FPIF Commentary |
McCain Should Know Better
Aaron Glantz | September 5, 2008
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
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John McCain seems to be running for President on the basis of his status as a former North Vietnamese Prisoner of War. Rudy Giuliani said in his speech at the Republican National Convention that McCain's refusal to accept early release showed he's a man "who believes in serving a cause greater than self-interest." In his speech, Fred Thompson said McCain's time in the "Hanoi Hilton" revealed "the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of history have sought in their leaders: strength, courage, humility, wisdom duty, [and] honor."
McCain wrapped up his speech in St. Paul with his own analysis of how that ordeal prepared him for the job of running the United States. "I was never the same again," he said. "I wasn't my own man anymore, I was my country's."
Democrats have shot back, arguing that McCain's "heroism" nearly 40 years in the past in no way qualifies him for President. Left-wing filmmaker Robert Greenwald released a new TV ad featuring Philip Butler, one of McCain's fellow POWs. In it, Butler argues that the Arizona Senator "was well-known as a very volatile guy" and not somebody he wants to see "with his finger near the red button." In a separate article published widely on the Internet, Butler (who was held as POW two years longer than McCain) wrote, "John's views on war, foreign policy, economics, environment, health care, education, national infrastructure and other important areas are much the same as those of the Bush administration."
As a journalist who has reported extensively from both Iraq and Vietnam, I see a third picture of John McCain, one who is quickly abandoning many of the lessons he learned in that hellish prison cell as part of his increasingly unprincipled quest for the presidency. It's sad to see, because John McCain should know better.
Freed by Peace Talks
More than any other leading politician, McCain should know that peace talks can be stronger and smarter than bombs, that withdrawing American soldiers can be the best way to achieve stability, and that the best way to protect American troops is to bring them home from the war zone.
John McCain should know, because he has lived this experience. After being held for nearly six years and tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, Lt. Cmdr. McCain was freed — not by a daring commando raid on an enemy compound but by a negotiated settlement arrived at in peace talks in Paris. President Richard Nixon agreed to remove U.S. troops from Vietnam within 60 days, and the North Vietnamese government agreed to release American POWs like McCain as those troops were withdrawn.
John McCain should know that no one wins in the destruction of war. As Michael Moore points out, the four-year-long carpet-bombing of North Vietnam, which John McCain engaged in, resulted in the destruction of bridges, power plants, homes, schools, and hospitals. "In the midst of the campaign, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara estimated that we were killing 1,000 civilians a week," Moore noted. "That's more than one 9/11 every single month — for 44 months."
As a young man on the front lines John McCain questioned the morality of this destruction.. Even before he was shot down during a bombing run over Hanoi, the admiral's son had questioned the human costs of armed conflict. In 1967, after McCain nearly died following a massive weapons malfunction and fire in the Gulf of Tonkin, the young Navy man told New York Times reporter R.W. Apple: "It's a difficult thing to say. But now that I've seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam."
Renewing Relations with Vietnam
McCain should know that yesterday's enemy can be tomorrow's ally and that alliances can be struck even after the United States is defeated on the field of battle. During the 1980s, McCain was one of the strongest advocates of establishing diplomatic relations with Communist Vietnam at a time when leaders of both political parties feared an angry backlash for simply talking to the other side.
In 1985, John McCain traveled to Hanoi to see Communist Vietnam for himself. He understood the value of putting the past behind him.
"When I arrived in Hanoi, I was excited to learn that my hosts had arranged for me a night's rest at Ho [Chi Minh]'s villa in exotic Ha Long Bay," McCain wrote in his 2002 memoir, Worth Fighting For. "As I ... laid my head on the pillow in the bed, in the house where Ho had slept, I knew I had received all the recompense I was likely to get for the nights in Vietnam I had spent in less comfortable circumstances many years ago. There was nothing more I could gain revisiting the war with my former enemies. Better to enjoy the evening and in the morning see to more promising pursuits, among which was helping to build a relationship with Vietnam that would serve both our peoples better than the old one had."
The John McCain of the 1980s and 1990s was a true warrior for peace. Working together with another Vietnam vet, Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts, he helped disprove the saber-rattlers' contention that Hanoi still kept thousands of American POWs in secret camps. He did this by bridging the gap between high-ranking Pentagon and Communist officials, people who had been shooting at each other just a few years before.
In 1994 the Senate passed a resolution, sponsored by Kerry and McCain, which called for an end to a U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam. "The vote will give the president the kind of political cover he needs to lift the embargo, and I expect that relatively soon," McCain told The New York Times. "I think it's a seminal event in U.S.-Vietnamese relations."
In 1995, when President Bill Clinton normalized diplomatic relations with Vietnam, John McCain was in the room.
Where's That Maverick Spirit Now?
