“ace” McCain

The LA Times goes somewhere I have resisted going for a very long time:

Mishaps mark John McCain's record as naval aviator

Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment.

Yup. It’s not like many didn’t know this, it’s just that we weren’t supposed to talk smack about a “hero.” Well, the LAT has the goods: John McCain was a shitty pilot, a “flat-hatter” or show-off, who was reckless and negligent in the cockpit. McCain’s actions were found to be suspect in four of the five planes that he lost—including when he was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967—and in at least three of the incidents, McCain lied about the circumstances of his crash.

Hmmm. . . inattentive, reckless, an inability to learn from his mistakes, a cavalier attitude about the safety and property of others, and ready to lie to cover his ass. . . sounds pretty much like campaign ’08. More evidence that McCain is the same asshole he’s always been.

evaluating McCain's Vietnam "experience"

Jason’s comment on my Wednesday post got me thinking a little more about McCain’s biography—most specifically the Vietnam War part—and what role it should play in the 2008 battle for the White House. . . and what was going to be a one-sentence response grew into something more like a post of its own.

First, the comment:

McCain will absolutely say anything to be elected, but I did find interest in Bai's piece. Not so much for the psychoanalyzing as for the Vietnam question.

For whatever reason, McCain believe[s] we could have and should have won Vietnam by committing more troops. That's a very interesting question to start debating right now, with the parallels with Iraq so obvious. Yet, I feel, lots of portions of America don't really want to ask that question. It brings up an era many would like to forget. Very interesting indeed.

Indeed. Therefore, my response:

That McCain thinks we could have "won" the Vietnam War is not only ignorant, it's dangerous.

Many questions were asked about Vietnam throughout the '70's and '80's. There are lots of good books (Karnow, Halberstam, and Shawcross come to mind), with lots of good insights, and they all tell us that we didn't just fight incorrectly, we fought for the wrong reasons.

Was there a way to "win" in Vietnam? I suppose we could have talked with Ho when he first turned to the US—and he did turn FIRST to the US—for help fighting a repressive colonial occupier. Short of that, there is no right answer.

I feel the right is forcing us to re-debate Vietnam history as a rehearsal for the eventual rewrite of Bush's Iraqi incursion. Imagine, even now, asking the "how could we have won Iraq" question.

The only answer is by not invading in the first place. That McCain still does not understand this makes for a bad omen when considering how or whether he would end the Iraq fiasco, and is a scary indication of just how terrible McCain might be at handling other foreign challenges.

I think the most interesting tidbit in the Bai piece—and I touched upon this the other day—was the revelation, of sorts, that "Mr. Experience" actually decided how to handle a crisis from what he read in a few books, and not from some special lesson learned at the Hanoi Hilton.

I am not against psychobiography—I have read some good ones—but I would want to look at the total of McCain's life experiences. Having been in a POW camp or in the jungle doesn't by itself predict how a veteran/lawmaker sees Iraq (take Bob Kerrey, for instance, an Iraq hawk that witnessed the worst of the Vietnam war firsthand during two tours as a Navy SEAL).

When I look at McCain's life, I see the son and grandson of very successful men who goes into the family business and quickly finds he's just not as smart and not as good at it. He then spends the rest of his life trying to one-up Daddy to prove his worth.

Sound familiar?


(cross-posted on capitoilette and The Seminal)

bears repeating

I wrote Friday’s post without the benefit of reading that day’s lead editorial in the New York Times. The editors (in their infinite wisdom) had a remarkably similar take on the whole “Iraq as Vietnam through the beer goggles of President Bush” thing—not to mention the whole Wizard of Oz (please ignore the man behind curtain), it’s al-Maliki’s fault distraction.

Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America’s biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.

. . . .

The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.

. . . .

Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.

The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.

The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.

If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them.

Now, at this point, I was going to write about how remarkable it is that both the Times’ editorial board and myself would focus on Diem, and the dangers of American-influenced, repeated regime change as the real lesson of the Vietnam conflict that comes to mind at the present moment. . .

. . . except that it’s not remarkable at all.

Anyone who lived through the Sixties, or anyone who has read a decent history of the second Indochinese war, should spot the same analogy in a well-reasoned flash.

What is remarkable, rather, is that more people haven’t seized upon this cautionary lesson of history. What is remarkable is that supposedly serious and informed Democrats have jumped on the “blame Maliki” bandwagon. And, even more remarkable, I’ve gotta say, is when one supposedly serious Democrat is seeking the presidency.

Yes, I’m talking about you, Senator Hillary Clinton.

Senator Clinton is supposed to be running for president and against the failed policies of the Bush Administration—the Iraq debacle being exhibit A. To disarm yourself that way, to blame an Iraqi PM (and a Bush-picked one at that) for the problems in this conflict when, frankly, all the blame (yes, all) for this circus of blood lay squarely at the feet of George W. Bush, is strategically inane. . . besides being historically ignorant.

