Matt Yglesias captures the spirit of John McCain as the essence of militarism:
“For McCain, a certain culture of honor, militarism, and nationalism are their own reward. The military is to be celebrated and supported not for what it does but for what it is. Thus, a given military venture doesn’t need to have a real purpose or be ‘worth it’ in any particular sense. It is what it is, and what we need to do is keep on doing it for as long as ‘it’ takes and it doesn’t matter if ‘it’ is pointless or futile or even if ‘it’ isn’t anything in particular at all. The war is its own rationale.”
War is the religion of the post-Bush blood-and-soil GOP, and McCain is auditioning for the role of high priest.
He’s scarier even than Giuliani, whose vision of unremitting aggression seems pretty much limited to the Middle East, as per the Israeli-centric perspective of his foreign policy advisors. McCain’s belligerence is more all-inclusive: I remember he once went to Georgia, the former Soviet republic, and declared that South Ossetia — which has risen up in rebellion against the tyrannical Georgian regime — is “sovereign Georgian soil.” No part of the world is exempt from the McCaniacĂ‚Â purview.