McCain Watch - 5

Lots of people have written about McCain's latest nonsense about Iraq on Hardball with Chris Matthews this week. McCain said that we needed 100,000 more troops in Iraq (without instituting a draft) when it seems that everyone else knows the U.S. can't sustainably keep the 140,000 they already have there. He's delusional... and dangerous!

As Digby says:

John McCain is a bigger warmonger than George W. Bush, always has been. The only difference is that he doesn't believe, as the administration does, that it can be done without a national mobilization. (Like most nationalists he feels that such a mobilization is good for the national character.) The change in policy will involve spending more money and putting more young people in battle, not less.

Bush's warmaking desires have been restrained by his unwillingness to put the country on a real war footing or create a coherent military strategy. McCain will have no such restraint and may very well be the man who sets this country on a militaristic binge the likes of which we haven't seen before.

Glenn Greenwald has this to say about "the very serious, responsible, straight-talking national security guardian, John McCain":

So, to recap McCain's position: (1) in order to win in Iraq, we need to expand our military by 100,000 more troops; (2) we don't have anywhere near 100,000 troops to send to Iraq, and nobody suggests that we do; (3) a draft is absolutely unnecessary.

I don't think McCain even knows what to say about Iraq at this point -- the Straight Talker refuses admit that it was wrong because he was one of the loudest cheerleaders for it, but there are also plainly no viable options to change what is occurring -- so all he does is babble incoherently about it. As best I can tell, his position is that we need 100,000 more troops to win, and that young Americans one day are going to realize this and there will be a spontaneous and massive wave of volunteers eager to go to Iraq and fight in combat there because they will realize -- like McCain and the President do -- just how Very Important it is that we win.

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McCain complained that Matthews' line of questioning meant that his "bias is starting to show." Apparently, if one demonstrates that McCain's Plan for Victory is based on absurd fantasy, that is "biased." A reporter should only sit by and heap praise on McCain as the responsible, serious Leader that he is.

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Advocating this war because one believed -- mistakenly -- that it would produce certain positive results imposes a certain level of culpability for what has happened. But continuing to advocate this war while knowing -- as McCain and so many like him do -- that (a) it is achieving nothing positive and (b) there are no viable and realistic options for achieving anything positive, places one in a different moral universe entirely.

John McCain's insistence that we're going to win in Iraq because the additional troops that we need to win are going to magically and spontaneously appear in a sudden outpouring of patriotic courage is a disgusting joke, but, as Americans have largely realized, that is what the Iraq war has become. Only the national media and the hardest-core Bush followers continue to cling to the fantasy that the people who brought us this disaster and continue to justify it with incoherence and fiction of this sort are the serious, responsible foreign policy leaders. Their foreign policy views are adolescent and completely incoherent - the very opposite of responsible and serious.

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Regardless of the numbers, McCain is clearly a proponent of adding additional troops to Iraq, but never says where we will get those troops either, what they will do, or how many we need (if, in fact, he isn't claiming -- as Matthews (and I) understood him to be -- that we need 100,000 troops in Iraq). Unveiling a plan for Victory in a disastrous war where nobody has any idea what you're actually advocating is not the behavior of a responsible or serious leader.