What happens when the corrupt and connected Iyad Allawi replaces a deposed Nouri al-Maliki and things continue to go horribly wrong—as you know, if you had been a good student of the Vietnam War, they inevitably will? You can’t very well go back to a strict “blame the other guy” policy—the other guy being Bush. Hell, Senator Clinton is actually, officially, out ahead of the President on this one. Bush says al-Maliki is a “good guy.”

Memo to Clinton, and Senator Carl Levin, and any of the other Democrats even thinking about blaming al-Maliki, or joining the PR-scripted chorus of “serious” people who think Allawi is just what we need to fix our Iraqi problem: Our Iraqi problem is George Bush—because our Iraqi problem is of George Bush’s making. Plain and simple.

So, repeat after me: It’s Bush’s war. It’s Bush’s war. It’s Bush’s war.

(cross-posted on capitoilette)

you want a vietnam analogy? i'll give you a vietnam analogy

Gallons of cyber ink have been spilled about how he who did not learn history, George W. Bush, would now mangle and distort history on his way to repeating it. The idea that the Vietnam war was a noble fight, and one that was winnable (whatever that means) had it not been for those lily-livered Americans who just “gave up” after roughly a dozen years and 60,000 deaths, would be laughable, and not worth a comment, were it not for a concerted effort by a cadre of neocons to rewrite history in just this way.

Of course, we don’t really need a rewrite, we already have Karnow, Sheehan, Halberstam, and Shawcross. . . and, for today, anyway, me.

it’s too easy being Greene

It was bad enough that NPR’s All Things Considered turned to the likes of Francis Fukuyama and Max Boot to assess whether President Bush’s Iraq-Vietnam analogy made any sense, but at least the network had the good sense to scrap that piece by morning.

No such luck with an analogy made by NPR reporter David Greene. It has to do with a “vexing tightrope,” Bush’s Iraq troop “surge,” and Democratic presidential hopefuls, and it ran on both ATC and Morning Edition (in slightly different pieces). . . and it’s a doozy!

then I can trust there won’t be any photo-op pheasant hunts in your future?

Who can forget this golden moment from Iowa ’04 (note bird dog running away from direction Senator Kerry is shooting), or a similar event that had John Kerry marching out of the Ohio woods in fatigues, a 12-gauge in his hand? I hate to make fun of the Senator, who probably did have some idea of how to handle a rifle based on his time in Vietnam, but those attempts to woo NRA types and Second Amendment apologists were, pardon my language, fucking lame.

I can almost guarantee that Kerry’s stunts lost him more votes than he gained. They pissed off vegetarians, and stunk of desperation.

Don’t get me wrong, though I would probably prefer a president who got no joy from shooting things, I am not going to withhold my vote solely because a candidate is a real I-stalk-it-I-shoot-it-and-I-eat-it hunter (to contrast with the “Dick Cheney, I go to a prestocked ranch, get drunk, and shoot my pal” school). I do think twice, however, when a candidate obviously panders—especially when it’s to a constituency that likely won’t vote for him or her anyway.

So, I am hoping that what seemed like a throw-away moment from Thursday night’s Democratic candidates’ debate bodes well for the anti-pandering set—at least when it comes to guns:

Mrs. Clinton was one of three senators who did not raise their hands when asked if they had, as an adult, had a gun in their home; the others were Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards.

If any of these three show up in the Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada (?), or South Carolina woods wearing starchy new LL Bean camo and a shit-eating grin, carrying a shotgun and a dead bird, however, don’t just chalk me up as disappointed, chalk up that candidate’s goose as cooked.

another chance to reflect on the legacy of Vietnam

David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War over forty years ago, was killed in a car crash earlier today. He was 73.

Though Halberstam had not worked as a daily reporter since the late Sixties, his boundless curiosity, his intense work ethic, and his unfailing attention to detail continued to serve as a model for what all journalists should aspire to be. Of course, some found Halberstam’s attention to detail to be more unceasing than unfailing, earning him the not always affectionate nickname “Halberstammer,” but in an age where access is often valued over accountability, and many in the media give the impression that an invitation to the right cocktail party is more rewarding than weeks spent doing the less glamorous detective work that used to be considered the meat and potatoes of investigative journalism, Halberstam’s obsessive voice, stammering or otherwise, will be sorely missed.

For instance, here’s Halberstam’s voice talking about a certain disastrous, bloody, and futile foreign military entanglement:

The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn't salute or play the game. And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around and they've used up their credibility.

The war David Halberstam is referring to there is not Iraq, it is Vietnam, but his words of warning could echo through the corridors of power today.

Would that anyone in those corridors could hear them. Would that an obsessive Halberstam was still around to repeat them. . . as often as he wanted.


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)

Update: David Corn says it even better. . . .