McCAIN'S BLOOD-LUST
Here McCain
exposes himself as a moral monster who positively revels in
the prospect of innocent blood being spilled. Oh yes, we are
supposed to "shed a tear" a single tear, mind you over
all that has been lost in the march to war, but then we must
go on about our business, which McCain describes as "ruthless."
How he loves that word: he used it twice in his WSJ
op-ed, and more during his Sunday morning [October 28] talk
show appearances, of which there were all too many. That's
the unpleasant sight that awaited us Sunday morning: him aggressively
thrusting out that self-consciously militant chin, and composing
his face in a semblance of rectitude. Ruthless! Or is that
clueless?
AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN
HIGH ENOUGH
Ah yes,
war is indeed "a miserable business," as McCain says, but
this one is made all the more so by McCain and his fellow
McCainiacs, who are now frothing at the mouth and barking
that we must abandon all "half-measures" and start carpet-bombing
Afghanistan. Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley
low enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep American power
away from its enemies according to McCain, the US is practically
god-like in its military prowess, and "yet our enemies harbor
doubts that America will use force with a firm determination
to achieve our ends, that we will use all force necessary
to achieve unconditional victory. We need to persuade them
otherwise, immediately." Oh? And how does McCain know this?
Does he have a direct line to the Taliban, is he a mind-reader
who can detect Osama's thoughts way on the other side of the
world? Such a view of the US is unlikely in those, such as
Bin Laden, who condemn America as the "Great Satan" and the
chief perpetrator of evil in the world.
LOOSE LIPS
How does
the Taliban know of this apparent reluctance to unleash our
full military potential unless McCain uses every forum
at his disposal to so inform them? Loose lips sink ships,
Senator but, then again, you already knew that, didn't
you?
THE IMMORALIST
By all means
shed a tear, says Mad John McCain, but let us not hesitate
to "ruthlessly" slaughter innocent civilians. Or, as he puts
it:
"We
cannot allow the Taliban safe refuge among the civilian population.
We must destroy them, wherever they hide. That will surely
increase the terrible danger facing noncombatants, a regrettable
but necessary fact of war. But it will also shorten the days
they must suffer war's cruel reality."
THIS MAD LOGIC
Having thrown
all morality to the winds of unlimited war, one can only wonder
why Mad John stops at merely suggesting the carpet-bombing
of Afghanistan. By his mad logic, we ought to immediately
launch a nuclear attack that would literally incinerate Al
Qaeda and, incidentally, hundreds of thousands of innocent
civilians. But, hey, we have to be "ruthless" don't we?
Indeed, some nut-ball general did suggest this, and now a
powerful American Senator is implying it. Surely this settles,
for all time, the question of McCain's fitness for the Oval
Office and raises once again the long-simmering question
of his mental stability.
DANGEROUS DICHOTOMY
A peculiar sub-theme of McCain's appeal to
bloodlust is the idea that war and diplomacy must conflict.
"We cannot fight this war from the air alone," he avers. "We
cannot fight it without casualties. And we cannot fight it
without risking unintended damage to humanitarian and political
interests." Say, what? War, as the saying goes, is
the continuation of politics by other means. So a war that
damages the political and diplomatic interests of the US in
the region is, by definition, self-defeating. A war that destabilizes,
say, Pakistan, and delivers it to the Bin Ladenites, could
hardly serve any purely military purpose especially considering
that a fundamentalist revolution would give Al Qaeda a nuclear
capability.
THE MIDDLE
EAST AGLOW
Thank God
John McCain lost the Republican presidential primary:
with this hebephrenic nutball in charge, much of the Middle
East would have been a radioactive wasteland shortly after
9/11. Can't you just see and, worst of all, hear President
McCain addressing the nation, solemnly intoning all the reasons
we had to nuke Kabul, his red face seething with barely-controlled
rage?
A PYRRHIC "VICTORY"
Forget about
the Arab world, says McCain: they all hate us, anyway, is
the unspoken addendum. They hate us, not because we occupy
their holy places and keep the settler-colony of Israel afloat,
but due to the behavior of "America's purported friends in
the region," who have "allowed" the bad guys to freely "sow
hatred of us throughout the Islamic world." The repressive
regimes of the region, which we regularly denounce as un-democratic,
are not, in McCain's view, repressive enough. While this is
no more sinister than the Bushian foreign policy which supports
Middle East tyrants against their own people, McCain's more
"idealistic" interventionism is entirely untethered from such
mundane practical considerations:
"Should the conduct of our war incidentally help inflame
that hatred it may indeed increase the threat to regimes in
the Middle East and elsewhere whose stability is a strategic
interest of the United States. But that threat will be infinitely
greater should we fail in our mission or delay victory by
one day longer than necessary."
