     Undoubtedly these are dangerous times in the world but when in the history of the world have the times not been dangerous?  This is not to say there are not real challenges that must be dealt with intelligently, vigorously and occasionally with force of arms.  But, as a point of proportion, these times are no where near as dangerous for America as the Revolutionary and Civil War times were or more dangerous for us and the world than Nazism and Communism and even the Cold War was when nuclear annihilation was merely a mistake and mad mutual missal strike away.  The pity here is that the abject failures, arrogant pretensions and terribly rigid misconceptions of the George Bush administration have made this fight against a few miserable terrorist thugs and their supporters much more complicated and costly in lives and money than it ever needed to be.
     After 9/11 George Bush was correct when he said the terror threat represented a new and abstract kind of war.  Unfortunately he and his advisors then proceeded to try to fight it in the same old territorial, nationalistic kind of way.  The rodents of terror must be ferreted out from the holes into which they have crawled.  This must be done through diplomacy, law enforcement and very surgical and very limited military strikes, painstakingly planned and thoroughly thought through in advance as to their ongoing repercussions.  
    Careless, large scale warfare between nations is certainly the worst thing we could have done.  It enables terror and spreads it rather than containing it and does not eliminate but actually creates a power vacuum for the current generation of terrorists to operate freely while plowing the ground from which the next generation of terrorists can take root.
    The approach to fighting terrorism Bush and his team chose might be called the “Caddyshack” approach.  That was the film where a crazed Bill Murray became so infuriated with a few canny prairie dogs that were harming the golf course, that he basically destroyed the golf course in the hopes he might kill a few prairie dogs.  This is the same type of napalmic lack of sophistication the Bush administration has applied toward the Middle East and the Islamic world since 9/11.
     So at the same time he was correctly cautioning the public that this was not to be a war against Islam, George Bush and his advisors deviously acted as if they believed just the opposite.  These folks surrounding Bush are basic nuts and bolts type of people, bureaucratic infighters with no strategic or intuitive grasp of the interconnected complexity of the world.  They have been so arrogant and jealous of their bureaucratic power, which they have steadily insisted they needed more of, that they’ve refused to listen to anyone with levels of expertise far beyond their own.  They have acted as an insular cabal and thereby denied the full intellectual heft of the United States to aid them in addressing the very difficult problems facing us in the world today.
    Their small mindedness meant that the small things worry them the most and the largest problems got lost in the shuffle of day to day events and have gone largely unaddressed.  Arguably an administration with more knowledgeable people in high places, with a better capacity for hard work and larger perspective on the world, would have had a much better chance of stopping the tragedy of 9/11 from succeeding to begin with.
    Instead the shock and awe that beset them after the attack steadily lured Bush and his advisors, with all the panic and discernment of a hungry bear in a kitchen, to carelessly conflate al Qaeda with strictly national movements like Hamas, with secular governments like Iraq, with extremist ones like the Taliban, with self-serving ones like Syria, with a democracy/theocracy like Iran, and the newly emerging democracy in Lebanon with the violent radical movement Hezbollah that it couldn’t contain within its own borders – as if these were all precisely the same entity with the same goals and aims as al Qaeda.  This was not just sloppy mindedness it was madness to the foreign policy of the United States.  
    Instead of keeping these inchoate groups apart and disunited, the Bush administration has done everything it can think of to inflate their reputation, anger them toward us, blur distinctions between them and drive these erstwhile disparate groups together.  The result of this has been that, with the exception of the legitimate government of Lebanon, each and every one of these groups we are ostensibly opposing has actually grown much, much stronger at the expense of conservative, traditional and more pro-western governments in Islam due to Bush policies and its signature error, the Iraq war.
     Clearly, the entire theory of how the Bush administration has approached terror overseas is fatally flawed and counterproductive to the ends it seeks to achieve.  We have behaved like a crazed zookeeper who, to capture an escaped tiger, opens the cages of all the other dangerous carnivores on the theory that it will be easier to catch them all at once than one at a time.  The result of his strategy is that a few hours later all that remains of him is half an indigestible boot and a crushed pith helmet hanging from the branch of a tree.  
