| McCain v. The Military
Think Progress did an excellent presentation of the McCain fiasco:
McCain: "Anyone Who Worries About How Long We're In Iraq Does Not Understand The Military"
Speaking to reporters in Richmond, VA last night, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) attacked “anyone” who points out that he is “fine” with keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 or more years. “Anyone who worries about how long we’re in Iraq does not understand the military and does not understand war,” said McCain.
He then added that it is “really almost insulting to one’s intelligence” to question “how long we’re in Iraq” because he believes the current “strategy” is “succeeding.” Watch it:
By dismissing as naïve those concerned with how long the U.S. military is mired in Iraq, McCain is claiming that top officials in the Pentagon don’t understand “the military” or “war” as well as he does. In a recent GOP presidential debate, McCain argued, “I’m the expert” on Iraq.
Top military brass, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, have worried in the past year that “a protracted deployment of U.S. troops”in Iraq would not be a wise move for the military:
- In October 2007, Casey said that “it’s going to take us three or four years and a substantial amount of resources to put” the Army “back in balance” and that time frame depends on when “the conflict end[s].”
- In July 2007, Mullen testified that without political and economic progress in Iraq, “no amount of troops and no amount of time will make much of a difference” and that “a protracted deployment of U.S. troops to Iraq…risks further emboldening Iranian hegemonic ambitions.”
By McCain’s logic, both the Army Chief of Staff and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff don’t “understand the military” as well as he does.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg.
Over at DKos, McJoan linked to and quoted from the Speaker's blog:
Pentagon Assessment: War Demands Strain Military Readiness. The Associated Press reported that "a classified Pentagon assessment concludes that long battlefield tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with persistent terrorist activity and other threats, have prevented the U.S. military from improving its ability to respond to any new crisis. According to the report, there is a 'significant' risk that the military cannot quickly and fully respond to another outbreak elsewhere in the world. Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen said the 15-month tours in Iraq and Afghanistan are too long and must be reduced to 12 months, with longer rest periods at home. 'We continue to build risk with respect to that,' he said." [Associated Press, 2/8/08]
Joint Chiefs Chairman Testified that "People Are Tired." Adm. Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee "The well is deep, but it is not infinite. We must get Army deployments down to 12 months as soon as possible. People are tired." [Associated Press, 2/6/08]
Joint Chiefs Chairman: U.S. Forces Are "Significantly Stressed." Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military's top uniformed officer, said U.S. forces are "significantly stressed" by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan while simultaneously trying to stem the tide of violent extremism elsewhere. Mullen stated, "I am extremely concerned about the toll the current pace of operations is taking on them and on their families, on our equipment and on our ability to respond to crises and contingencies beyond ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan." [Associated Press, 2/6/08]
But the Speaker's blog itself had much, more more in an entry titled "Caucus Report on America's Sliding Readiness". The report itself was titled, "America At Risk: Despite Continued Warnings, America's Readiness Continues To Slide." It was introduced thus:
America Is Vulnerable
In Congressional testimony last week, military officials confirmed America is vulnerable. The U.S. Armed Forces are strained to the breaking point, our National Guard and Reserves are stressed and depleted, and President Bush's latest budget cuts in half homeland security funds desperately needed by communities across the country. Nearly seven years after 9/11, and five years into a war in Iraq that continues to exhaust our troops with no end in sight, America may be at its most exposed. As Marine Maj. General Arnold L. Punaro said earlier this month, America now faces "an appalling gap in readiness for homeland defense."
McJoan had quoted three items from a section titled, "War Continues To Strain Military Readiness." Other sections, in order, included the following items:
National Guard Homeland Preparedness Slides....
[Item #3 of 4] 2008: Report Finds "Appalling Gap" in Homeland Security Readiness. A report by the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves found that there is an "appalling gap" in forces able to respond to chemical, biological and nuclear strikes on U.S. soil. The Commission Chairman Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro said Guard readiness has continued to slide since March [2007], when the panel found that 88 percent of Army National Guard units were rated "not ready." He said, "We think there is an appalling gap in readiness for homeland defense, because it will be the Guard and reserve that have to respond for these things." [Washington Post, 2/1/08]
2008 Budget: Bush Cuts Homeland Security Grants....
[Item #1 of 3] Bush Cuts Homeland Security Grants in Half. In an editorial on President Bush's 2009 budget request the New York Times wrote, "The budget fine print shows homeland security grants for states, cities and local first responders being slashed by almost half, to $2.2 billion. This includes deep cuts in transit and port security and in the long-promised, still unrealized priority of better emergency communications." [New York Times, 2/8/08]
In The States: Natural Disasters Expose National Guard Weaknesses....
