John McCain and George Bush

In his acceptance/victory speech last night, John McCain made clear his foreign policy would be based on a world view that assumes a global war with radical Islam is the great calling of our time. He essentially endorsed George Bush’s good versus evil mentality and the Administration’s imperial notions of America’s role in subduing this evil throughout the world.

He did not mention, however, that Secretary of State Rice was in the Middle East and Admiral Mullen was in Pakistan, both trying to obscure the embarrassing fact that every single application of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy against Islam has collapsed in total chaos, leaving America’s strategic interests in shambles.

McCain tried both to evade responsibility for the strategic blunder of invading Iraq — he simply asserted there is no value in "relitigating" past decisions — and in the very next sentence to take credit for deposing Saddam Hussein.

America is at war in two countries, and involved in a long and difficult fight with violent extremists who despise us, our values and modernity itself. It is of little use to Americans for their candidates to avoid the many complex challenges of these struggles by re-litigating decisions of the past. I will defend the decision to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime as I criticized the failed tactics that were employed for too long to establish the conditions that will allow us to leave that country with our country’s interests secure and our honor intact.

It is a neat trick to claim credit for deposing an unpopular dictator while denying all responsibility for opening the Pandora’s Box of catastrophic consequences that flowed from removing a non-sectarian regime and replacing it with the murderous clerics and chaos that filled the governance vacuum we created.

McCain was defiant on Iraq, laying out a set of preconditions for withdrawing so impossible that even George Bush has been reluctant to make them so explicit.

But Americans know that the next President doesn’t get to re-make that decision. We are in Iraq and our most vital security interests are clearly involved there. The next President must explain how he or she intends to bring that war to the swiftest possible conclusion without exacerbating a sectarian conflict that could quickly descend into genocide; destabilizing the entire Middle East; enabling our adversaries in the region to extend their influence and undermine our security there; and emboldening terrorists to attack us elsewhere with weapons we dare not allow them to possess.

McCain did not explain, because his supporters would never think to ask, how his embrace of Bush’s war policies had led us inexorably into the quagmire he was describing and what that says about his own judgment. It is doubtful the adoring media will ask these questions either.

The Republicans now have their man — they didn’t really want him, and some of them still hate him — but he fits their requirements perfectly. McCain satisfies the right wing’s emotional needs to have a perpetual enemy — officially replacing communists with radical Islamists — providing a set of undifferentiated, dark-skinned and dehumanized foreign devils against whom perpetual war is the only acceptable policy, and about whom no further thought is required. The millions of innocents killed, maimed, or made homeless will remain invisible, and after all, it was in the cause of freedom and the American way.

By focusing on world war while extending Bush’s tax cuts, McCain would ensure his supporters never make the connection with their own economic insecurity, and never directly pay for the folly of the worst strategic blunder in America’s history. And he will continue an occupation that, through it’s self-interested excuses for repression, perpetuates its own justification. McCain will thus keep America fighting in Iraq forever, relieving the right wing’s anxiety about losing Vietnam all over again.

It is the unfortunate task of the Republican primaries to select a nominee acceptable to the most insecure and delusional segment of the American political spectrum, and that mission is accomplished. By sheer accident – and the serendipitous incompetence and duplicity of his rivals — John McCain is the ideal candidate for that pitiful group, all that’s left of a once proud Grand Old Party. They will follow this broken but unbowed warrior without question, firmly convinced not only of the national security imperative but that their personal salvation depends on it. Pastor Hagee knows his man.

This morning, the presumptive nominee will dutifully trudge to the White House to receive the Emperor’s blessing. I couldn’t help but think that Darth would say, "The circle is now complete." But beware the New Hope and Princess Leia. tbogg captures the spirit.

Related posts:

  1. On PDB Day, a New Direction against Terrorism? John Brennan’s Coming Out Party?
  2. Get a Grip, Wingnuts: John McCain Obsessively Quotes Mao Zedong
  3. Frank Rich: McCain Was Wrong On Everything. CNN Treats Him As Sage
  4. John Kyl and Richard Perle: Nuclear Weapons Keep the World Safe, Except When People We Don’t Like Have Them
  5. Early Morning Swim: Special KO and John McCain vs. Dick Cheney Edition