John McCain’s ‘Foreign Policy Experience’ August 21, 2008
Posted by bensix in Uncategorized.trackback
John McCain has won a lot of support for his experience in foreign policy and international affairs. With the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, and now the resurgence of Russian aggression, many voters support his supposed knowledge and wisdom over Obama’s perceived naivete. This is, I rather unsurprisingly believe, a mistake. His record is poor, and his knowledge is insubstantial.
He has supported the utilisation of American forces in “ensuring the survival and prosperity of the American people, defending our allies and combating such global threats as terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or narcotics“, but has opposed sending “men and women to fight and die in foreign conflicts unless [their] goal is victory” . To this end, he still considers the Vietnam War that he fought and suffered in to have been a “noble cause“, whose loss could have been avoided.
More recently, McCain has gained much praise for supporting General Petraes’s surge, but less attention has been drawn to other elements of his record regarding Iraq. In 2002 he believed that success would be “fairly easy“, and when, in 2003, he was challenged as to the continuing level conflict in Iraq, he declared “then why was there a banner that said ‘mission accomplished’ on the aircraft carrier?“. His knowledge of the very initiative that he’s praised for supporting is also deficient.
It’s generally crass to create an image of a candidate upon their gaffes, but some of McCain’s, especially with regarding geopolitics, will make you shudder like it’s 1999. Victory in Afghanistan, according to him, is all the more serious considering the conflict on the mysterious Iraq/Pakistan border. When musing on the Russian threat, he consistently spoken of the urgent need to defend Czechoslovakia, which was split over fifteen years ago. True consistency in candidates is like true empathy in lawyers, but ignorance is certainly worrying.
Ignorance and presumptuousness is especially worrying in a candidate such as McCain, whose rhetoric is rarely less than belligerent. During the current Presidential campaign he has declared that “the threat of radical Islamic terrorism” is the“transcendent challenge of our time”, and has then informed the public that the recent conflict in the Caucasus represents “the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War”. His sense of humour has also been a little eccentric, and more concerning when one considers that his foreign policy advisers include Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, the co-founders of the unhinged radical neoconservative Project For A New American Century. His leading aide is Randy Scheunemann, another PNAC member and the President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
John McCain, then: reckless, presumptuous and often uninformed, while advised by the neoconservatives that shaped the Bush Doctrine. Experienced? Well, yes, but there’s no intrinsic merit to experience. And if they believe that there is then why the hell didn’t they vote for Ron Paul?
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