John McCain Loved the Military Too Much – Foreign Policy

Giving us the proto-Trump Sarah Palin was not John McCain's only sin.  Much more consequential was his support for the debacle in Iraq.
John McCain Loved the Military Too Much – Foreign Policy
by Doug Bandow (Cato Institute)

John McCain was a brave man, from the time he spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to his final battle against cancer. May he rest in peace.

However, his public career warrants a harsher judgment, and it is worth bidding farewell to the kind of aggressive, militarized foreign policy he championed, too. McCain was an unlikely leader of the Senate’s pro-war caucus. He suffered in the Vietnam War, which was both mistakenly and incompetently waged. He presciently opposed President Ronald Reagan’s disastrous intervention in the Lebanese civil war, was sometimes skeptical of U.S. involvement in the Balkans, criticized turning Somalia into an exercise in nation building, and denounced the Clinton administration’s plans to invade Haiti. These positions suggested a focus on both America’s interests and its capabilities. 

However, in his last few decades in the Senate, he turned into one of its most ferocious advocates of military intervention, almost irrespective of circumstance. McCain favored aggressive war against Serbia, an endless crusade to bring democracy to Afghanistan, the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the equally counterproductive destruction of Libya, a combat role in Syria’s horrific civil war, and military aid for Saudi Arabia in its brutal aggression against Yemen. 

He recklessly promoted Georgia against Russia in those two countries’ short-lived war, advocated striking North Korea militarily, and sang about bombing Iran in a little ditty set to the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” He proposed creating a no-fly zone in Sudan and intervening in Nigeria against the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram. Last year, he urged the Trump administration to “choose the Kurds” over Iran and Iraq, since for decades the United States “has protected them from attacks, both from within and outside Iraq.” Ukraine was a disappointment, causing him to lament: “I do not see a military option, and that is tragic.”

In other words, he tended to treat war as just another policy option, an answer to any number of problems, from the mundane to the monstrous, even when U.S. security was not seriously threatened. In most of the conflicts in which he favored involvement, U.S. intervention worsened the resulting humanitarian tragedy.

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