McCain Wrong on Vietnam

I respect John McCain, and I really wanted him to be the candidate in 2000, I would have voted for him instead of Nader. But McCain does have a lot of problems besides the flip-flops that allowed him to get the nomination this time around. He's less-Maverick than he used to be, but his biggest problem may come from his greatest "strength": his perceived expertise of foreign relations and war. From Joe Conason at Salon via Common Dreams:

"The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn’t do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake — and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.

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.”

Consider this next time McCain says he wants us to stay in Iraq for an undetermined length of time. If McCain had been in Nixon's shoes, we might still be fighting in Vietnam. And he would think that was a good thing. The choice is clear, folks.