    This approximates the essential result of Bush foreign affairs designed to win the war on terror.  Study after study by every competent authority who has examined this, supporting our own observations, has found that the Bush administration policy has been almost perfectly designed to help terror prosper in the world not suppress its continuing rise.
     We have been tone deaf to the atmospherics accompanying this policy as well.  Each and every offensive act by our government, every thumbing of our nose at the conventions and respect of the rest of the world, every power vacuum we create, every mistaken air strike (dismissively and callously euphemized by those who do them as “collateral damage”) which decimates civilian families, every atrocity by our hired mercenaries and every act of sanctioned brutality, every published photo and account of torture perpetrated on detainees, every instance of lack of candor, every twisting of the nature of our peace loving democracy into crude irrational militancy by this least loved of all American administrations has assaulted the imagination of the world and been worth its weight in gold as a recruitment tool by our enemies.  
    And none of this has been necessary.  Other administrations have fought much more complicated wars with far greater efficiency than this.  We have fought much more vicious and far more organized enemies than these before without stooping to their levels of brutality.  We have fought much more powerful enemies over longer periods of time and over farther flung areas of the world, with much better, more certain and longer enduring results.  In past times of war we have kept our nation united without effort, without having to resort to the duplicity, the exaggeration, the polarization, the astonishing ever expanding claims of privileges and secrecy surrounding them and the sheer unforgivable corruption that this administration has visited on its own people to maintain policies which won’t stand the scrutiny of the light of day.  Why have so many lessons of our past been misplaced in our current leadership?
     At the time of 9/11 al Qaeda consisted of (at most) several hundred people.  This viral group needed to be contained, neutralized, discredited, pulled out by the roots and eradicated.  It hasn’t been and not one of these other goals of our policy has been achieved and much of the cause can be related to the unjustifiable war in Iraq and the completely erroneous theory of endless, needless open ended warfare that has been its staple. Despite the abject failure of the extraordinarily costly adventure in Iraq to achieve any of its broader underlying aims in regard to stopping terror and winning the hearts and minds of enemies – in fact, it has been amazing efficient in doing just the opposite – John McCain looks upon this war and this policy approvingly.

III Terrified of Terror and 
      Frightened of Fear Itself 

    Iraq was erected as a false front on the “war on terror”.  There was never any national interest in our attacking there and none has arisen since, so all gains for the US in Iraq are illusory.  Meanwhile, as we are tied down there, al Qaeda and its allies have been free to recruit, plot and consolidate their power.  In Iraq those who now claim we are winning something are really only referring to the fact that are not losing quite as fast as before.  
    The questions to ask the proponents of this war are:  What problems are we solving in Iraq that we have not created?  What mess are we cleaning up that we have not made?  Where does the net profit derive from expensively creating a problem one year that we even more expensively clean up over the course of many more?  After first destroying Iraq we are now trying to rebuild it to a shadow of its former self, with both ends of the equation at American taxpayer expense. Perhaps Iraqis are better off for our sacrifice for them, though that is still debatable, but it is very hard to see what advantage has come to us from the invasion in Iraq.
    Prior to the invasion our containment policy of monitoring and daily flyovers of Iraq cost us roughly a billion dollars a year, not hay, but a necessity that only represented a tiny fingertip of the collective colossal power of the United States to maintain.  It was working.  Iraq was weak and toothless.  There had not been a single combat related death in Iraq since the end of the Gulf War.  
    Now we have parlayed that initial $1 billion a year cost into a $4oo million dollar a day occupation of Iraq, or approximately $3 billion a week and have lost over 4,100 lives and many thousands more Americans wounded, and are well into our fifth year of occupation without any discernible benefit for our efforts or tangible return on our investments.  But because fewer Americans are being killed on average this year than last we are told this is great progress.  The hapless proponents of this war call this “victory”.  I’m not sure how many more such victories like this we can stand.
    What we have before us by remaining in Iraq, by way of “winning” even by our own definition of “winning” can in no possible way compensate us for the massive coruscating losses it has already cost us.  “Winning” in the context of Iraq as used by its supporters is therefore rather a relative and nebulous term of art.  Are we stronger today than before we attacked Iraq?  Have we been able to spread our influence in the region?  