[Item #2 of 2] While California Fires Rages, National Guard Deployed in Iraq. While the California fires of October 2007 were burning, 2000 members of the California National Guard were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The previous May the San Francisco Chronicle reported that, "As state forestry officials predict an unusually harsh fire season this summer, the California National Guard says equipment shortages could hinder the guard's response to a large-scale disaster." [Sacramento Bee, 10/10/07; San Francisco Chronicle, 5/11/07]
In The States: National Guard Lacking Critical Equipment....
[Item #14 of 18] TENNESSEE
Over $200 Million in Tennessee Guard Equipment is Overseas; Tanks and Vehicles Outdated. When the Tennessee Guard was deployed to Iraq, members brought millions of dollars worth of equipment with them. As of February 2007, $140 million worth had been retrieved but $200-$300 million remains overseas. "We need to get that replaced because if we had a disaster, a major earthquake for example, it's precisely the kind of equipment that we would want to have in Tennessee," Gov. Phil Bredesen said. Moreover, the Tennessee Guard has a shortage in modern vehicles and tanks. According to Maj. Gen. Gus Hargett, "Although we have not yet received these state-of-the-art armor vehicles, we do have earlier generation M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles on which to train our soldiers." [News Channel 5, 2/24/07]
Even this survey understates the case, however. With no overt connection, a media advisory from the University of Pittsburgh arrived in my inbox this week, warning of the dire state our military is in:
PITTSBURGH--Leading World War II authority Donald Goldstein, a professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, is worried about the state of our military--and for good reason. The army's recruitment standards are at a two-decade low, according to statistics compiled by the Defense Department and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Boston-based research organization National Priorities Project.
Goldstein says the abundance of conscripts during WWII and the Vietnam War allowed for a more diverse and larger army, but those days are long over. "Because the volunteer force is limited, the same people are serving three or four tours," says Goldstein. "The volunteers are doing the best they can, but they are overworked and underpaid. It is a growing problem. The military is forced to take people everyday that it would not have years ago."
Goldstein explains that the army is suffering from ops tempo, or too many commitments, and many of the army leaders will not admit it.
"Morale is much lower than they are willing to admit," he says.
Department of Defense statistics reveal that the percentage of new army recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003 to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. The Department of Defense's current goal is 90 percent. Also, many conscripts do not get through the first year, says Goldstein.....
And, of course, there are problems with the officer corps as well, which have been reported for some time now. In April, 2006, the NY Times reported:
April 10, 2006
Young Officers Leaving Army at a High Rate
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, April 9 -- Young Army officers, including growing numbers of captains who leave as soon as their initial commitment is fulfilled, are bailing out of active-duty service at rates that have alarmed senior officers. Last year, more than a third of the West Point class of 2000 left active duty at the earliest possible moment, after completing their five-year obligation.
It was the second year in a row of worsening retention numbers, apparently marking the end of a burst of patriotic fervor during which junior officers chose continued military service at unusually high rates.
Mirroring the problem among West Pointers, graduates of reserve officer training programs at universities are also increasingly leaving the service at the end of the four-year stint in uniform that follows their commissioning.
McCain's Extremist Out-Of-Touch Ideology
In short, McCain's views on the impact of staying in Iraq diverge sharply not just from expert opinion within the military, at the highest levels, but from a wide range of objective indicators as well. This is a clear indication of the extremist ideology that has him in its grip--an ideology that is dangerous to health of America's military, just as it is dangerous to America itself.
But that ideology is not neo-conservatism. It is merely compatible with neo-conservatism. But it goes back a good deal farther in time. It's important to understand just what it is that drives John McCain if we want to have the best possible chance to beat him--and not just by a little bit, but beat him in a way that produces a dramatic reorientation of our nation's foreign policy, as well our domestic policy.
Fortunately, a deeply illuminating look at that ideology is readily available. The day before Tsunami Tuesday, Amy Goodman, on Democracy Now interviewed Matt Welch, Editor-in-chief of the libertarian Reason Magazine and author of a new book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. I diaried about this interview shortly after it happened in "The REAL John McCain--The "Bush Doctrine" Is Actually McCain's," but that only highlighted one aspect of this truly remarkable tinterview. Here, I'm going to go deeper into it, but I still won't have exhausted its riches, so I advise everyone to read (or listen to) it for yourselves.
