The Washington Post summons forth a huge psychopolitical profile of John McCain today, which manages to simultaneously trot out nearly every cliche about the man, from adviser Mark Salter to hero Robert Jordan, while actually challenging him on the issues. One small insight: Salter is quoted saying that "things go on inside McCain's head that rarely or never come out." Uh, if these are examples of what comes out, then no one should know what stays in. Oh, and is the circumlocution "McCain also seems to enjoy extracting information from individuals" an allusion to torture?
But these are cheap shots. The reporter, Robert Kaiser, really deserves credit for demanding this McCain introspection on Iraq:
But [McCain] has not defined victory in Iraq, and many wars have ended ambiguously.
...."We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain has said, implying that the war could have been won -- again without defining victory.
Is it possible that in both Vietnam and Iraq, "victory" was and is beyond the reach of the United States, because in both cases only locals -- Vietnamese and Iraqis -- could ensure a satisfactory outcome to the conflict by finding a political resolution? McCain is impatient with this argument. In recent days, he has all but declared victory in Iraq: "This conflict has succeeded," he said in the interview. "All I can say is they [the Iraqis] are establishing the rule of law, they're going to be having elections, and I think they're becoming an effective government, which is what our strategy was, thanks to the genius of a guy named David Petraeus."
McCain has repeatedly lambasted Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for failing to understand the Iraq war. McCain was asked about Obama's warnings in 2002 that a war against Iraq was a bad idea that would require a U.S. "occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." Wasn't Obama more prescient than McCain, who gave repeated prewar assurances such as "the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators" and "we will win it easily"? McCain replied: "I think that's a legitimate question."
--Tim Fernholz
