McCain's Terrible Foreign Policy Plans

(second in a two-part series!)

A lot of focus is on the DNC's devastating new ad about John McCain's Iraq policy, and that's important. But I want to start with McCain's policies outside Iraq and work my way inside.

For instance, it should interest you to know that McCain's foreign policy ideology is to be the worst nightmare to all of our enemies, which is certainly not an adult maneuver, but also misreads the goals of foreign policy itself.

Consider Saddam Hussein. He's a bad dude. And which American president is his worst nightmare? Well, it's George W. Bush. Thanks to Bush, Saddam got booted from power and killed. Compared to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Dubya was a disaster for Saddam. But of course Dubya's Iraq policy has also been a disaster for the United States of America, whereas Clinton and Papa Bush ran policies that made us better off. International politics shouldn't be conceived of as some nutty zero-sum race to the bottom where our goal is to make Hamas cry -- the question is who are we trying to help and do we have ways to do it.

Unfortunately, this belligerence extends beyond enemies and into putative allies. Were you aware that McCain essentially wants to restart the Cold War?

On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

This is madness. Russia's supremacy in oil resources and China's supremacy in the new economic landscape make them the worst countries to alienate in perhaps the entire world. You engage these countries - sometimes through tough talk and desiring to push them in the right direction, like on Tibet - but you do not start acting actively hostile to them!

Of course, this is the only way McCain knows how to relate to other nations - through militarism and belligerence and using massive strikes of American power to dominate the world. McCain is actually more purely neoconservative than even George Bush - he ran on a "national greatness" agenda in 2000 which included "rogue-state rollback" - his plan to start massive uprisings in other countries, decapitate leaderships, and overthrow sovereign governments all over the world. He's the biggest hawk in American politics, and his options for foreign policy usually fall along the lines of "bombs" and "more bombs".

And this gets us to the DNC ad, which is sparking a HUGE Republican hissy fit.



First the RNC said this was illegal coordination with the Clinton and Obama campaigns, absent any proof. Then they decided that ads featuring the opposing candidates in their own words are lies that must not be aired.

The Republican National Committee wants CNN and MSNBC to stop airing the DNC’s new national television advertisement, calling it “false and defamatory” and illegally coordinated.

“This is a complaint about the facts that are being misrepresented in the ad, and this being a deliberate falsehood, that we are saying, stations have an obligation to protect the public from airing a deliberate falsehood,” said Sean Cairncross, an RNC lawyer.

The RNC provided no evidence to support their change that the communication was illegally coordinated, aside for a few newspaper articles pointing out that some Democrats work for both a candidate and the committee, like pollster Cornell Belcher. DNC chairman Howard Dean said this morning that neither campaign saw or heard the ad before the put it out.

The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad’s content. Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.

The DNC is in no way backing down, with Howard Dean making the funny statement "I understand the RNC thinks it's illegal to criticize John McCain."

But let's delve into why the RNC and the McCain campaign is so upset. They clearly have some information that endless replays of the "100 years" comments just would totally sink the campaign. This wasn't so much a problem when McCain said comments like this for basically the entire primary season. Here, look:



But suddenly, now, in a general election, it's a big problem. So they want to claim that he was talking about a post-war presence. As Dean says in the above clip, anyone who thinks that we can keep troops in Iraq for 100 years and not have them shot at or attacked is a lunatic. McCain is committed to leaving troops inside Iraq until there is no violence and "the war is won". THEN, he wants a 100-year, or lifetime, commitment in the region. There is no timeline placed on how long it could take to get the violence under control; indeed, this month was among the worst in close to a year. So McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq until the war is over, and would never pull them out a minute beforehand. How is that BETTER than the "100 years" comments? How should that comfort the overwhelming majority of Americans who see no political solution in Iraq and want the war to end? Josh Marshall puts this best.

The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it's okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there's little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn't like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn't change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.

If there is an unfair supposition at work here, there is a simple way to find out. Someone should ask McCain how long he's willing to have us stay in Iraq even if we are sustaining casualties. Since he believes it is in our strategic interests to stay there on a permanent basis I doubt very much he'll say that in that case he'd only be comfortable staying two or five or some other relatively short span of years. That is because he believe we should stay there on a permanent basis, ideally with no casualties but with casualties if that's what it takes.

Plus, McCain has been all over the place on a continuing Iraq presence, saying in 2005 that Iraqis resented the US presence and need their visibility reduced. Then he flipped to advocating a presence like in South Korea and Japan and Germany, then he flipped back in an appearance on Charlie Rose, rejecting such a parallel, and now he's back on it. So who the hell knows what he thinks on that front.

But what we do know is that McCain believes global solutions go hand in hand with military solutions. And his warped sense of "honor" concludes that we cannot show weakness or defeat, even if staying in Iraq, for example, impacts our long-term security goals. He'd rather keep us bogged down in a war with no end in sight. And that is why Joe Klein, ye gods, is right.

...I was thinking about posting yesterday about McCain's cheesy nonsense about Obama being endorsed by Hamas. If McCain wants to go that route, I can suggest another: that John McCain is probably the favorite candidate of Osama bin Laden, just as George W. Bush was Osama's presidential preference.

Why? Because both Bush and McCain have bought Osama's disinformation about Iraq being the central front in the war on terrorism. Of course, bin Laden wants the gullible neocons to take the Iraq bait because Afghanistan really is the central front of the war on terrorism--more precisely the Afghan-Pakistani border areas where the real Al Qaeda lives. The war in Iraq has been a grand strategic gift to Osama, keeping the U.S. military tied down elsewhere and off his tail.

Indeed.