First off, McCain comes from one of the most extensive military family backgrounds one could possibly imagine:
MATT WELCH: John McCain--his grandfather and father were the second-ever father-son four-star admirals in the US Navy. One of the interesting things that I found out in the course of researching my book was that the first-ever father-son admirals in the US Navy were my own great-great-grandfather and his son, strangely enough, and they both commanded people named John Sidney McCain. He comes not only on his father's side, obviously, from this military background, but I believe his grandmother's side, as well. In one of his many books that he has written, he talks about how, if anything, his grandmother's side was more martial and war-making than even on his father's side. He's basically participated--some McCains have participated in every military conflict in United States history, except for maybe the first Gulf War. And right now, he has two sons who are in the military, including one who's deployed in Iraq, if I have my story straight these days.
This alone would not mean he had any particular ideological orientation, of course, particularly one at odds with the health and well-being of the military itself. But there's more...
AMY GOODMAN: In addition to being in Vietnam, his father was also--was part of the invasion of the Dominican Republic, is that right, in 1965?
MATT WELCH: He led the invasion of the Dominican Republic. His grandfather--the McCains historically had been in the Army. There was Wild Bill McCain, who was, you know, chasing Mexican bandits along the border. But then his grandfather went into the Navy right as Teddy Roosevelt was building it from, you know, a couple of tugboats into the Great White Fleet and was expanding it greatly and using it as a forward thrust of American power under the influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan, his book of the role of sea power in world history. And it became a sort of a model based on British colonialism of how a navy can guarantee the world--you know, make the world safe for democracy and bring fruits upon the empire who takes it out there.
This is what was truly formative, according to Welch. Even though McCain rebelled against the family tradition by being something of a screw-up in the service, he had grown up in an atmosphere where military imperialism was virtually the family religion:
[MATT WELCH:] But, you know, getting back to his military history, this is something, again, that is not very well understood. Not only were his parents--father and grandfather in the military, but his father used to go around giving these lectures about how, you know, the naval gap between the US and the Soviet Union was threatening democracy, how we--his nickname was Mr. Sea Power. You know, he would recite British colonialist poetry around the dinner table. They were constantly talking about the necessity for just a huge US navy to guarantee the world's security. That is the background that John McCain was just marinating in from the time he was a child. And for much of that period, whenever his father or grandfather was not out at sea, they were living on Capitol Hill, usually in some Washington, D.C. capacity. So he was sitting around the breakfast table with senators and congressmen from the time he was a kid. There's this big notion that he's a man of the people, which is actually the name of a biography of him, when in fact, down the line, he's been very much an elitist his entire life, for both good and for ill. He has just been surrounded by, you know, top historians, top senators and congressmen and top military brass.
But this tradition that he comes from is incredibly interventionist and expansionist.
Which, of course, is quite the opposite of where his electoral appeal has come from, as Welch points out in the very next sentence:
It's really interesting that in the primaries so far, if you look at the exit polls, among people who voted in the GOP primaries who consider themselves antiwar, anti-the-Iraq-war, and among voters who consider themselves angry at George Bush--and that's a quote--and among independents, McCain is beating his opponents by two-to-one. If you actually look at people who describe themselves as just Republicans, McCain has not yet won a single primary. So he is basically winning the GOP primaries on the back of the antiwar vote, when in fact he would be the most explicitly interventionist president since Teddy Roosevelt, and he certainly makes George Bush look gun-shy by comparison.
Indeed, when asked about McCain's relationship with Bush, Welch reminds us that in 2000, McCain--not Bush--was the neocon's choise. And he was openly at war with much of the rest of the right--as were the neocons, too:
MATT WELCH: It's an interesting and tortured one, you know? McCain was- not only was he running against Bush, but he was running against Bush very much as an insurgent in 2000. The Republican establishment had coalesced around Bush, and McCain and his backers- largely who are neoconservatives and surrounded the Weekly Standard Magazine, in particular, Bill Kristol and David Brooks. They were speaking a language of Teddy Roosevelt and third parties, this is an insurgency and maybe the Republican party will get blown up in the process. It was a very kind of high wire and thrilling act, and one reason why a lot of people glommed onto it. They saw that he was standing up and having daily "sister soldier" moments with the right. He was calling Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson agents of intolerance and these kind of things. So he ran this sort of very insurgent campaign, playing star wars music, you know? And George Bush was Darth Vader and McCain was Luke Skywalker. And then Bush croaked him in South Carolina in a pretty vicious campaign. I don't know if it was any more vicious than your standard vicious campaign- but then McCain went and sulked basically for a year and a half.
