Sunday, August 17, 2008
The Old Fart was for the Bush Doctrine before Bush was
And that is what makes him dangerous. Like the bomber pilot he was, his only answer to any perceived threat is to drop more iron on their heads, whose heads does not really matter.
Whether through ideology or instinct, though, Mr. McCain began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same. He drew on principles he learned growing up in a military family and on conclusions he formed as a prisoner in North Vietnam. He also returned to a conviction about “the common identity” of dangerous autocracies as far-flung as Serbia and North Korea that he had developed consulting with hawkish foreign policy thinkers to help sharpen the themes of his 2000 presidential campaign.Or as one Republican put it,"He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments." And even if the doctrine worked, after 7 years of Bush futility in Iraq we no longer have a military to back it up. The Old Fart goes beyond being the same as Our Little Prince, he is worse.
While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.
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