    Generally speaking in life winning is not the same thing as losing less, less fast than you did before.  And yet that is all we have to show for even our best efforts there.  And not one of these actions of lives lost in Iraq has brought us one day closer to bringing to justice those that attacked us on 9/11.  On the contrary every day we are tied down in Iraq that eventuality moves ever farther away from fruition.  Even al Qaeda in Iraq was not an indigenous presence there but only camp followers of our occupation.  They have never had a real foothold there and will evaporate like the dew when our occupation ends.
    So even if we could actually be thought to be winning something tangible from this battle of Iraq for the American people we are still chronic losers because the war in Iraq still loses for us or keeps us from winning the wider war against terrorism.  We may continue to win this battle and continue to lose the war.  On the contrary we cannot win the war against terrorists until we have ended the war in Iraq not before.  To its proponents the open ended continuation of the war has become a political crutch, far more politically important to them than the actual practical conclusion of the war is to us and the best long term interests of the United States.
    Though we are thankful that the war has continued long enough to force the Bush administration to finally give our military the leeway and the forces necessary to redeem their honor and restore their reputation by the partial pacification of Iraq we are seeing today, it is unacceptable for these politicians to try to take credit for it.  They are responsible for all the strategic problems in Iraq not for any of the tactical successes.  The Bush administration has made mistake after mistake, first by dropping the ball by letting bin Laden get away in Pakistan and then invading Iraq, then by resisting for four years giving the military the necessary forces to complete the mission they had been assigned.  For George Bush (and John McCain) to try to take credit for a policy they had for four years resisted and only instituted because of the lack of confidence the American people showed in them in the “06 election, is an insult to the nation and to the military they have so poorly served. 
    And even now, with a brief opportunity the current increased security situation affords us in Iraq it doesn’t seem that our political leaders have any understanding how to capitalize on it.  The “return on success” promised us means that our troops actually must be withdrawn when success occurs, otherwise the ‘success” they claim is merely chimerical and always out of reach with the “benefits” of the war always lost among the costs that continue mount unrelentingly and forever remain on the debit side of the ledger.  
    This means that the administration has turned any goal this war may have ever had further on its head.  To get our troops back home safely from this endless and destructive deployment must be one of the primary components of victory not a plague to be avoided as a mark of our defeat.  Yet McCain seems to envision a long term, open ended deployment along the lines of Korea, as if Korea was a victory rather than necessity of our being unable to achieve a victory.  Yet Korea is just the sort of “victory” McCain apparently imagines for Iraq.  This is essentially the trajectory of defeat.
    McCain has bizarrely claimed that the American people would support American troops in Iraq for 100 years.  He has compared it favorably to Korea where our troops have been tied down for over fifty years.  He has said that perhaps by 2013 things may have quieted down enough where some troops may be able to be redeployed.  It is perhaps unique in the annals of job applications for a person to seek employment on the strength of something that may or may not occur after his first term of employment has ended.
    The whole point of increased security in Iraq is that it should be combined with the opportunity for gradual withdrawal of troops as a part of an increased regional diplomacy to see if we can’t solidify the current precarious, nebulous security both nationally and regionally, both internally and externally.  Iran and Syria have to be pivotal in this, and yet we are told we can’t engage in talks with people whose actions we don’t always entirely approve of.  Perfect.  That makes the sordid, mistaken beginning of a war that never should have been fought dovetail rather nicely with its non ending end.

IV Neo-Conservative Neo-Colonialism

     Because when it is all boiled down nothing ever said about this war in Iraq has ever been true.  And rest assured that everything they will tell us later about how necessary and worthwhile it was and what a great victory we have won there, will be untrue too.  By a process of elimination each and every rationale for this war has fallen by the wayside as it has progressed.
    The war in Iraq was not about terrorism as there were no terrorists there.  As concern for the well being of others has never been noticeably present in their other actions, humanitarianism was never their chief purpose in Iraq either.  Therefore concern about the Iraqi people, as it has led to the destruction of tens of thousands of them and led to the further ruination of their nation was not uppermost in the war’s calculations.  Especially as there were far worse tyrannies in the world elsewhere.  