Where is that John McCain today? He now talks about keeping the United States in Iraq for 100 years and seems to have no clue about the hardship and pain American bombing raids have on the Iraqi people. Where's the maverick's spirit of truth-telling when it comes to the lies the Bush administration told to get us into this war?
Today, McCain angrily calls out his Democratic rivals, arguing that they advocate an "arbitrary timetable" for withdrawal from Iraq "which recklessly ignores the profound human calamity and dire threats to our security that would ensue." John McCain should know better, because the history of the Vietnam War (and his involvement in it) shows that while peace takes time, it starts with the withdrawal of the U.S. military.
When the U.S. left Vietnam in 1975, the situation was indeed tragic; more than 400,000 people were rounded up by the victorious Communists and thrown into "re-education camps." More than a million didn't await that fate and fled by boat as refugees. The country's economy remained a shambles and was isolated from the outside world for years. The same seems in store for Iraq when we leave.
But Vietnam's setbacks were temporary and could not have been prevented by additional bombing runs or a "surge" of U.S. troops. Indeed, the main thing that triggered economic progress in Southeast Asia was the courage of people like John McCain — those who understood that the United States can achieve more through trade than it can through war and that tough diplomacy can achieve what a thousand bombing runs cannot.
Aaron Glantz, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, has reported from both Iraq and Vietnam. He is author of the upcoming book The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans.
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Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies.
Recommended citation:
Aaron Glantz, "McCain Should Know Better," (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, September 5, 2008).
Web location:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/5513
Production Information:
Author(s): Aaron Glantz
Editor(s): Emily Schwartz Greco
Production: Erik Leaver |
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| Name: |
COL. A.M.Khajawall [Ret] |
Date: Sep 05, 2008 |
| As a concerned disabled American Veteran and American citizen, I consider it my duty and responsibility to address the following critical issues facing the voters of our Greatgrand nation, the United States of America [USA].
The citizens of the United States of America [USA] have the ultimate power and responsibility to elect the Right Ticket with the right joint "temperament, judgment, and statesmanship" to lead our nation as well as change our nation's present and future moral, political, economic, educational, health care, energy, military, and foundational soul.
In my firm professional, personal, and political opinion, the media should help the common voter to explore and discuss the following attributes of the present Republican and Democratic presidential slates:
1. Does the joint ticket have a calm, cool, and collected " temper and impulse" [Presidential Temperament]?
2. Does each ticket have sound and sustained "Judgment and Caliber"?
3. Does each ticket have a "presidential depth and degree" in regard to their purpose, policies, and positions?
4. Does each ticket have adequate, "understanding and knowledge" of workings around Washington"?
5. Does each ticket have enough "vigor, wisdom and Vision" for the future of our beloved Great-grand Nation?
6. Does each ticket possess enough joint foreign policy experience and ex-poser based on "American Values, Virtues, Vastness, and strong soul"?
7. Are their campaign talk, slogans, ads, plans, and programs based on facts and are they free of fear, fiction, frivolous labels, unfair attacks, negativity, and impulsivity? [Danger to country and countries mission[s].
8. Ultimate irony is he stool change message and uses Palin to kill the messenger. Maverick McCain not good for USA and White House.
As an Independent registered voter I have decided to vote for Obama-Biden ticket. I am sure they will protect our national security, Strong stamina and strong soul. Rebuild our nation from bottom up in all areas of need, OBAMA-BIDEN ticket will once again restore and rebuild our global standing with the use of maximum international firm diplomacy and minimal force if and when indicated.
Yours sincerely,
COL. A.M. Khajawall [Ret] MD., Forensic psychiatrist, Colonel, US-AR / MC Combat Stress Control [Ret], Disabled American Veteran and Iraq Freedom team.
PS: This nation will not buy into kitchen sink strategy. We are getting deeper into internal and external holes thru these attacks and world is laughing on us and enjoying our partisan Pitt Bull wounds. I am sure GOP.RC, FOX, RUSH, ROVE, And McCain's his surrogates will fail to dupe, deceive, and deprive USA its deserved leadership. |
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| Name: |
DE Teodoru |
Date: Sep 23, 2008 |
| GW Bush had claimed that Iraq is not brain-dead like Terry Shivo. He insists it is "responsive." To make his case he called in a "specialist," Gen. Petraeus, his subordinate!
But GW Bush knows well that there is no prospect for victory. His goal is to hold on and avoid "pulling the plug" on Iraq before he leaves office. Anything that happens afterward will point to the new president as the "proximate cause," not Bush. Key to this prognostic trick is that the US holds on into January. That's why he is even abandoning his 2008 deadlines for a SOFA accord with Maliki. If Maliki forces Bush's successor to pull out and Iraq goes sour, it's not Bush's fault, it's something the next president did wrong as compared to the Bush Administration predecessor that had kept Iraq "responsive."
