McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked... His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite... McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator. McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. [More] . . read more

Both are now in poor political shape, with contradictory strategies for rehabbing their fortunes. The president is saddled with an approval rating bumping along in the 20s. Each day he is served another platter of contemptuous stories about “the worst presidency of modern times”, the lack of any enduring “legacy”, the approaching Democratic landslide that will put the Republicans in the wilderness for at least two terms...

The White House made no serious attempt to upend Obama’s trip to Iraq or excessively ridicule the harmonies from the Democratic candidate and Iraqi prime minister Maliki on schedules for U.S. withdrawal. Indeed noises that could be construed as acceptance of an accelerated schedule emanated from the White House... As final testimony to the huge disaster for the McCain campaign of Obama’s trip to Iraq, the floundering Republican candidate managed to shoehorn himself into talk about a rate of withdrawal from Iraq a good deal brisker than the 100 years of occupation he was talking about, or even the 2013 deadline he subsequently settled on. [More] . . read more

But wait a minute. During the Cold War, before it collapsed in a heap of rubble, the Soviet Union was a country of nearly 250 million people. Its mighty Red Army had defeated the German Wehrmacht in World War II. The USSR had tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and it had missiles bigger than ours, capable of lobbing 20-megaton bombs on American cities. It held half a dozen European nations of ancient lineage captive, and financed dreaded revolutionary forces around the globe. It had a nuclear submarine fleet that was better than ours, and that was equipped with sea-launched missiles that could be fired at U.S. targets from locations only minutes from our coastline.

Iran, in contrast, is a poor country of 70 million. It has no nuclear weapons. It has no missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, much less of carrying them halfway around the world to U.S. targets. It hasn’t conquered or even attacked another country in centuries, and seems to show little interest in doing so (it couldn’t even defeat Iraq, a country less than half its size, which attacked it in the 1980s). Its navy consists of little boats more suitable to towing water skiers than to fighting American carrier battle groups. Its air force wouldn’t last a day in a contest with the planes from just one U.S. carrier. Hell, Iran's leadership is afraid of its own women! But Big John is afraid, and he says we all should be too. [More] . . read more

In his first assertion, Senator McCain is claiming credit where credit is not due. In his second, that we are winning in Iraq, he fails to understand what “winning” means in a Fourth Generation conflict. The current reduction in violence in Iraq does not mean we are winning. Nor does al Qaeda’s incipient defeat mean we are winning. We win only if a state re-emerges, the state we destroyed by our invasion. A reduction in violence and the defeat of al Qaeda are necessary preconditions for the re-emergence of a state, but they are not sufficient to ensure it...

So McCain is wrong on both counts. The fact that a Presidential candidate is fundamentally wrong on so important a subject as the war in Iraq is disturbing. More disturbing is the nature of the errors. Both represent carryovers of Bush administration practices. [More] . . read more