McCain, please

9 February 2008

The Spectator on why John McCain should be the next US President

However, if George W. Bush’s successor is principally interested in withdrawing US forces, then the country will become a permanent breeding ground and safe haven for terrorists. For the rest of the world, winning in Iraq will be by far the most pressing task facing the 44th president of the United States. There is one candidate who is qualified and prepared to do this: John McCain.

In recent years, the Arizona senator has been consistently right on foreign policy. When the rest of the American political class was enjoying its holiday from history in the 1990s, Senator McCain was talking about rogue states. While too many Congressional Republicans played politics with the wars in the Balkans, McCain did not, and instead pushed President Clinton into a more assertive position that eventually brought the Serbs to heel.

Since the 9/11 attacks, no American politician has better understood both the stakes involved in this struggle and what needs to be done to win it than McCain. George W. Bush’s judgment that the Muslim world would remain a fertile recruiting ground for terrorism as long as it was dominated by closed societies that denied its people control of their own destinies was essentially correct. However, what President Bush failed to appreciate was both the military effort that would be needed to win and the extent to which this was an ideological struggle. This resulted in the double disaster of an ineffective strategy in Iraq that allowed the insurgency to flourish, and the sores of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib that so sapped America’s moral authority.

No politician has done more to prevent defeat in Iraq than McCain. Just months after the invasion, he started arguing that the strategy was not working and that adjustments needed to be made urgently — much to the irritation of Republican loyalists who felt that any criticism of the conduct of the war helped the Democrats. After the 2006 mid-term elections, when many Republicans wanted to wash their hands of Iraq, fearful of the effects that the war was having on their party’s poll numbers, it was McCain who pushed relentlessly for the surge that has changed the course of the war.

McCain understands how important America’s moral standing is in the long struggle that lies ahead. As he told The Spectator in September 2006, ‘It’s not only on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq where British soldiers are sacrificing as we speak, but it’s also in the ideological struggle. That’s where the ultimate battle is, because you don’t win the war on the ground unless you win the war of moral superiority.’

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John E Morrissey

February 11th, 2008 1:09am Report this comment

A Brit visiting here in Florida told me that he and most Brits were outraged at the Guantanamo prison camps,and felt that it was a source of alienation between our two nations.When asked how these same Brits felt about Vincenamaros,answer came there none,a blank look substituting for comment.So a prison in Cuba for 200 or 300 of the most vicious murderers the world has ever known, where they are treated far better than they would have been in their home countries proves to you that Americans are heartless,but a prison on the same Island where a dictator has for the past forty years held tens of thousands, with thousands of summary execution and real torture is beneath notice.In the words of Jack Nicholson, "You can 't handle the truth".

william walsh

February 26th, 2008 4:09pm Report this comment

Its nice to see other people who understand we are in the beginning of WWIII, unless we somehow can stop these muslim terrorists soon. History does not always repeat, but in 1939 if the French army and air force which outnumbered the Germans, whose army was busy invading Poland, had invaded Germany in Sept 1939 there might have been a fast end to the beginning of wwii