{"id":12417,"date":"2018-09-05T07:47:32","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T11:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=12417"},"modified":"2023-09-05T11:00:15","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T15:00:15","slug":"usa-today-mccains-disastrous-idealism-bombing-and-wishful-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/05\/usa-today-mccains-disastrous-idealism-bombing-and-wishful-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"USA TODAY: McCain’s Disastrous “Idealism” – Bombing and Wishful Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

USA TODAY, September 5, 2018<\/h1>\n

John McCain combined bombing with wishful thinking. We should learn from his mistakes.<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n
\n

John McCain has been lauded for his service, but his military crusades were rooted more in rhetoric than realism. They have failed to spread democracy<\/em>.<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

The late Sen. John McCain is being lauded far and wide for his long career of public service.\u00a0\u00a0Rep. John Lewis, the famous civil rights activist, hailed McCain as a \u201cwarrior for peace<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0In reality, McCain embodied a mix of moralism and militarism that worked out badly for America and the world.<\/p>\n

When he was awarded the Liberty Medal last October at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, McCain declared, “We\u00a0live\u00a0in a land made of ideals… We are\u00a0the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He warned that it would be \u201cunpatriotic\u201d to \u201cabandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe.\u201d\u00a0But idealism has fared better in political speeches than in the lives of American soldiers or purported foreign beneficiaries.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crusades that were righteous but not realistic<\/h3>\n

McCain was first elected to Congress in 1983 and, during the 1990s, \u201cslowly moved toward the idealist camp and became one of his party’s foremost advocates for the use of force abroad<\/a>,\u201d the\u00a0Boston Globe\u00a0noted. In his 2000 presidential campaign, he pledged a \u201crogue state rollback<\/a>,\u201d which sounded like \u201cfill-in-the-blank\u201d declarations of war against any regime the United States disapproved. He was defeated in the Republican primaries by George W. Bush, who sounded reasonable and moderate in comparison. However, after 9\/11, Bush adopted McCain\u2019s bellicose vision and promised to \u201crid the world of evildoers<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCain was one of the most foremost advocates of attacking Iraq and served as honorary\u00a0co-chairman<\/a> of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.\u00a0In 2002, he declared that invading that nation would be\u00a0\u201cfairly easy<\/a>\u201d and that \u201cwe can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time.\u201d Two months after the fall of Baghdad, McCain proclaimed that the war was \u201cfully vindicated<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps McCain\u2019s faith in his ideals blinded him to political venality.<\/strong>\u00a0When Bush created a\u00a0pseudo-independent commission<\/a> in 2004\u00a0to examine the failures regarding missing Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, he selected McCain as one of the nine members. On the day his appointment was announced, McCain publicly vindicated Bush even before the evidence came in: \u201cThe president of the United States, I believe, would not manipulate any kind of information for political gain or otherwise<\/a>.\u201d McCain\u2019s declaration of faith tacitly ignored the presidential deceits that spurred the\u00a0Mexican-American War<\/a>,\u00a0the Spanish-American War of 1898<\/a>, the\u00a0First World War<\/a>, and the\u00a0Vietnam War<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Facts were sometimes not permitted to impede McCain\u2019s righteous crusades.<\/strong>\u00a0He was ridiculed as “the new Baghdad Bob<\/a>” who took a “magic carpet ride<\/a>” after he visited a Baghdad market in 2007 and claimed \u201cNever have I been able to go out into the city as I was today.\u201d (Rep. Mike Pence, who accompanied McCain, ludicrously asserted that the scene was \u201cjust like any open-air market in Indiana<\/a> in the summertime.\u201d)<\/p>\n

At the time, he was\u00a0wearing a flak jacket, accompanied by 100 U.S. troops, and protected overhead by attack helicopters. After McCain\u00a0departed, Iraqi merchants\u00a0scoffed at his claims that the market was safe<\/a>.\u00a0Despite claiming vast progress,\u00a0he declared in 2008 that it was\u00a0\u201cfine with me<\/a>\u201d to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for \u201ca hundred years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Iraq war showed that the media would valorize almost any politician who urged attacking purported bad guys. In 2011, McCain was outspoken in demanding U.S. bombing of Libya<\/a> \u2014\u00a0widely considered the biggest foreign policy blunder of the Obama administration.\u00a0Yet he had sung\u00a0a different, conciliatory tune two years earlier when he visited Tripoli.\u00a0 At that time\u00a0McCain\u00a0met with officials of Moammar Gaddafi\u2019s regime and \u201cpledged to see what he could do to move things forward<\/a> in Congress\u201d regarding a Libyan request for U.S. military equipment, according to a confidential U.S. embassy cable disclosed by Wikileaks.<\/p>\n

McCain ignored lessons of history<\/h3>\n

McCain returned to the Middle East for an encore visit with Syrian rebels in 2013<\/a>, who he then ceaselessly boosted as a moderate alternative to the regime of Bashar Assad.\u00a0Under pressure from McCain and others, the Obama administration provided massive military aid <\/a>to anti-Assad forces,\u00a0but much of the weaponry ended up in the hands of terrorist groups. The absurdity of U.S. policy became undeniable\u00a0when Pentagon-backed Syrian rebels openly battled<\/a> CIA-backed rebels.<\/p>\n

Most of the American media ignored McCain\u2019s role in making the Syrian conflict longer and bloodier than it otherwise would have been. This is no surprise since politicians are perennially absolved by the ideals they invoke. But the moral bonus points are void beyond the national borders. Idealistic pretenses can spur vast resentment because \u201cthe American judges himself by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner judges him<\/a> by what he does,\u201d as\u00a0Irving Babbitt explained after World War One.<\/p>\n

McCain\u2019s career illustrates the peril of exalting uplifting rhetoric over\u00a0the lessons of history. There are plenty of nasty dictators in the world but U.S. military campaigns have dismally failed to spread democracy this century. America can no longer afford an idealism that consists of little more than combining bombing and wishful thinking.<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Bovard,\u00a0author of\u00a0Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a>,\u00a0is\u00a0a member of\u00a0USA TODAY\u2019s\u00a0Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter:\u00a0@JimBovard.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USA TODAY, September 5, 2018 John McCain combined bombing with wishful thinking. We should learn from his mistakes. by James Bovard John McCain has been lauded for his service, but his military crusades were rooted more in rhetoric than realism. They have failed to spread democracy. The late Sen. John McCain is being lauded far […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nUSA TODAY: McCain's Disastrous "Idealism" - Bombing and Wishful Thinking - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/05\/usa-today-mccains-disastrous-idealism-bombing-and-wishful-thinking\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"USA TODAY: McCain's Disastrous "Idealism" - Bombing and Wishful Thinking - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"USA TODAY, September 5, 2018 John McCain combined bombing with wishful thinking. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12417"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18639,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12417\/revisions\/18639"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}