McCain’s campaign ads on television spend a great deal of time talking about his experience. Things such as getting shot down in Viet Nam, being bayoneted and tortured, and then spending 5 years in a POW camp seem to rank very high on McCain’s list of what he believes are his qualifications for being president. Setting aside the (unanswered) question of how being bayoneted or tortured, or sitting out the Viet Nam war in a POW camp, teaches skills necessary for being the U.S. President, my own problem with McCain’s argument stems from the fact that his war experience from Viet Nam has no obvious relationship to the wars the U.S. is currently waging.
Compared to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the so-called “global war on terror,” the Viet Nam war was fought against a completely different enemy, in a completely different region of the world, using completely different weapons, with completely different strategies and tactics. How does fighting communist leftists in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the mid-20th-century (a war that America lost) provide McCain with experience that is relevant to the problem of fighting Islamic reactionaries in the deserts of the Middle East in the early 21st-century? Sure, we might be tempted to conclude that “war is war,” but we all know that the current occupation of Iraq differs significantly from every other war in world history, including even the first Gulf War between the U.S. and Iraq. So, why should we believe McCain’s argument?
Indeed, shouldn’t we turn the question around and ask ourselves the following: to the extent that McCain argues that his Viet Nam experience relates to the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, isn’t he demonstrating that he is remarkably ignorant about the nature of war? Isn’t he demonstrating that his experience might actually be a weakness — that he is making profoundly invalid assumptions about the value of his past experience and, thus, over-estimating his abilities and potentially (if he is elected) exposing our troops to unnecessary risks? Experience is a strength only if it is relevant; otherwise, it can be a serious weakness.
Indeed, consider the example of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Here’s a guy who was arguably one of the most experienced military experts in the world, in a job that gave him access to the best military information in the world, yet virtually every decision he made about the so-called “war on terrorism,” including the invasion of Iraq, turned out to be disastrous. In fact, tens of thousands of American troops, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, are now dead or maimed because of his miscalculations and arrogant belief that his experience made him infallible. Judging by the Republican campaign ads I’ve seen, McCain is headed down the same road: tremendous emphasis is placed on McCain’s war experience, yet none is placed on its relevance to America’s current conflicts.
Even more troubling is seeing how McCain responds to questions about the future of U.S. forces in Iraq. McCain rejects the notion of a timetable and, instead, declares that the withdrawal of U.S. forces “must depend upon conditions on the ground.” That sounds good, but have you noticed that McCain never discusses what those “conditions on the ground” might be? When asked about what conditions would justify a reduction in U.S. forces, McCain consistently dodges the question by deferring all such matters to General David Petraeus. According to McCain, Petraeus will tell us when conditions on the ground justify a reduction of U.S. troops. Is this all that McCain’s vast military experience gives him — the ability to avoid leadership by giving key decisions to someone else?
Bottom line: McCain wants us to believe his past military experience would automatically make him a better Commander-in-Chief than Obama, yet nowhere do we see evidence to support this assertion. All we do see is evidence that McCain oversimplifies the situation in Iraq (i.e., he incorrectly equates it with his experience in Viet Nam) and ducks questions about how to lead our military going forward (much as Bush did with Rumsfeld). Do we really want another four years of such nonsense?
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