There was a lot of talk, we forget about it now, but there was a lot of talk in 2001 especially of- is McCain going to defect and go to the Democratic Party? He got very interested in campaign finance, which is largely a democratic initiative. He became much more interested in global warming and regulatory issues, which are more traditionally democratic. And you know there were plenty of articles about both him and the Weekly Standard people and neoconservatives in general in late 2001, before September 11th, saying "Hey look, you know, they're basically going to be democrats this time next year." Well, September 11th changed all that.
This, then is the bottom line on McCain--his conservatism consists primarily of old-style military imperialism, which makes him line up well with the neoconservatives, but not with any other faction of the GOP base.
The McCain Doctrine
In fact, Welch goes on to explain, judged by his positions, if not his rationale, McCain appears to be the neoconservative's neoconservative:
[WELCH:] The basic McCain strategy- you know in 1999 McCain advocated this policy of rogue-state rollback which is basically preemptive war three and a half years before Bush ever thought of it.
AMY GOODMAN: He threatened North Korea with extinction.
MATT WELCH: He threatened North Korea with extinction, and he elucidated this doctrine by which- wherever there is an authoritarian dictator, we support the insurgents. And, if we support the insurgent and the dictator cracks down, then we have to defend the insurgents with US force. And any time we make a threat and someone calls our bluff, we also have to use US force. It is incredibly interventionist militaristic approach towards foreign policy that he has had all along. That's the reason why neoconservatives have flocked to his cause and championed it over the years.
So, after September 11th, Bush started to embrace those ideas. That kind of policy structure grafted onto Bush and so it was natural that McCain and Bush would become closer over that time. And then- starting around 2004 and 2005, when McCain started eyeing the presidency in 2008, he began this long, slow suck-up to the right, particularly social conservatives, and also to Bush because he wanted to be the sort of front runner of the Republican establishment.
In short, the "Bush Doctrine" really ought to be called the "McCain Doctrine," which is why there is nothing the least bit unseemly about doing everything possible to tie McCain to Bush. The idea that any of this sort of reckless adventurism promotes the welfare--or even the defense--of the United States has clearly been rejected by the vast majority of the American people, and we ought to welcome every opportunity to have the election be about that.
Indeed, McCain's blindness to costs and consequences runs so deep, it's seemingly impossible to parody:
[Welch:] I asked him once at a press conference that he was giving about defense spending, I said, "Hey, look, you know, we're spending right now 50 percent of the world's total defense budget. What do you think about that share? You know, should our share be increasing, of the world's defense budget, or decreasing or whatever?" He says, Oh, yeah, it needs to increase a lot; we've got a lot of trouble in Iran, in Korea and blah, blah, blah, blah. He does not recognize a downside, a sense of game theory in which, you know, you're the biggest kid on the block and you control everything and take responsibility globally for everything, and so, you know, that it might build up resentments among people who feel like they don't have responsibility for their own affairs. He just does not see that or understand that, and I think that is kind of frightening, frankly.
If I've gone on at great length, and used a lot of other people's words, there are good reasons for it: John McCain appears to be a very formidable opponent. And certainly, when it comes to campaign organizing, one should never take anything for granted. But in reality, he is an incredibly weak, out-of-touch extremist, who should be beatable by an enormous margin--especially if Obama is our nominee. And the opportunity to capitalize on that weakness is the sort of thing that does not come around very often. Indeed, it is an opportunity that could well produce a dramatic realignment in Congress--even despite GOP gerrymandering.
In researching a related article for publication in Random Lengths News, I interviewed Welch myself--remember, Welch is a libertarian. And Welch said to me:
...the most prospectively frightening or worrying thing is that he [McCain] sees no downside at all to America policing the world. He thinks anyone who sees a downside to it has a defect in his brains.
If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee you're going to have a very clear choice on that question.
I think the single most interesting thing about Obama--to me, at least--is that he is ruining an attack campaign against a mindset. That mindset is the soft Washington consensus that always ends up endorsing war for good or for ill.
I'm not as certain as Welch is on this. I go back to the beginning of this post, and the lengths that the Democrats seemed to go to in order to set up the Iraq war blurring strategy. It's easy to imagine a great deal of pressure from within the party for Obama to avoid sharpening these obvious differences. It would be phrased differently, of course--in terms of "not wanting to look weak on defense," in terms of "not playing to McCain's strengths" and all other manner of horseshit. And, of course, the media will continue to slobber all over McCain--even if they slobber all over Obama as well. If the media slobbers over both of them, then they'll hardly want to force any sort of real confrontation of ideas.
Which is all the more reason that we should become much better versed and much more active in doing what we can to bring this clash of visions to the fore in the upcoming election. |
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