“I know how to win wars! I know how to win wars!” “And if I’m elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory, I know how to do that.” – Senator John McCain
A lot has been made of John McCain’s status as a war hero, as if he was the only POW the country has ever known. He is revered and applauded as a soldier of soldiers because he survived a five-year stint in a Vietnamese prison. Several soldiers before and after him have undergone worse and a few of them lived to tell the story, but alas, they are not campaigning to be president, so their stories are not newsworthy. The line that really gets me though, is this notion that just because senator McCain flew planes and dropped bombs on innocent civilians he must be a security or war expert. If he was such a damn fine pilot, how come he got shot down? If he was such a military strategy genius, how come he ended up in a POW camp? If he is so good at winning wars, how come he has not passed on the secret to our commanders on the ground and saved the lives of American men and women being killed every day in Iraq and Afghanistan? It is easy to claim that the so-called surge is working because Iraq has been turned into a virtually partitioned country with walls and barricades all over the place. The so-called success of the “surge” is at the expense of training a future militia armed by the United States. Just as was the case in Afghanistan, the “Awakening” militia being trained by the U.S. will turn around and use that training against American soldiers in the very near future. It is not just okay for senator McCain to scream “I know how to win wars”, he needs to tell us how he can win the peace. Unless of course, he is going to be like George W. Bush and fight perpetual wars. It is easy for him to sit in one of his numerous houses and claim that the surge is working. Let him visit Iraq today and walk around without the wall of marines and re-enforced flak jacket, wearing a bulletproof vest with Blackhawk helicopters and Apache gunships overhead. Let him go to Iraq and stay in a hotel instead of the “Green Zone”. How about driving around Baghdad in a convertible? The ordinary Iraqi who leaves home everyday and does not expect to come back home is not sure about the success of the surge. Talk about winning wars, what war exactly did John McCain win? He got captured by a bunch of rag-tag soldiers. Was he lucky to have survived five years of alleged torture? Sure. But he did not win the Vietnam war.
The U.S. is seven years into a war in Afghanistan that John McCain said we won. Today, even the senator cannot be so self-deluded to say we are “winning”. If he was such a military genius, he should know that an insurgency never ends unless the planners decide to call it quits. If military might was all it took to wipe out an insurgency, the Palestinians would be extinct by now. Hezbollah will be a historical reference only. The Kurds will not be a thorn on the side of Turkey; the Nigerian Delta will be a safe place for foreign oil workers; Somalia will be a safe and peaceful country; Kashmir will be ruled solely by either India or Pakistan. This whole facade that has been built around John McCain as a super military expert and foreign policy guru is a fraud that should make the American media ashamed. When John McCain chants “I know how to win wars! I know how to win wars!”, we expect someone in the media to have the guts to ask, what wars did you actually win, senator?
During the run-up to the war in Iraq, and the American occupation that followed, McCain’s judgment fell miserably and disastrously short. He predicted that the war would be short. He claimed that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. He argued strenuously that the U.S. would find weapons of mass destruction. In the face of thousands of soldiers dying in Iraq, he, along with president George W. Bush, announced that the mission was accomplished. This foreign policy expert embarrassingly confused Iran’s support for the Shiites in Iraq as a support for the Sunnis. The man who claims to know how to win wars was miserably inept at foreseeing what was ahead and said of Ahmed Chalabi, the miscreant who tricked the U.S. into a senseless war “He’s a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart”. Go figure, where is Chalabi today?
The U.S. has a rich history of military men who knew how to win wars including Dwight Eisenhower, who led Allied forces to victory in World War II in Europe; George Washington who steered the country through a rough civil war and Colin Powell who commanded the first Gulf War. John McCain is not one of them. These men never had a need to scream at every turn “I know how to win wars! I know how to win wars!”. Empty vessels, the saying goes, makes the loudest noise.
