McCain: Re-fighting Vietnam?
Posted: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:12 AM by Mark Murray
In the upcoming New York Times magazine, political writer Matt Bai examines McCain’s thinking on foreign policy, as well as why the Arizona senator is alone among his fellow Vietnam vets serving in the Senate in supporting the Iraq war. Here are some select passages from the piece:
-- “Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, he is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there… There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world.”
-- “If it is true that McCain’s Vietnam experience left him with a different attitude about foreign wars from the one held by those who were on the ground, then it certainly wasn’t apparent earlier in his political career. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, after he arrived in the Senate, McCain was, in fact, an outspoken opponent of American intervention in faraway lands — at least in cases where the country wasn’t willing to lose thousands of lives to achieve its aims… By the time McCain ran for president in 2000, he was the one arguing in debates for a more robust military presence in humanitarian crises, while George W. Bush forswore ‘nation building’ and vowed a more ‘humble’ foreign policy. During that campaign, McCain introduced the closest thing he had found to a doctrine for foreign intervention: the ‘rogue-state rollback,’ under which he proposed arming and training internal forces that might ultimately overthrow menacing regimes in countries like Iraq, Iran and North Korea.”
-- “It’s clear, though, that on the continuum that separates realists from idealists, McCain sits much closer to the idealist perspective… He makes a point of meeting with dissidents when he visits countries like Georgia and Uzbekistan and has championed the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the Burmese resistance. Most important, as he made clear in his preamble to our interview, McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet.”
-- “The lesson McCain drew from Vietnam all those years ago is that you cannot turn your back on a war when at last you figure out how to win it, and he is determined not to let that happen again. Far from having failed to internalize the legacy of Vietnam, as some of his friends in the Senate suspect, he is, if anything, entirely driven by it. ‘I don’t think you can isolate John’s views in Iraq from his experience in Vietnam,’ Gary Hart told me. ‘Whether he is aware of it or not — and I want to tread carefully here, because I don’t like psychologizing people — I don’t think he can separate those things in his mind. In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War.’” More: “McCain’s main reason for continuing on in Iraq seems to be that we’re already there and must not accept defeat, and that’s an argument that probably feels all too familiar to many Americans who lived through a decade of aimless war in Vietnam, to no discernible end.”
The New York Times: “The Rev. John C. Hagee, whose anti-Catholic remarks created a controversy when Senator John McCain received his endorsement for the Republican presidential nomination with fanfare, has issued a letter expressing regret for ‘any comments that Catholics have found hurtful.’”
The AP: “Hagee's support for McCain has drawn cries of outrage from some Catholic leaders who have called on McCain to reject Hagee's endorsement. The likely Republican nominee has said he does not agree with some of Hagee's past comments, but did not reject his support. The letter was to the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, “one of Hagee's sharpest critics, said he accepted the apology and planned to meet with Hagee Thursday in New York. ‘I got what I wanted,’ Donohue said in an interview. ‘He's seen the light, as they like to say. So for me it's over.’
“The controversy had threatened to pursue McCain throughout the campaign, potentially hurting his standing with Catholic voters. A narrow majority of Roman Catholics voted for President Bush in 2004 and for Al Gore in 2000, critical votes in close elections. The letter came after Hagee met Friday for lunch in a French restaurant in downtown Washington with 22 influential religious activists, virtually all of them Catholics.”
