The real John McCain & America's love of war

McCain was not, generally speaking, a man of strong beliefs. One of the most honest things he ever said was that he didn’t run for president to enact reforms or out of some “grand sense of patriotism,” but simply because “it had become my ambition to be president.” If anything, he often seemed bored by domestic issues, and was even famous after a fashion for “reaching across the aisle” on matters like campaign finance.

But he did have one unshakeable conviction: Wherever America had a foreign policy problem, the solution was always to bomb the fuck out of someone.

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[H]e was the torchbearer for the purest bipartisan value that exists in Washington: military interventionism. He never saw an invasion he didn’t support, and it’s sadly fitting that the last piece of legislation to bear his name was a massive military spending hike that scored the rare trifecta of support from mainstream Democrats, Republicans and Donald Trump.

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Between 1963 and 1974, we dropped two million tons of ordnance on Laos — not North Vietnam, but Laos — which works out to “a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours per day, for nine years.”

The death toll from that one country is said to be 70,000 (50,000 during the war, 20,000 who died later from unexploded bombs). Similar operations in North Vietnam are said to have killed 182,000 civilians, and estimates about bombing deaths in Cambodia range from 30,000 to 150,000.

Add another 400,000 maimed and an additional 500,000 gruesome birth defects chalked up to the use of Agent Orange, and you start to get a sense of the scale of civilian suffering caused by our invasion of Indochina.

I bring this up because the McCain view of what happened there — that we “lost” in Vietnam only because we were “limited” to, say, 2 million tons of bombs and 580,000 air missions in places like Laos — continues to this day to be a mainstream belief.

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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.

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We’ve never gotten around to the view most of the rest of the world holds: America committed mass war crimes there, including “genocide, the use of forbidden weapons, maltreatment and killing of prisoners, violence and forceful movement of prisoners.”

McCain’s thinking never moved an inch in that direction. This is why he later refused to see the madness of entering a host of other countries, including Iraq.

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In 2009, noting “we are not winning” in Afghanistan, McCain again said we needed to double down, not back out: “The scale of resources required to prevail will be enormous, and the timetable will be measured in years, not months.”

McCain’s famed solution for Iran was “that old Beach Boys song,” which he sang: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” He was also in favor of intervention in Libya, Nigeria, Kosovo and Bosnia, among others. His take on Syria: “The only realistic [solution]… is with foreign air power.”

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More recently, McCain voted to block a deal to end American involvement in the increasingly genocidal Saudi-led campaign in Yemen. Just as the images of dead and maimed Vietnamese children never changed minds about that war, the similar scenes emanating from Yemen have not penetrated Washington thought processes today.

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We can learn from the Vietnamese, and, in a spirit of forgiveness, stipulate that McCain was a family man and a respected colleague to those in the Senate.

What we can’t do is pretend that we don’t have a serious untreated addiction to war, one that survives McCain, who was maybe the ultimate symbol of the problem. The late senator was both a victim and a perpetuator of our national tragedy, which begins with an inability — still — to face our bloody past.

  Matt Taibbi