    Nor was this war about spreading democracy, as superimposing modern, western style democratic thought on an Islamic state by force of arms is an absurdity.  Besides, our current leaders barely seem to tolerate democracy in their own country, much less anywhere else.  It was not about weapons of mass destruction and protecting ourselves against them, as none existed there.  It was not about tamping down the gathering threat of Iraq, as yesterday’s Gulf War (just twelve years before) had already wrecked the country for a generation.
     Now as the detritus of its instigation is clearing somewhat it is plain to see what most have always suspected, the war in Iraq was about the oil.  By our process of elimination that’s all that’s left.  It was simple hegemony, democratic imperialism, probably best termed modern American neo-colonialism.  We didn’t approve of the leadership of Iraq and invaded it to install a government more compliant to our wishes that would allow a consortium of western nations to mine its oil fields.  All the rest has been the considered obfuscation of untruths, exaggerations, delusions and lies.  
    Disguise it as you will, this is old school power politics.  Whether the Bush administration believed any or even half of what they were telling the American people about the necessity of fighting this war is no longer even germane to the existing policy.  It is what it has become and we will make a mistake in dealing with Iraq from here on out unless we clearly recognize this without fantasizing or romanticizing it.
    This was pure neo-colonialism piggied on the back of the “war on terror” on behalf of the Military/Industrial/ Political/Petroleum Syndicate.   In other words Iraq has been about the public expenditure by all of us for the private profits of a few.  While the American military has paid all the human costs and the American public has borne the actual costs, the only profits in Iraq have been realized by the private shareholders and chief operators of the MIPPS complex, including Halliburton, Blackwater mercenaries, Republican Party supporters, numerous defense contractors and (coming soon) Exxon and others, including many people incestuously connected to the decision making process of the administration which propagandized for this war to begin with.  
    Even these profits have not come from any intrinsic wealth deriving from our invasion but come from transfer payments of American tax money directly to Bush appointed American contractors which then go into off shore accounts.  It is hard to see what benefit the American people derive from this.  Once it was determined that Iraq had never represented any threat to the United States this has been all about borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, both are American, except Paul’s much wealthier and  better connected to the administration.  
    Meanwhile American foreign policy and reputation have been left in ruins, the war against the real terrorists has been indifferently fought, the war in Afghanistan gone begging, Pakistan dangerously destabilized and twenty thousand American soldiers killed or wounded (more when you include our undermanned forces left in Afghanistan) and a trillion dollar debt (and counting) to be delivered to the American people.  All without a counterbalancing iota of policy benefit returning to the American people.  Still, they say, America is “winning” in Iraq, though the exact nature of this victory cannot quite be explained or quantified and the exact number of Americans actually profiting from this “victory” is miniscule.
    It is testament to how unjust the inception of this war was that it took such a cacophony of endless untruths, fear mongering, coded ethnic and religious prejudices, and American self-righteousness to con the American people into supporting it. Without this wild collection of “God and Country” type exaggeration, threats, irrational haste and aggressive message management, the American people never would have willing supported this war if they had been honestly apprised of what it was really about and what the potential costs might actually be.  
     Such is the difficulty inherent in trying to force such an atavistic, nineteenth century style policy down the throats of a proud and free democracy in the 21st  century.  The policy is so self-defeating and anachronistic that it had to be done dishonestly.  Those who really could understand what the Bush administration was about knew to expect a disaster and were not disappointed.  But no one would have expected or sanctioned losses this severe prior to the war.  Twenty thousand Americans dead or wounded, five years and a trillion dollars later the war in Iraq so far stands as the most corrupt and futile war in American history.  Who can still honestly suggest that such steep costs were worth a gain so negligible as to be all but invisible?
     And amazingly, dishonest as the instigation of this war was, to be honest, they might have gotten away with it, success being its own political reward, but for the breathtaking incompetence with which the Bush administration typically goes about our business.  To attack an unarmed country barely on life support with a proven buffoon of a leader and blithely manage to take four long years to even subdue the country, will surely go down in the annals of American incompetence as our apotheosis.

