Republican presidential hopeful John McCain fixed his sights on Saddam Hussein long before President Bush sent the U.S. military to oust the Iraqi dictator in March 2003.
[Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) listens to Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) during the presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee October 7, 2008. Although he's cultivated a maverick image, McCain's fixation with Iraq, and with regime change more generally, is squarely in step with his party's neoconservatives, many of whom now work for his campaign. (REUTERS/Jim Young)]Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) listens to Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) during the presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee October 7, 2008. Although he’s cultivated a maverick image, McCain’s fixation with Iraq, and with regime change more generally, is squarely in step with his party’s neoconservatives, many of whom now work for his campaign. (REUTERS/Jim Young)
Four years earlier, the Arizona senator told a Kansas State University audience that Saddam was amassing illicit weapons, and that the U.S. should arm opposition groups to overthrow him, along with North Korea’s leaders and other “odious regimes.”
Saddam, however, no longer had any chemical, biological or nuclear arms programs. Covert U.S. efforts to oust him had all failed because the Iraqi opposition was riddled with feuds and Iraqi spies, and because the exiles whom McCain favored – led by Ahmad Chalabi, a purveyor of bogus intelligence on Iraq who also had ties to Iran – had virtually no followers in Iraq.
For years, McCain repeated the same assertions about Iraq’s weapons programs and ties to terrorism that the Bush administration later used to make its case for invading Iraq. Today, he insists that the war was right and that last year’s surge of additional troops to Iraq has put the U.S. “on the road to victory” there.
Although he’s cultivated a maverick image, McCain’s fixation with Iraq, and with regime change more generally, is squarely in step with his party’s neoconservatives, many of whom now work for his campaign. Neoconservatives believe that the U.S. must preserve its unchallenged global dominance and military superiority, and reshape the world, by force if necessary.
“There is no question that he (McCain) reflects the hard-line neocon view,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. John Johns, a former supporter who’s known McCain since his return from Vietnam but is backing Democratic nominee Barack Obama. “With his attitude, his finger on the trigger, the slightest thing will (cause him to) execute that philosophy.”
Not true, responded Max Boot, a McCain campaign foreign-policy adviser.
“He is not a warmonger, as the caricature has it, but someone who is very prudent on the use of the American military,” Boot said. “He takes things on a case-by-case basis. He has no overarching ideological vision that he would impose on the messy reality of the world.”
McCain says that as a Vietnam veteran and a former prisoner of war, he “hates war” and believes that force should be the “last option.”
He promises to employ “all instruments of national power” – military, economic and diplomatic – and work with allies to deal with adversaries, and with Democrats to forge bipartisan foreign policy.
“Senator McCain has always made his own calls based on his assessment of the various situations we face in various parts of the world,” Boot said. “He is a very careful, prudent thinker who knows the military and how it should be employed.”
The words “diplomacy” and “State Department,” however, don’t appear on the McCain-Palin campaign Web page, which outlines a national security platform heavy with vows to pump up U.S. military muscle.
While McCain has toned down many of his hard-line pronouncements in this campaign, a McClatchy review of dozens of his speeches, interviews, statements and writings over more than two decades traces an evolution from reluctant warrior to advocate of U.S. military intervention on a global scale.
Filed under: 2008 Elections, Iran war, Iraq War, Sarah Palin, The Real Truth | Tagged: Evolved From Reluctant Warrior, McCain, to Interventionist | 1 Comment »