I don’t know what happened to John McCain. He used to be alright. Now that his last real chance at the Presidency is here though, he’s starting to go a little nuts. First he said that he wants Roe v. Wade to be a state matter (which is pretty much legally impossible at this point, and is only really brought up to divide people) “like gay marriage”, and now he’s drawing an imaginary line in the (imaginary) sand for his Democratic challengers. Support a troop buildup in Iraq, or support the terrorists.
“The consequences of failure are so severe that I will exhaust every possibility to try to fix this situation. Because it’s not the end when American troops leave. The battleground shifts, and we’ll be fighting them again,” McCain said. “You read Zarqawi, and you read bin Laden. … It’s not just Iraq that they’re interested in. It’s the region, and then us.”
“We left Vietnam. It was over. We just had to heal the wounds of war,” he said. “We leave this place, chaos in the region, and they’ll follow us home. So there’s a great deal more at stake here in this conflict, in my view, a lot more.”
How was Vietnam “over” when we left? I don’t think everyone gathered around and agreed that Vietnam was over. People had been saying we should leave Vietnam for years before we actually did. When we did, the “chaos in the region” (which was also called by the Vietnamese a reuinification under a populist government) did not follow us home. If you’d really like to compare this war to Vietnam, I think the lesson to be learned is “get out as fast as possible”.
Republicans need to stop fighting wars on ideas. John McCain is now just another politician guilty of grouping Iraq with terrorism without any evidence.