V  A Recipe of Endless War
 
    As to what the Bush - Cheney administration wants to achieve in Iraq the likely shape of the future of Iraq is just becoming clear.  They want to build and maintain as many bases as they possibly can there whether they are necessary to any military purpose or not.  They have already built what has been billed as the largest American embassy in the world in Baghdad, for no particular purpose that can be readily explained.  Foreign oil companies will milk what they can from the oil fields and we will provide security and protection to prop up the Iraqi government as it becomes increasingly less well liked and more and more oppressive as a result. 
    In other words, after all the bombast about a democratic Iraq we are left with a fairly typical neo-colonial situation not unlike the previous British Empire occupation of Iraq or American arrangements with the Shah in Iran.  It is a throwback arrangement with all the resultant pitfalls and ambiguities of every such foreign occupation where, if the US keeps a garrison and a few bases and provides aid and logistical support to a more or less compliant Iraqi government a certain symbiosis may gradually develop between the two nations which will deepen and become more complex and mutually compromising over time.  
    Increased flow from Iraqi oil fields may indeed help stabilize the oil markets, though mysteriously, as supply is controlled by a cartel, not enough to substantially decrease the price of oil at the pumps.  Iraq with our help and constant vigilance may provide a springboard and bulwark to arrest the rise of Iran that our invasion of Iraq has already unnecessarily done so much to advance.
     However, keep in mind that this is just the sort of too clever by half policy which tends to backfire on us down the road.  All in all, democracies don’t make good imperialists.  With a new administration every four years, a disinterested public and a fractious congress, we are too big, complacent, inconstant and aloof to establish and maintain consistency in policy of this subtlety and expense over a very long period of time.  
    Moreover, such policies have proven to be double edged swords in the best of times, but today when the modern world teems with modern weapons, nations’ tend to reject a foreign occupation like antibodies do an outside infection, colonialism has become highly unproductive, far from accepted and entirely out of fashion.  The day of colonial adventurism is long gone as costs to a colonial power far outweigh the benefits.  If our experience in Iraq reiterates nothing else it is this.  
    The first Bush administration in the first Gulf War made the point forcefully to Iraq that military adventurism does not pay as we compelled Saddam Hussein to undo the invasion and occupation of Kuwait.  The second Bush administration is learning the exact same lesson the other way around, from the aggressor’s point of view.  Clearly military adventurism and imperialism is neither tolerated nor sustainable policy in the modern world.  Everyone in the world not among this administration’s supporters already knew this.
     The next president, despite all last second attempts by the Bush administration to make an end of term arrangement to lock them in, will have to determine for himself how much of a colonial arrangement we wish and will be allowed to maintain in Iraq as time moves forward.  The tradeoff is clear.  The more colonial we become the less democratic and responsive the Iraqi government will be toward its own people, with us being blamed for the operational differential.  
    In this respect it already should be quite clear that we will never have anything approaching what we would call a democracy in Iraq.  Moreover, unlike colonial times, if the Iraqis tell us to leave we will have no choice but to comply.  We are already starting to see them flex their new muscles in this regard.  We are there at their sufferance now, as they become less and less dependent on us, they may order us out without a single blessed thing to show for our great sacrifice there.
     Therefore, among the many graves in Iraq will lie buried the short lived and doomed to be little remembered Bush Doctrine.  Because as we go forward the Iraqi government (unless a new type of leader should happen to arise there which we have not yet seen), even if it puts on occasional elections, can not be a true democracy because the presence of foreign troops in its land acting as a guarantor of it existence structurally precludes this.  Such power at its back invariably invites a government that is not primarily beholden to the support of its own people for its endurance, to become less democratic not more.  This will lead to greater centralization and less tolerance for dissent, as the client state develops a relationship of mutual reliance on its protector.  For its part the occupier, to protect its bases, its control, its foreign trade and oil operations and the foreign nationals, will increasingly have to look the other way and accept more and more oppressive actions on the part of the government it supports.  This is the way of all modern colonial governments.

VI  The Discreet Charm
      of Bad Bureaucrats
    
    Yet John McCain, like Bush, seems to accept each and every one of these self-defeating limitations of the completely misguided and blissfully unanalyzed policy of the Bush administration without question or distinction, with all its artless untruths, misdirections, waste, and astonishing mismanagement intact.  And he will apparently never stop the entirely self-destructive war in Iraq of his own volition.  
