"Maverick" foreign policy

These three articles taken together tell me a couple of important things about McCain's foreign policy:

McCain's mixed signals on foreign policy by Paul Richter Los Angeles Times 03/16/08

Even if Dems win, total Iraq exit uncertain by Carolyn Lochhead San Francisco Chronicle 03/17/08

Hothead McCain by Robert Dreyfuss 03/06/08 (03/24/08 issue)

The Richter and Lochhead articles both promote variations on the theme of the Maverick's relative moderation in foreign policy. Richter emphasizes that the Maverick has taken position that seemed to put him at odds with the Republican Party consensus of the moment. He is a big maverick, you know. (At least in the mind of many reporters and pundits.)

Lochhead, who reliably reflects the conventional press wisdom of the moment, tells us that it's really not so certain how much Clinton and Obama are against the war and that, hey, that bold Maverick might decide to pull out instead of staying for 95 more years.

I don't know how much of this is being generated by the Maverick's campaign and how much by general press corps adoration and general cluelessness. But Dreyfuss' piece seems to be much more realistic about our 100 Years War Maverick:

Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.

"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."

Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax. (my emphasis)

And there's good reason to believe that 100 years war crack wasn't just hyperbole:

In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.

Tags: iraq war, mccain