Salon's Joe Conason: The Last Neocon

[flpoljunkie]

It wasn't for nothing that William Kristol supported John McCain's failed bid for the presidency in 2000. McCain, evidently through his relationship with Kristol, drank the neocon Kool-Aid--big time!

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/12/08/iraq_mccain/

The last neocon

The Iraq Study Group shot down Bush's failed war strategy. Yet John McCain stubbornly supports it -- calling for more troops and promising unattainable victory.

By Joe Conason

Dec. 08, 2006 | With the broad establishment acceptance of the Iraq Study Group's new report, the embattled neoconservatives have clearly lost the debate over Iraq. Their belligerent foreign policy has been universally discredited. Their strategic fantasies have led the United States into a losing war, to the great detriment of American security and prestige. Today their desire to send tens of thousands more troops into the Iraqi quicksand is shared by less than 10 percent of their fellow citizens, according to recent polls.

Yet even now they still can boast the support of the most formidable Republican presidential candidate expected to stand in the next election: Sen. John McCain, the last neocon.

At this late date, very few politicians are as eager as the Arizona Republican to echo the calls for escalation in Iraq now heard from neocon opinion leaders in the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review and the New York Post, whose front page caricatured James Baker and Lee Hamilton as "surrender monkeys" on the morning after they released the ISG's findings. Among his Capitol Hill colleagues, McCain was almost alone in joining the right-wing attack on the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission, whose report dismissed demands for additional combat brigades as unrealistic. He was enraged by the report's emphasis on political negotiations and on the excessive costs of the military effort. "Sustained increases in U.S. troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq, which is the absence of national reconciliation, Meanwhile, America's military capacity is stretched thin: we do not have the troops or equipment to make a substantial, sustained increase in our troop presence. Increased deployments to Iraq would also necessarily hamper our ability to provide adequate resources for our efforts in Afghanistan or respond to crises around the world."

Over and over again, regardless of the realities on the ground and in the armed forces, McCain urged President Bush to deploy enough additional troops to Iraq to constitute an overwhelming force, although the specifics of his plan (and exactly where he hopes to find several brigades of trained, equipped and combat-ready soldiers) remain murky. The credibility he earned from his suffering in a North Vietnam prison camp -- as well as his reputation for blunt honesty -- evidently exempts him from answering difficult questions about his plan for "victory."

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[Kellyiswise]

1. Truth spoken to idiocy.

We must lose ourselves from the neocon grip no matter how politically costly. The future of our nation as a worthy world leader among nations is at stake.

[gratuitous]

2. And yet McCain has no problem finding a platform

Remember when MSNBC cancelled Phil Donahue's program? It was too anti-war, too anti-Bush, and had to be pulled, even though it was the highest rated show on that cable channel. Voices against the war were stifled, caricatured, lampooned, but almost never allowed on the nation's airwaves on their own terms, and never allowed to be aired without some bloodthirsty warmonger (or preferably three) to offset them. And all this in an atmosphere where public opposition to the war never dipped far below 50%.

Now, public opposition to the war is running at about 71%, yet kooks like McCain have no difficulty finding a platform for the unexpurgated airing of their lunatic viewpoints, and we still can't hear from anyone who was opposed to the invasion of Iraq before the invasion. The price of admission to the public discussion is that a commentator has to be on record as having been supportive in the past before they can go on the air and comment on the horrific situation in Iraq.