Anyone who did his third year of residency in the ICU realizes that he gets stuck intensively keeping going the vital organs of the patients that the attending physicians screwed up on the acute floors where any prospect for recovery was sacrificed to incompetence; ICU rarely results in recovery. Rather, it's the chamber of heroic efforts until the family can be talked into "pulling the plug." John McCain would do well to consider that fact as he might take charge of an irreversible mess. His claim that we "had," " have" or "will" succeed to pull off a miracle (he never settles on a tense for "victory") can only be convincing if he traps himself claiming that Bush was an excellent physician who pulled it from death's grasp with his "surge"-- for which McCain takes credit in the Washington Times!
The facts, however, indicate that the current Bush resort to short-cuts short-shrifts prospects for stability. US forces are relying more and more on remote killing from the air, resulting in wide-spread civilian deaths. A recent UN study shows that 1 in 5 Iraqi refugees left Baghdad during the Petraeus surge, having suffered as collateral damage victims or victims of killings by sectarian assassins in previously safe areas. These are the technical and skilled cram of that nation. US forces have only walled in homogenized areas, a situation that cannot stand if there is to be an Iraqi nation. Petraeus, now that he is no longer responsible for events in Iraq, stressed the reversibility of the current alleged "stable" state. But he refuses to either discuss the effects of his Israel "killer teams" aping or the disappearance of the enemy into a wider regional war expansion to all the nations in the region. The pre-surge Anbar Sunni uprising, according to Iraq Gov intel, has turned into a safe base for the insurgents and the Iraqi Gov is going after its leaders as if they were still insurgents. At the same time, Maliki has put forward a SOFA concept that no US President can accept; Maliki won't budge, only offering us a chance to hasten our departure. What is clear is that the Iraq War has become much more complicated, involving all the nations in the region as advisers, supporters and funders for the various factions. To speak of alQaeda in Iraq now is to extent what EJ Dionne so rightly said about the Bush Administration: "It is on A LONG VACATION FROM COMPLEXITY."
The surge is a tourniquet applied north of a cut in the artery that incompetent command carelessly made. The artery feeds an entire limb-- our military-- and if we do not repair the artery the Green Machine will go gangrene because we cannot keep sending soldiers into combat for repeated tours. On average soldiers in Iraq are about 5 years older than in Vietnam. Thus, casualties leave widows and orphans or families that must forever take care of disabled injury survivors who originally expected to take care of their families.
This nation has lived on lies and that it has done so for so long allows John McCain to justify to himself the deception that he and his friends Senators Lieberman and Graham are perpetuating. These lies may well pass accepted by the 60's generation that since adolescence lived on illusions, be they chemical or ignorance based.
If I thought binLaden alive, I would imagine that watching videos of Sec. of Treasury Paulson mumbling in desperation and smiling saying to himself: "By the Grace of God, I can say 'mission accomplished,'" for he has lived (???) to see America bankrupt and mired in Muslim lands, Afghanistan and Iraq, despised by all Muslims and still so disabled as to be unable to respond to Russian retaliation against Georgia and its feeding of nuclear technology to Iran. At the same time, having sought to impose a production agreement, where the US oil industry takes a 40% cut of Iraq's oil for 35 years but also decides on how much oil Iraq is to produce instead of the Iraqis, the DoS has sought to settle for a service agreement where US companies get payed for services rendered. Instead, Iraq canceled these deals completely and made a $50 billion accord with China. Today, with the dollar so weakened by the Wall Street bail-out, oil is again rising in price. So what has the "surge" done other than gangrene our armed forces, stood helpless as Maliki goes after the very "Awakening" of Sunnis allied to the US, and got the militias to lay low while killers continue to-- admittedly more selectively-- kill each other's leaders at will?
Will alQaeda get to watch America collapse on itself with various ethnic groups blaming each other, possibly producing a Holocaust in response to the reckless and false neocon linking of Israel to our War on Terror?
We need to finally look ahead and add things up using calculus instead of arithmetic a la Bush. The surge slowed down the deterioration of a brain-dead war pretending that it has been maintained "responsive." It's time to pull the plug. 9/11 would have never happened had the airlines not violated the law by leaving open the pilot's cabin door, allowing four airliners to be seized each within ten minutes. If we stopped exaggeratingng the capabilities of alQaeda-- an amorphous shibboleth-- we could find a way to stop the hemorrhage of our Treasury and the gangrene of our military, not allowing Bush to pass off the inevitable consequence of his criminal negligence on his successor. Will we pull the plug or will we stay until the Iraqis kick us out?
John McCain refuses to deal with that question as he babbles about "victory." I find that to be treason by a man who seems to have done that before making propaganda broadcasts for Hanoi. I don't hold against him what he was forced to do as a POW but I sure hold against him the lies he is telling about the surge in Iraq. |
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| Name: |
andy |
Date: Oct 23, 2008 |
| i can not add so i will just agree |
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