DEL.ICIO.USMcCain, warrior no matter what the situation
Sen. John McCain has seized on the Russian invasion of Georgia as a chance to demonstrate to the American people what kind of president he would be on foreign policy matters.
For better or worse, I think he’s succeeded. McCain has clearly been more confrontational and aggressive than the Bush White House, going so far as to announce that in the wake of the invasion, “We are all Georgians,” a statement that implies a degree of commitment that the United States is not in a position to honor.
Even more startling was McCain’s decision, as a mere candidate for president, to send personal envoys to confer with Georgia’s leadership. Such a step is the prerogative only of a president, and is an act of dangerous presumption at an extremely delicate time.
To some Americans, McCain’s rhetoric has nonetheless communicated an image of authority that they find reassuring in a president. It also confirms him as an instinctive type of leader, someone whose response to a crisis is driven more by his own character than by the specifics of a challenge.
That has produced a consistent response to a wide range of policy questions.
In 1998 — three years before the attacks of Sept. 11 that supposedly drove our decision to invade Iraq — McCain joined men such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others in signing a letter that urged President Clinton to attack and remove Saddam Hussein.
“The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction,” said the letter. It had been drafted and circulated by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, a group that advocated a much more aggressive use of American military power not just in Iraq but around the globe.
In 1999, when President Clinton decided to launch air attacks to stop Serbian attacks on civilians in Kosovo, most Republicans in Congress opposed military intervention. McCain was also a harsh critic of the Clinton policy, but for a very different reason: It wasn’t aggressive enough.
McCain claimed — incorrectly, it turned out — that bombing alone would never work. Instead, he wanted to send tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the region, ready to intervene.
“Militarily, you just go in and drive them out of Kosovo,” he said at the time. “Yes, the terrain is terrible; yes, the Serbs are tough. But … if we can’t prevail over a country the size of Ohio with 10 million people, we’ve wasted several trillion dollars in defense spending.”
In the Republican primaries of 2000, the hard-line conservative foreign policy “experts” who later pushed hardest for an invasion of Iraq did not support George W. Bush. Their candidate was McCain, because they believed he would be most likely to conduct the sort of militarily interventionist policy they advocated.
More recently, McCain’s aggressive instincts have been apparent in his policy toward Iran. There too he has been more eager than most — including many in his own party — to talk of military solutions to a problem that to many experts defies a military approach.
The question for the American voter, of course, is whether a candidate of such instincts is well-suited for the White House in times such as these. At rare moments in history, a military response is essential and required, as it was in World War II, and as it was in Afghanistan in the wake of Sept. 11.
But more often, the choices offered by history are more complex, requiring judgment and wisdom. Choosing confrontation and war too quickly when other options are available can prove disastrous, as the example of Iraq should have taught us.
McCain’s instinct, demonstrated time and again and most recently now in Georgia, is to cast America as a global policeman. In the next few months, American voters have to ask themselves whether they share that vision and instinct.
• Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Monday and Thursday.
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