    The Bush administration has embraced the bad bureaucrat’s defense against being called weak or accused of doing too little, by always over compensating in doing far too much.  They have been the essence of excess in pursuit of the unnecessary at the expense of the necessary.  Therefore in the bizarre world of the proponents of the war in Iraq and the authors of the inaptly named “war on terror” (whose method seems to be to try to stop terrorism by letting all the actual terrorist leaders get away unpunished) has been all about erring on the side of any extremism, atrocity and wildly erroneous justification no matter how absurd.  This is true even to the point where their policies have become patently counterproductive to their own stated purpose.  Better this than the risk of being accused of doing too little, as that is what they want to accuse their political opponents of.  
    This is the incompetent politician’s chief ploy.  Even if an action is overdone by a factor of ten and waste and pointlessness prevail to the point of sheer obscenity; this is preferable to a far more reasonable response which lacks easy justification and is not prone to oversimplification and resultant use as a political bludgeon.  This premise is essentially the key to all the massive failures of George Bush (now being aped by John McCain).  Or in Bush’s own parlance, they may not have succeeded but at least they “covered their asses.”
    The corollary to this is that a good bad bureaucrat always wildly exaggerates the difficulties which he faces to insulate himself from ever being held liable for any unexpected dereliction on his part.  Therefore, instead of trying to calm the fears of the nation after 9/11, when he might have taken the responsible approach and took full charge of our security and put it on his government’s back where it belonged by vowing to never let an terror attack of the magnitude of 9/11 ever occur on American soil again as long as he was in the White House, Bush took the opposite tack.  He let his people continually insist that new attacks and even bigger and more devastating attacks on us were not only possible but “inevitable”.  Time and again we were told that it was not a matter of “if but when”.  Irrefutably this is the obverse path to the one a good leader would have taken.  
Terrifying his own people to “cover his own ass” was not only irresponsible and cowardly in the extreme but gave Bush and people leeway to claim credit for having “protected” us from a problem or outcome that (they should have known a few months after 9/11) had little likelihood of ever happening in the same way again.  Similarly, they now pretend that the war in Iraq is a great triumph even though by their own definitions for its necessity it was completely unnecessary.
    Knowing that his ass was covered, Bush has grown steadily more carefree, bragging about how well he sleeps at night as the country has grown more and more sleepless, somber and morose.  This is a neat trick. He has laid his responsibilities on us as he has absolved himself in advance from all past and future mistakes.  Bizarrely, the more mistakes he makes, the more unchecked power for himself he has demanded he be given.  He claims this is necessary to protect us from terror attacks his surrogates still claim we can’t be protected from for as long as we are at war, subject to his own definition of war.  Under these circumstances it’s no great surprise that these proponents of endless war prefer all their wars to be open ended, or to at least endure as long as they happen to be in office.
    Has McCain agreed with all these destructive tactics, and if he agrees with the war, does he agree with Bush assault on the constitutional rights of the citizens of the United States and the intentional unbalancing of the balance of the power meant to keep a president like George Bush from making exactly the type of mistakes that George Bush continues to make?
    Why does he continue to support policies so costly and counterproductive to the fight against terrorists and harmful to our military around the globe?  For all his vaunted independence in regard to foreign affairs it is hard to see how he has been anything but a yes man.  And this is not the time for yes men.
     Curiously, just lately we have started to see some give and flexibility by the Bush administration toward a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq (though, of course, they euphemize this to “time horizon”) and limited ( and perhaps not quite sincere) negotiations with Iran.  Even Nouri al-Maliki, the president of Iraq, is suggesting it may be nearing the time for us to leave.
    This is ironic.  Having missed numerous opportunities to put some daylight between himself and Bush, by Bush moderating his failing positions he has started to put some daylight between himself and McCain by moving to his left.  This leaves McCain hugging the failed policies Bush and the neocons used to hold.  Like a survivor hugs a barrel as the Titanic sinks in the background, he may be the only proponent of the Bush Doctrine left.