An opinion piece. IMO, he makes some good points. I am a bit confused, though, as to exactly which war McCain won?
In recent weeks, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has touted his credentials as a Vietnam war hero and denounced rival Barack Obama as inexperienced and naive on national security issues. In one campaign advertisement, McCain suggests that his POW experience shows he’s ready to be commander in chief. In another spot, he blames Obama for holding not “a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan” and for not having visited Iraq “in years.” In a recent speech about Iraq, McCain declared, “I know how to win wars.”
But his understanding of why we lost in Vietnam strongly suggests the opposite: that under a McCain administration, Iraq would come to resemble Vietnam even more than it already does. Of course, the pundits have hailed McCain’s considerable foreign policy experience as among his chief assets. But his inability to learn the right lessons from Vietnam has shaped his flawed Iraq war policy and revealed national security to be among his greatest deficits as a candidate.
It could have been different. Shortly after McCain returned home from a Hanoi POW camp in 1973, he attended the National War College at Fort McNair. He spent the next year attempting to understand what had gone wrong in Vietnam. He read David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” and the Pentagon Papers, among other works. He concluded that U.S. military and civilian leaders had failed to level with the American people about the absence of military progress in the war. These leaders underestimated the enemy they faced, never established clear-cut objectives and were unable to sustain popular support for the war. At first, McCain’s critique was reasonable, fair and incisive.
He also returned from Vietnam convinced that torture was unacceptable, anti-war demonstrators had the right to dissent and draft dodgers should not be judged too harshly. When he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, McCain expressed his belief that Vietnam informed his vote against keeping Marines in Lebanon.
“The longer we stay,” he said, “... the harder it will be for us to leave.” (Shortly thereafter, 241 service members, mostly Marines, died in a suicide bomb attack on their barracks in Beirut.) But McCain’s early responsible judgments about the defeat in Vietnam were soon replaced by a much more simplistic and hawkish explanation for why America lost: As McCain later put it, America “limited the tools at our disposal” and “lost the will to fight.” In a breathtaking bit of revisionist history, he asserted that if America had “taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power, ... we ultimately would have prevailed.” McCain had become enamored with Ronald Reagan, who called Vietnam “a noble cause” and blamed defeat on a government that was “afraid to win.”
McCain’s one-hand-tied-behind-our-back theory has clouded his judgment about the war in Iraq and about America’s national security challenges at large. Shortchanging cultural, historical, geographic and political factors in his analysis of both Vietnam and Iraq, McCain endorsed President Bush’s belief that a military solution to Iraq has always been within America’s grasp. The son and grandson of admirals, McCain came to view Vietnam as primarily a lesson in the scope of American military power: U.S. war fighters could defeat any enemy if policymakers let them fight freely. Moreover, they could mold countries as diverse and distant as Vietnam and Iraq to America’s democratic liking.
McCain’s unswerving faith in the efficacy of American bombs and bullets explains why he has been so wrong about the war in Iraq — and it bodes ill for a McCain presidency. Shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2003, McCain told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that “Iraq is not Vietnam.” However, more than five years, 4,000 U.S. lives and half a trillion dollars later, 140,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq; despite the decrease in violence during the surge, victory remains an American fiction. This war has no clear end in sight, but McCain even this week is claiming that victory in Iraq is still feasible.
In his approach to Iraq, McCain has also ignored several other crucial Vietnam-era lessons. In the 1980s and ’90s, McCain himself insisted that the Vietnam War taught the U.S. that authorizing the use of force had to be “readily explainable to the man on the street.” Yet since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCain has mocked his own litmus test for war. He initially explained the war as a way to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. When no weapons were found, he joined Bush in shifting the justification for war — from Saddam’s human rights abuses to the presence of Al Qaeda to spreading democracy to the Middle East.
McCain has also failed to recall how Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and other U.S. officials hyped the consequences of a withdrawal from Vietnam. In the 1960s and ’70s, America’s leaders argued that leaving would empower the Soviet Union, doom all of Southeast Asia to Communism and severely harm U.S. credibility in the world. McCain has grown adept at reprising such comments. If America withdrew from Iraq, “profound ... consequences” would follow, he has said. America’s enemies would be “empower[ed],” America’s security would be “put ... at risk” and “America’s leadership in the world” would be endangered.
The last lesson from Vietnam that McCain has ignored is the responsibility to level with Americans about battlefield progress, or lack thereof. Like his Vietnam-era predecessors, McCain has engaged in surreal obfuscations. He visited Baghdad’s central market with other members of Congress in April 2007. Minimizing the recent wave of suicide bombings in which scores of Iraqis had died, McCain declared that the market was safe and that significant sectors in Baghdad were secure, too. What he didn’t mention is that he was accompanied by more than 100 troops in armored Humvees and that attack helicopters hovered above.
Playing down the anarchy and bloodshed in the streets of Iraq’s capital, McCain proclaimed that the United States was making clear military progress. With these misleading comments, his almost single-minded devotion to a military solution in Iraq and his get-tough talk of achieving a “victory” after so many years of fighting and occupation, McCain has come to resemble the leaders who bore responsibility for America’s last great quagmire, in the jungles of Vietnam.
Matthew Dallek, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, writes a monthly column about history and politics for Politico.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11992.html