Thinking McCain Through

So I watched Senator McCain this morning on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, and decided to drop all preconceptions and simply come to terms with the somewhat improbable, but nonetheless existent, possibility that he might become the 44th President of the United States. In which case, I must ask myself, what then? What's he like?

The interview occurred in one of Mr. McCain's many nice homes, this one in Cottonwood, Arizona, where two chairs were arranged before a stone fireplace in a light and airy room. At one point two of McCain's dogs romped into the room, which had a homey, if somewhat contrived, feel to it. I mean, if an interview for national television is in progress, with all the tech and camera people present in and around the house, with electric cable and light stands everywhere, are we really to believe that the dogs were simply running loose? I'll let that go. I was determined to listen with an open mind.

The first thing I noticed was that Senator McCain is enormously proud of his decision to support President Bush's decision to add 30,000 American troops to Iraq in January, 2007. McCain sees this decision as the fulcrum point for the survival of Western Civilization As We Know It. Without his courageous support for a decision which Bush was going to undertake anyway, the opposition be damned, a kind of End Times scenario would be spooling out in Iraq even at this very moment. Genocide, Iranian invasion, Kurdish-Turkey combat, a wider war involving all countries with Arabs or Persians in them - you name it, it would be happening. A kind of Express Down Elevator to Hell. It's somewhat unnerving that Senator McCain recites the grim details of Armageddon in a completely wooden, almost somnambulistic monotone, as if he accidentally doubled up on the Xanax.

Back to the objectivity, the attitude of the day. None of these terrible things happened because John McCain had the courage of his convictions and voiced his support for the introduction of 30,000 additional troops into Baghdad. Since I am so utterly gracious in honoring his victory, the victory of being right, I know I can count on Senator McCain's similar magnanimity in granting the truth of the related observation that Iraq was in a condition to fall completely apart in January 2007 because of the dumb idea of invading the country in the first place. If I think this, Senator McCain has a few words for me, to wit: not so fast, my friend. For this very question was asked and McCain had the following, zinging comeback:

MCCAIN: I said that Saddam Hussein caused a -- imposed a threat to the United States of America and our security. And the Oil for Food scandal, the $12 billion he was skimming, the fact that he had said that he had in operation and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction, the fact that this society that he ruled in such a brutal fashion was really awful. And he did pose a long-term threat to the security of the United States of America.

So let's take a look, objectively, and see what we have here. The first sentence and the last, in my opinion, do not follow from the factual predicates of the other sentences. The conclusion that Iraq posed a threat to the security of the United States needs some sort of empirical support, and that I don't see. In more detail:

1. I don't know of anyone, even W, who actually contends that we invaded Iraq because Saddam was skimming from the Oil for Food program. We knew he was doing so for about twelve years before we invaded, we knew he was building increasingly opulent monuments to himself with the money, but it's not why we went to war.

2. "The fact that he [Saddam] had said he had in operation and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction." It was the public position of the Iraqi government, in the months immediately before the invasion and as announced by Tariq Aziz, Iraq's Ambassador to the United Nations, that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Hans Blix, as Chief Inspector of the UN weapons detail, said that he could not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. While their contents have never been disclosed (only scoffed at by W), Iraq made a 13,000 page document dump to Blix's team shortly before the invasion, in an effort to verify the destruction of all weapons (all part of the very difficult task of proving the negation of a proposition). Adding the phrase "and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction" does not add anything to the argument. Even under Bush's rather elastic standards for justifying "preemptive wars," I don't think we ever got to the point where we invaded based on "announced intention."

3. "The fact that this society he [Saddam] ruled in such a brutal fashion was really awful." I think McCain's saying that Saddam's brutal reign was awful, not the society itself, but that's one of the difficulties of McCain's very inarticulate way of expressing himself. It's hard to know what he means. Either way, this again is not a legitimate casus belli. Elsewhere in the interview, McCain talked about his desire to kick Russia out of the G-8 because of its "autocratic" tendencies, itself a very stupid idea, of course. We're not going to get anywhere with Iran or China if we drive Russia into isolation again. But I assume even McCain would draw the line at ostracism and not propose war because of the "awful regime" in Russia.

McCain's odd bill of particulars seems to betray an uneasiness about the actual reasons we invaded Iraq; essentially, he's admitting we didn't have any good reasons. McCain doesn't say, as Bush did, that "everyone knew" Saddam had WMD, probably because he knows that just isn't true and he lacks Bush's ease with casual lying (to McCain's credit). But despite the absence of a good reason, at least according to his own logic, the decision to invade was right.

Elsewhere, McCain confirmed that he's against gay adoption and affirmative action, and for nuclear power, drilling for oil and making permanent the Bush tax cuts. Remaining as objective as I can, I nevertheless found his talk more or less devoid of any important ideas which are commensurate with the serious challenges (economic and environmental, primarily, but also in terms of health care) actually facing the country. I don't think he really has any ideas about how to reinvigorate the country; I think the McCain presidential run is about a series of attitudes and positions on certain issues which he sees as (a) defense-related or (b) moral values. In that sense, I think he's a classic reactionary, and I think the election of a reactionary, at this perilous time, would be a tragic mistake for the country.