Why Does Anyone Listen to McCain?
I only just got around to reading this Frank Rich op-ed from three weeks ago but I enjoyed it enough to share here. This really says it all:
Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.
Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued.
This isn’t just surreal with regards to Afghanistan; there are no penalties for being wrong in any foreign policy matter if your default setting is more force. Rich’s target in this case is Senator McCain, and to a lesser degree his two collegues Senators Graham and Lieberman. These three, led primarily by McCain, have been wrong about a lot of things since 9/11 and yet not only do they continue to make grand statements, more incredibly, the media continues to seek them out for wisdom. Rich again:
Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”
This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.
Rich goes on to pick apart various statements made by McCain and Lieberman. Its interesting though, as Matt Yglesias notes, that McCain and company are entirely predictable. They always advocate for the same thing. Here’s Yglesias:
The key to understanding McCain’s strategic “thought” is that he loves war. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to start on any given day is the war he wants to start. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to escalate on any given day is the war he wants to escalate. The entire rest of his erstwhile worldview will just revolve around that.
I’ll repeat the title of this post: Why does anyone listen to McCain?
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