What kind
of a "victory" would it be if we captured Kabul but lost
the entire Middle East, from Istanbul to Riyadh, to Bin Laden?
Truly
a Pyrrhic one. This idea, which is just plain crazy, defines
the madness at the core of Mad John McCain: for, in his view,
the loss of the Middle East is a small matter compared to
his own pure devotion to the abstract idea of Victory. And
here is where ideology begins to blend seamlessly into psychopathology
.
VENGEANCE AND
VICTORY
For McCain,
who aspires to be a popular demagogue on the strength of the
war issue, "there is no substitute for victory" and yet
victory, in his lexicon, has a unique meaning. It requires
not the achievement of certain political objectives (the eradication
of Bin Ladenism), but some vague emotional catharsis that
seems perilously close to pure vengeance. McCain's war is
being conducted, not to further American interests in the
region, but to further his own political interests on the
home front. Some of my regular readers may remember all
those rumors that McLoser was going to bolt the GOP and
form his own "centrist" third party, and it may happen yet.
Back then [June 11, 2001], I ventured that the main planks
of the McCainiac Party seem to be three in number: conscription
("national service"), conquest, and "reform," this last meaning
the federalization and centralization of power on the home
front. It is an agenda that flourishes in wartime, as irrational
and emotionally satisfying as equating "victory" with vengeance
wreaked on the innocent. McCain in 2004? You can bet on it
AN AMERICAN
NAPOLEON
It is ironic,
at the very least, that McCain seems to speak for those who
claim that "politicians" lost the Vietnam war, not the military,
and if only the latter had been allowed to run it their way,
without politicizing the conduct of the war, defeat might
have been averted. But now here is McCain, the politician,
trying to run another war single-handedly, a would-be Napoleon
second-guessing the Pentagon in a very public manner:
"We
have been sparing in the amount of ordnance we have dropped
on the Taliban front lines. We have not yet employed B-2s
and B-52s, the most destructive weapons in our airborne arsenal,
against them. We shouldn't fight this war in increments. The
Taliban and their terrorist allies are indeed tough fighters.
They'll need to experience a more impressive display of American
firepower before they contemplate surrender."
RAGTAG TYRANTS
He also
wants us to unconditionally back the ragtag coalition of pro-Iranian
tribes, petty warlords, and ordinary brigands who call themselves
the "Northern Alliance" a gang whose rule after the Russians
were driven out was so brutal that the Taliban seemed tolerable
in comparison. Oh, but remember now: we must be ruthless.
NEVER MIND
SUSAN SONTAG
How Mad
John dearly wants to be Commander-in-chief, so much so that
he is perfectly willing to undermine the authority and declared
war aims of the real Commander-in-chief in order to
call attention to himself. Never mind Susan Sontag, or that
Canadian "feminist" who declared that America, as the root
of all evil, basically got what it deserved on 9/11. The real
fifth columnists in this war are the hawks, led by the opportunist
McCain, who don't really care about getting Bin Laden, and
have a whole other agenda.
FIELD MARSHAL
KRISTOL
As an alleged
war hero albeit one whose
dark past may not have been fully exhumed McCain at
least has some standing to conduct his own military campaign
from the sidelines. But how do we explain the strategic
dictums of Field Marshal Bill Kristol, as expostulated
in this morning's [October 30] Washington Post? As
Morris Wanchuk recently pointed out on Lucianne Goldberg's
site, "Kristol's brave exploits during the Viet Nam War
he wore a Spiro Agnew sweatshirt at Harvard." That doesn't
stop this dime-store Clausewitz
from proffering his advice: failure to take Kabul before winter
would be a "disaster," and, like his hero, McCain, he clearly
means to do it with American troops on the ground. And that's
not all: Iraq is also in Kristol's sights, and only an immediate
attack would satisfy him. What is really striking, however,
is his rage at the direction the anthrax investigation has
taken. Any conclusion that doesn't fit his preordained view
of the facts is, in his view, monstrous:
"And
what signal do we send when our law enforcement and intelligence
agencies desperately try to convince the press that, as Saturday's
Washington Post headline put it, FBI and CIA Suspect
Domestic Extremists; Officials Doubt Any Links to Bin Laden'?
