War President McCain

Last weekend, when Iraq's prime minister supported Senator Obama's timetable for withdrawing American troops, John McCain's national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, countered: "Timing is not as important as whether we leave with victory and honor, which is of no apparent concern to Barack Obama." Scheunemann also said: "The American people deserve a commander-in-chief who puts their country first ahead of party, politics and self-interest."

McCain is emulating Nixon's 1968 election strategy, which got him elected while successfully concealing his actual war plans. McCain is not as diabolical as Nixon, but he remains ideologically confined by the same faulty hawkish logic the U.S. used to lose the Vietnam War.
Senator McCain, to many Americans, seems trustworthy, particularly on war matters. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll this July, 72 percent of adults surveyed viewed the Vietnam War POW as a good supreme commander of the military, while only 48 percent thought the same about Obama.

By guaranteeing victory with honor, McCain has boosted his standing and curtailed scrutiny of himself as a potential commander-in-chief. Richard Nixon received the same 'Don't-Question-Him' treatment in 1968 with a promise "to end the war and win the peace." A year into Nixon's presidency (halfway through the 3,630 covert B-52 bombings over Cambodia, codenamed "Operation Menu"), he enjoyed a 71% approval rating. In fact, McCain's entire war strategy relies upon Nixonian political logic: Americans will vote for the candidate who won't countenance defeat not because they're attached to the country we're liberating, but because they can't accept that many American lives may have been lost without purpose.

McCain's military outlook bears a striking resemblance to Nixon's via his advisers. McCain claims Henry Kissinger as his most important national security mentor. McCain's other main national security adviser, John Lehman, served on Kissinger's staff during the Nixon presidency. McCain and Lehman and the neo-con Schneuemann have embraced Nixon's belief that if public confidence can be maintained, American military power will compel surrender.

Like Kissinger today, McCain's top national security advisers have their personal economic interests mixed up with the America's. Scheunemann picked a bad week to talk about putting country ahead of self-interest, given his role in an unfolding war-profiteering scandal. As a member of Worldwide Strategic Partner's executive team, Scheunemann offered to sell his White House connections to the leaders of Kazakhstan, Georgia, etc. in exchange for oil leases in those countries. Scheunemann's early, successful lobbying for the U.S. to go to war with Iraq is cited in Worldwide Strategic Partner's sales brochure as proof that Scheunemann can deliver the political goods.

Finally, McCain's strategy for Iraq can be seen as an extension of his greatest and earliest mentor: his father, Admiral McCain. The elder McCain was both Nixon's and Kissinger's go-to briefer when each wanted to convince the other to up the military ante in Vietnam. Admiral McCain, an ardent advocate of the Cambodian carpet bombings, was included in Nixon's backdoor channel that circumvented the Pentagon hierarchy. He was the most hawkish among the most hawks, urging on Nixon's secret nuclear brinksmanship. *

Senator McCain is as optimistic about winning wars as his father was. In 1972, upon his retirement, Admiral McCain wrote an op-ed for The New York Times that claimed: "President Nixon's plan to reduce the total United States troop commitment in South Vietnam is a result of our confidence that the South Vietnamese can continue to improve their capability for their own defense. We are seeing a much-improved South Vietnamese fighting force. The South Vietnamese are doing sound military planning; the South Vietnamese Army has come of age; and the South Vietnamese Air Force is playing a steadily growing role in support of South Vietnamese Army ground forces. Vietnamization is successful."

If Admiral McCain believed this, he was the only top American official who did. By then the author of the Vietnamization strategy, General Creighton Abrams, was privately calling it "Slow Surrender." Nixon and Kissinger were cynically seeking "a decent interval" between the time American troops returned home "with honor" and the moment when the South Vietnamese military would be crushed.

Senator McCain patriotism has both old-fashioned and Born-again qualities. As he's written, he survived as a POW by rediscovering his love for his country. This faith in America seems to have come at the cost of comprehending the enemy. The military historian John Karaagac explains in his biography of McCain: "Captives cannot afford to sympathize with their captors, who are trying to win over the 'political prisoners' through calibrated game manipulation, payoff and punishment. Perhaps for this reason, discussion of politics surrounding the war was something of a taboo subject in the POW environment, as it was on the carriers: it damaged the larger, collective morale."

When McCain returned home, he asked to attend the National War College, but was told that his rank didn't qualify him. He went over his superior's head to the-then Secretary of the Navy, John Warner, who was his father's friend. Warner got him admitted. In his War College thesis, McCain wrote exclusively about his own POW experience and concluded that in the future, soldiers should be more politically educated about the cause for which they're fighting so they can be resolute if captured. But his thesis cites nothing -- no articles, no books, no one -- to indicate that McCain himself used his time at the college to reflect on why the U.S. fought in Vietnam and whether the country, including our military, were misled. In this sense Senator McCain, with all due respect for his great courage as a POW, remains a prisoner of the Vietnam War.

