John McCain Is Reliving Vietnam

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is an angry old man who wants to rewrite his experience in Vietnam by reinventing the war in Iraq. Yesterday, in the first of three policy addresses McCain will give before he announces his candidacy at the end of the month, he once again said signs of progress are real and measurable in the Bush administration’s security plan in Baghdad. Ironically, yesterday a bomb breached that security plan and went off in the parliament building in Baghdad's green zone. As Jonathan Alter said in his article in Newsweek (April 16th issue, “McCain’s Meltdown”), “If it (the surge) fails, as most analysts outside the Bush administration believe it will, McCain will either have to reverse course in the fall or go into the primaries as the fiasco's main cheerleader. To ratchet up the irony, he has said repeatedly that he doesn't believe that Bush is putting in enough additional troops. That means McCain is betting his political future on a strategy he believes is flawed, executed by a president he has never much liked. “To understand why he's doing this, we need to go back to his own experience in a faraway war. ‘This is all about Vietnam,’ says a longtime diplomat who insists on anonymity because he's supporting another candidate. ‘You can see it in his face. This triggers all the complexities of his father and grandfather and the code of honor he has written about and believes in deeply. It's hitting him in his gut. It's not a rational thing. If it were, he'd listen to the advisers who are telling him to move toward a diplomatic solution.’" Yesterday, when McCain spoke to several hundred cadets at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, he said, "I understand the frustration caused by our mistakes in this war. I sympathize with the fatigue of the American people…but I also know the toll a lost war takes on an army and a country. It is the right road. It is necessary and just." The only way John McCain can make it right for the US to have left Vietnam without crushing the enemy is for John McCain to ensure that the US stays in Iraq and crushes the enemy there. The only problem is, the US started the war in Iraq. The war never was necessary, it always was unjust and the enemy cannot be crushed because the Bush administration neocons bungled their initial attempt to control Middle East oil from the onset. Barack Obama condemned McCain’s speech, saying, “Progress in Iraq cannot be measured by the same ideological fantasies that got us into this war -- it must be measured by the reality of the facts on the ground. And today those sobering facts tell us to change our strategy and bring a responsible end to this war. What we need today is a surge in honesty." Every day McCain becomes more angry and further removed from reality. Finally, in his 70th year, John McCain has become totally unhinged by the war in Vietnam.