I'm Just Sayin': Beware McCain's "Peace with Honor"

"I will never surrender in Iraq, my friends. I will never surrender in Iraq," John McCain said on May 27. "Our American troops will come home with victory and with honor. And that's my message to my friends."

This was the purest statement we've yet heard of McCain's political strategy on Iraq: It's not the reincarnation of the Hundred Years War: it's Richard Nixon's endgame slogan for the Vietnam War -- "Peace with Honor."

As the general election unfolds, McCain's strategic message will be to argue that both he and Barack Obama will end the war in Iraq, but that if he is in charge, American will remain proud and honorable while Obama will bring us shame and dishonor.

The concomitant argument will be that the issue of the war in Iraq is not about past decisions but about future plans. All that matters now is what happens going forward: Victory or defeat? Success or surrender?

Never mind that at every step of the way to this moment, McCain voted to get us into the war, to extend it at every turn and to increase American troop commitments. Never mind that, until this most recent foxhole conversion, McCain has argued for a permanent American troop presence in Iraq, along the lines of the U.S. posture in Korea.

Never mind that according to the National Archives, from 1969-1973, when Henry Kissinger finally concluded an accord with Hanoi, 20,863 American soldiers died in Vietnam -- sacrificed on the altar of Nixon's "Peace with Honor," a coarse, cynical campaign strategy masquerading as a foreign policy.

Nixon and Kissinger knew -- as author Professor Larry Berman of U.C. Davis demonstrated from declassified documents in No Peace, No Honor -- that their treaty with North Vietnam would result in neither.

Yet John McCain appears to have learned little in the 40 years since Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war in Indochina -- a "secret plan" that sent to their deaths an additional 20,000 Americans, more than 100,000 South Vietnamese fighters and countless North Vietnamese.

Comments

[civillibertieslost]

The hubris of powerful men has always caused history to repeat! And the ordinary have always paid the price for such arrogance.
In the end, whether in 2009 or 2019, we will simply slink out of Iraq without bothering to turn off the light at the end of the tunnel. Iraq will become its own nation - or perhaps several nations. And they will become one of our economic trading partners. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Powell & the other war mongers, just like Johnson, Humphrey, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger, & Laird before them, will eventually die without having to publicly answer for their war crimes. And the surviving veterans of this war, just like my fellow survivors of the Vietnam war, will thank God for coming home and will hopefully do honor to those who didn't.

[tompoe]

The discussion changes dramatically, when the term, war, is replaced with invasion/occupation. Obama needs to educate and inform the citizens. How many corporations will object to such openness?

[dexxjones]

there is something wrong with a country where a president (nixon) sends 20,000 more troops to their deaths on a lie and doesnt go to prison or get hanged. and kissinger? is he even american? what the HELL?

[benjaminblue]

Just who are these "friends" Mr. McSame is addressing all the time? Does he see some phantoms floating around him? Does he see some ETs? Is he invoking unseen presences so the rest of us (who are not his friends) will be nervous and/or afraid, much as Mr. Bush, a dry drunk, keeps talking to the make-believe enemies only he can see, so the rest of us will develop his irrational fear of the terrorists that reveal themselves only to him, as he eavesdrops without warrants?

Mr. McSame only creeps me out. We don't need another nutcase, afraid of his own shadow, trying to convince us that he is sane.

[MyGuyO]

From the onset, this saying just drives me up the wall....."My friends.............."

[Yohomegirl]

All he is saying, is give war a chance! Wasn't that a song in the sixties?

[S1m0n]

The US already won the damn war in Iraq. Tell John McCain that he's five years behind the times.