Joe Conason has a great piece in Salon on the similarities between John McCain's attitudes toward Vietnam and his attitudes toward Iraq.
Indeed, what is most striking about McCain's attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won -- that we should have won -- with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable," he said. "I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed." Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal."
|
Given how McCain feels about Vietnam, we can assume that the concept of a "lost cause" is alien to the man's mind. Like Vietnam, there is no winning -- it was doomed from day one. Logic dictates that wars without purpose can't be won, because there's no objective to achieve,
Not a realistic ones, anyway.
For McCain, it's all about winning or losing, not whether anything we're doing makes any damned sense at all. He seems to think that admitting a mistake is akin to forfeiting a football game by quitting in the middle of it.
He doesn't seem capable of considering foreign policy objectively or realistically.