McCain's current guarantee of victory with honor appeals to magical thinking. He asserts: "Understand this: When I am commander-in-chief, there will be nowhere the terrorists can run, and nowhere they can hide." Put another way, McCain is promising that American forces will constantly scour the globe to annihilate terrorism for good. He wants to kick Russia out of the G8 (a much more hostile stance than George W. Bush's) and hold China at arm's length. Meanwhile we'll keep permanent bases in countries like Iraq, just as we did during the Cold War. McCain calls withdrawal from Iraq a "morally reprehensible abandonment of our responsibilities." His faith in America's transcendent moral destiny is a mirror image of the terrorists' paranoid nihilism, and hence a boon to their cause.

Like Nixon, McCain is a complicated man, but fundamentally pugnacious. If he's elected president, he'll surely find no shortage of wars he is dying to win. And no shortage of war profiteers eager to advise him.

*Footnote:
Admiral McCain played a key role in Nixon's nuclear brinksmanship during October of 1969, when 71% of Americans approved of their war president. Nixon concocted an astonishingly secret operation to fake a nuclear attack on North Vietnam. From Oct. 10 through the end of the month, Nixon ordered the US military to full global war readiness alert with no explanation. Nixon knew both his Secretaries of State and Defense opposed his nuclear brinksmanship. Admiral McCain, however, was in Nixon's loop and urged maximum mobilization, including the deployment at sea of as many threatening Polaris nuclear missile submarines as possible.
On Oct. 27, Nixon dispatched 18 B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to the northern edge of the Soviet Union, where they circled for three days. This signal to the Soviets and the North Vietnamese ("Compromise on our terms or else!") was completely hidden from the American public and virtually all of the top military brass. Nixon's mad bypassing of the chain of command caused tactical screw-ups, including near collisions of the nuclear-armed bombers with other planes over Alaska. And the bottom line? The operation failed to budge the North Vietnamese.

Comments

[valleygent]

I am sure that McCain and Bush will be declaring full victory in Iraq sometime in late Sept. or by Mid October. Senator Obama...you will be like a man alone in a vast desert unless you put a military resume awful close to you very quickly, make your decision on VP Senator...you are going to get walloped between now and the convention. That individual better be a war hero... at least.

[GunnyJ]

Everyone knows war is about "makin' money", just ask Bush and Cheney who have been makin' a killin' with this Iraq mess. McC is from the same mold, feed the American citizen with the elite BS of honor and country and victory and you can do whatever you want. Remember, we went to war in Iraq based on a lie.........period! Where is the honor and victory in that? I am amazed that the polls, even though this is the summer are so close. This election should be a rout, even if Obama was a one legged kangaroo that would be better than anything Republican at this point.

I hope we are not put to sleep with all this better commander in chief crap Mcc is feeding the public. One more thing, the War College is for a certain rank officer for a reason. The fact that McC used connections to get a waiver means that a deserving officer was left out, which may have also cost that left out officer something in regard to career progressio­n.........­.what does McC care as long as he wins right?

How we select out next President will determine the direction not only for us, but for the world for at least a decade.

[dizmo4]

I'm becoming increasingly fearful that this narrative that McCain has put forth may actually work. This idea that any withdraw from Iraq ( even if it's what the Iraqis want) is defeat. That Sen. Obama is willing to lose a war in order to win an election. It seems that McCain is landing body blows against Obama which may do just enough damage to eek out a victory. Obama's been declining in the polls since 7/4 which indicates that the flip-flopper attack may work to some extent.

The MSM doesn't challenge McCain on his own flip flops. They seem to go out of their way to protect the guy from himself, like CBS editing out a huge gaffe McCain made on the timeline of the surge.

Its frightening that the McCain may actually be succeeding as painting Obama as a flip-flopper that is more concerned with winning an election than a war....

[4real]

Why hasn't the press asked that McCane release his entire military record?

[Geauterre]

Jeffrey Klein did his homework. I only wish most other commentators would do theirs.

[knighthowl]

As a Viet Nam veteran, I have been taken aback by McCain's use of the phrase "victory and honor." Perhaps he missed the repeated claims of "peace with honor" by Nixon and Kissinger because he was still a POW when those claims were first made.

I was able to come home from the Viet Nam theatre when the Paris peace accords were signed and Kissinger and Nixon declared they had won peace with honor. Of course, I knew it was total fantasy. There would be no peace and there really was no honor. At the same time, I was delighted to go hone. For McCain to echo that phrase, however, is terribly disturbing. It stinks of the same fraud.