Really? Was someone unrelated to bin Laden's people ready
to mail anthrax spores immediately after Sept. 11 just for
the fun and chaos of it?"
NEVER MIND
THE FACTS
Never mind
the facts, as they emerge, not least of all the
scientific evidence which shows that this is a variety
of anthrax that a graduate student could have whipped up in
his basement. How dare the FBI contradict the editorial
policy of the Weekly Standard! Besides being an amateur
Field Marshal, little Billy Kristol, being a real Boy Wonder,
is also a kind of Sherlock Holmes. The FBI, the scientists,
all of whom have access to information unknown to the rest
of us who are they to contradict Kristol? Good God,
the insufferable arrogance of this pompous little man is apparently
limitless!
I GIVE IT A
TEN
This open disappointment and even anger
at the administration's conclusion that the anthrax attack
is the work of amateurs, and that mass death is probably not
in the cards, is downright bizarre. On the Insensitivity Scale,
Kristol's remarks rank up there with the comment
by some AOL executive that the 9/11 atrocity was "good
for the Internet." Yes, a different conclusion on the part
of the FBI would have been good for the War Party but very
very bad for the rest of us. Not that Kristol gives a rat's
ass about that
.
RESISTANCE
IS FUTILE
"At some
point," the Field Marshal smugly concludes, "the president
surely will insist his administration change its strategy,
and get about winning the war. Better sooner than later."
In other words: us neocons will get
to Bush eventually by relentlessly exerting pressure, including
a threat to split the Republican party and the nation in wartime
so he might as well give in now, before he is subjected
to a humiliating defeat. Let us hope Bush gives Kristol and
his ilk the answer they deserve.
THE NORTHERN
STRATEGY
Well, then,
what about this hurry to send in the ground forces?
How, the War Party wants to know, can we vanquish Al Qaeda,
and wipe out the terrorists, without sending US troops into
Afghanistan? The answer is not at all obvious, until one realizes
that this will never be accomplished by assaulting the enemy
from the south. The consequences for Pakistan, and the subsequent
unraveling of the whole region, would not be worth the price
of such a dubious "victory." What is needed is another kind
of strategy for this "new war" of ours, and that is what might
be called the Northern strategy. Let me briefly explain
IN THE CROSSFIRE
The other
day I was
watching Crossfire, and Robert Novak was firing
some awfully good questions at two proponents of the war,
Frank Gaffney, who represented the "Bush is doing fine" position,
and some big-mouthed ex-military man, a self-styled "expert"
who, roughly, took the McCainiac widen-the-war position. The
latter kept insisting, like Kristol, that we need to unleash
the ground troops before winter sets in, and Gaffney kept
insisting that the Northern Alliance could be our troops on
the ground. Novak turned a skeptical eye on Gaffney, and said
"Everybody knows the Northern Alliance can't win against the
Taliban." Gaffney looked uncomfortable and could only emit
a few inarticulate noises in feeble protest. That's when it
dawned on me: why not give Afghanistan back to the Russians?
GIVE IT BACK
The Russians
are now our great allies, and have pledged to stand shoulder-to-shoulder
with us in the "war on terrorism" so why not take them
up on it? We fought a long war against the Soviets, of course,
to "liberate" Afghanistan and look where it got us! We
created our own strain of Franken-terrorism, as the veterans
of the anti-Soviet campaign (including Osama) went on to found
the core of Al Qaeda and turn on us. Vladimir Putin has been
fighting these guys in Chechnya all along, so why not use
his experience to our military advantage? What we need to
do is invite the Russians to re-invade Afghanistan, to re-fight
their own equivalent of the Vietnam war, and, this time, help
them to win it. That should restore their national sense of
self-esteem and help us get rid of the terrorists without
putting large numbers of our own troops at risk. That's why
I was thrilled to read the
news that "the US and United Kingdom will turn to Russia as
the primary provider of ground troops in the Afghan campaign,"
and was positively thrilled to note that "Moscow is preparing
to mobilize up to 1 million soldiers for the invasion and
occupation." Now, my heart sank when I saw where the report
was from Debka.com, the notoriously hyperbolic "news" site
whose name is a byword for the farfetched but, hey, a stopped
clock is right twice a day, and, in any case, we can always
hope.
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