Granted, John McCain is a brave man, a true war hero from the 1960s.
Granted, he has taken some bold stands in the Senate, even if he was not
always on the right side of important issues. But all said, last night on
CNN, he once again showed himself to be utterly clueless in how to fight the
War on Terror:
1. He fails to grasp that the actual Al Qaida terrorists are a small,
relatively very small, subset among Orthodox Moslems. They are also a
threat to every Islamic Nation--including those with Orthodox Islamic
Governments--because of their amoral resort to anarchial techniques, and a
borderless, internationalist mantra. The correct approach: We need to
isolate and destroy those already committed to this particular subset.
Defining the war as a struggle with Islamic Fundamental Extremism, simply
helps Al Qaida win recruits among Islamic Fundamentalists. It does not
isolate their appeal, it broadens it!
2. Defining the battle with Al Qaida and its immediate allies as the
defining issue of the 21st Century borders on actual insanity. Would any
thoughtful leader in 1908 America have defined the 20th Century in terms of
efforts to deal with the Anarchists of that era, who were busy assassinating
Western leaders? If they had, they would have looked foolish in very short
order, as the rise of Communism and its cousins (National Socialism in
Germany, etc.) quickly became the real threats to our civilization. What
McCain's dramatics does do, however, is glamorize Al Qaida. It makes it
seem more of a cause worth dying for to those McCain has already offended,
as set forth under our first point. It is a recruiting aid, not a way of
isolating and destroying.
3. McCain has bought the Neocon idiocy that fighting Al Qaida in Iraq, a
country in which they were formerly weak, is the right course for
suppressing that subset. This would be like Mayor Giuliani--whose crime
suppression efforts were laudatory, beyond question--proposing, not to step
up Police efforts in all Five Boroughs of New York, but concentrating the
Police on Statin Island--the lest crime afflicted--and claiming that by
crushing crime there, he was making the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and
Queens, much safer. Is McCain--the self-anointed "leader"--totally unaware
that Iraq represents only two percent of the Islamic world? Does it not
occur to him that the idea of our reforming that 2% is an affront not an
appeal to the other 98%? Has he ever studied the success of the Brits in
Ireland?!
It is clear, that John McCain's prescription for waging what is a war
against this particular form of International banditry, is not a
prescription for victory, but one for endless war and the ensuing bankruptcy
of the American people. To anyone who bothers to look at the world map; who
bothers to analyze the dynamics involved; everything that comes out of John
McCain's mouth, is a compelling reason not to vote for John McCain.
And, by the way, McCain's boast that he predicted success for the "surge?"
Has anyone ever suggested that if you add more trained troops on one side
of a fight against the existing number on the other, the reinforced side is
not
going to do proportionately better? The Senator misses the point, entirely,
that the real question is, "If you completely pacify Iraq, what really have
you
accomplished so far as the security of these United States?" We suspect
that
his only answer would be the purest speculation. Meanwhile America's
bridges
are reported on the verge of collapse.
http://pages.prodigy.net/krtq73aa/decision.htm
William Flax [Goldwater & Reagan Republican & Author Of The Conservative
Debate Handbook]
Attorney At Law
Cincinnati, Ohio
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