Where is the honor in attacking a country on false pretenses in violation of international law? Law which we helped define. If the goal was actually to steal Iraqi oil, which now appears to be the only rational goal, where is the honor in that? And it is clear that we will not ever achieve that goal even if a few oil companies get profitable contracts.

I was unaware of Admiral McCain's beliefs about the Viet Nam war. I was a junior officer in the Navy at the time. I would have been appalled, as I am now, to think that any military officer would have been fool enough to agree with Admiral McCain. HIs son appears to have the same lack of judgment.

[valleygent]

I am insulted by McCain's ineptitude on the wars we are waging. While John McCain sacrificed personally in his imprisonment during Viet Nam, I cannot accept that the remainder of his military experience gives him a free ticket to the Presidency. He does not have the command experience of a General, period. On the other hand if Senator Obama does not pick a strong Military man for his VP, I predict he will ultimately lose in November. It is so very clear that President Bush is setting the stage to call Iraq a Victory just before the election. The Republicans already have convinced more than half of the country that the SURGE has been a success. If Obama chooses someone like BAYH, with a civilian resume, he WILL LOSE in NOVEMBER, because as we all know, Obama has zero military experience.

[XME]

There is one important reason that McCain is unfit to be president of our country: he's made it clear that ALL he truly cares about is "winning" the war in Iraq, AT ANY COST.

The question to ask is why, and I personally believe it's because he see's it as his second chance at the Vietnam War. He clearly disagrees that we should have pulled out of Vietnam, and I have to wonder if he believes it might have been different had be not been captured (that alone could somehow have changed the outcome of that war). At any rate, I believe he sees this as a rerun of that war (and my father, a Vietnam vet says it is VERY similar, and feels a president McCain would be a huge and tragic mistake for our country) and sees this as his chance to "change" what happened and "get it right", sadly, at any cost, because he will NEVER surrender.

We should all be very afraid of a potential McCain presidency.

[snesich]

Very good post. McCain has many, many similarities to Richard Nixon. Both talk a lot about "honor" being essential, no matter the cost in lives or treasure. Both are prone to go into rages and have fierce tempers when they can't get their way. Both are fearful of the changes around them. Both are obsessed with having lots of money and currying the favor of those who might bring them more money. McCain is a disturbed man. Like Nixon. But at least Nixon came from nothing. McCain comes from naval royalty. And he's had everything handed to him.

[PADDYWHACK]

I remember so many times at school,many years ago,where the large school bully wilfully kicked the arse of any boy he wianted to,but one day some victim would fight back with skill and ferocity.The outcome was usually a draw,but the real casualty was the bully's ability to terrorize,we fortunately have the large nuclear arsenal to whip out which is fortunate since whipping out the national willy has not worked as we hoped.We will either shut up and acknowledge our limits or whip it out and go rogue completely.

[joebiz]

Senator McCain is as diabolical as Nixon, but maybe not as manic. I would not underestimate him or his staff with opportunities to create havoc in foreign policy. But, the argument of continuing the Iraqi War so we can "win with honor" is a foregone conclusion. Haven't we bombed the country into the stone age? What else can America do to show the world that we kicked some real butt? We won, a pyrric victory of sorts, but we won.

The global situation vis-a-vis Russia and China in the 60s and 70s is considerably different than the current situation in Iraq. Nixon wanted to be seen as a"mad man" when it came to waging war in the Third-World. He wanted the Chinese and the Soviets to fear his decisions and to fear that the US would stop at nothing, including nukes, to curb Sino-Soviet wars of liberation.

Today, the "perception model" Senator McCain hopes to apply to Iraq is false. In Iraq, Russians and Chinese are mostly on the sidelines, it's not about a liberation of Iraq from a Communist-­cum-Social­ist ideology. It's about control of petroleum and shipping lanes; to counter Saudi/OPEC dominance; waging war against Islamic terrorism; intimidation of Iran; Middle Eastern, geo-strategic poistioning; an just a plain, old fashioned dispute between business partners (Hussein and Bush).

McCain has not learned the politics, even after writing a thesis on the subject. Iraq is not Vietnam.

[vietveter]

Much like the war in Viet Nam, Iraq will never be a victory or have any honor

associated with it. The logic was faulty then... as now.

Go find Osama and put him on trial.

Go pack up all our gear and troops and come home.

Do not sacrifice any more lives for this totally

bogus cause.

[wsblake]

Stop talking about both Vietnam and Iraq as being "won" or "lost" as if both were legitimate conflicts that America had any business being in in the first place. Both are/were illegal,immoral occupations that were never America's to win or lose.

[julia06]

Excellent post!
Thanks for sharing all of this info before history could repeat itself yet again...

[Moxo]

McCain graduated 894 out of 899 in his clas - can someone PLEASE research what has happened to the the career of #893?

If McCain is qualified to be "a good supreme commander of the military", then #893 should be even better!