Maybe the bold Maverick McCain has a foreign policy that's more than waging war and threatening war. But so far he seems to be keeping it a secret. Joe Conason in Bomb, bomb Iran?Salon 03/21/08:
By suggesting that the Iranians are aiding al-Qaida, the Arizona senator and his neoconservative allies are building a case for strikes against Tehran and perhaps even "regime change," just as similar allegations, since proved false, were deployed to justify the invasion of Iraq. ...
The danger of a McCain presidency is not only that he would prolong our presence in Iraq but that he would seek to fulfill neoconservative dreams of a war expanded from Iraq into Iran and Syria, leading to a regional conflagration. With his campaign already sowing the arguments for a wider conflict, we will not be able to say we weren't warned.
This plea that we all just forget about the unpleasant past - stop trying to figure out who was responsible for the Iraq War - has become the principal self-defense weapon of the pro-war political establishment. That's their only hope for evading responsibility for what they've done. It's also the central hope on which the entire McCain campaign rests - that we should just all forget about the painfully wrong and misleading things John McCain said and did in making himself into the prime cheerleader for the most disastrous and unpopular war in American history, and focus instead on how he (somehow) has the experience and judgment to lead us to glorious Victory.
William Arkin gives his ratings of the Presidential types on the Iraq War in Iraq Is All About Iran? Not! Early Warning blog 03/20/08. Including the Maverick, of course:
When it comes to making sense on Iran, Hillary Clinton wins hands down over Barack Obama, John McCain and George Bush.
In his zeal to describe the mess created by the war in Iraq, Obama falls into the trap of lumping Iran in with our "enemies." McCain is even more offensive, borrowing from the president's always-change-the-justification playbook to argue that the Iraq war is ultimately about Iran. And President Bush is more confused than ever, fretting about emboldening Iran if we leave Iraq, but oblivious to how invading and occupying Iraq may have had the same effect.
And, finally, I like Steve Clemons writing and reporting as a rule. But here is an odd piece in which he sighs over the fact that our Maverick is no Richard Nixon, John McCain: An Act of Belligerency? TPM Cafe 03/21/08. Most of his post is a quote from an article by Doug Bandow in which Bandow writes:
However, the biggest problem with McCain is his philosophy. Sen. McCain once was a reluctant warrior, balking at intervention in Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and even Iraq the first time. Today he is the most belligerent of the original 2008 presidential contenders, except, perhaps, for Rudy Giuliani. If there is a war in the world, McCain can be counted on to join it. And if one doesn't exist, he is determined to start it.
The last two sentences sound right to me.
Clemons, though, wants to keep alive the hope that "perhaps McCain's acts of belligerency are all an act". This is what our Establishment press corps tends to do also, to insist that what the Maverick says and what his record shows are really just unpleansant compromises that the living saint has to make for politics. But he doesn't really mean it all.
I don't buy it. I think it's far more likely that the Maverick's greater willingness to embrace war beginning in the 1990s came from what the neocons like to call the "unipolar moment" in which the post-Cold War US remained as the only superpower. In any case, the Maverick is spelling out his war policies. As Conason says, "we will not be able to say we weren't warned".
