News out today says a recent Gallop poll finds that 28% of Clinton supporters and 19% of Obama supporters are ready to vote McCain if their candidate doesn't win the nomination. I've been one of those people. I've stated it here and elsewhere for awhile.
But today, after listening to a report on McCain's foreign policy on Democracy Now! I changed my mind.
Amy's guest was Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter and contributing editor at The Nation magazine. The segment was called "A Century in Iraq, Replacing UN with League of Democracies, Rogue State Rollback? A Look at John McCain’s Foreign Policy Vision."
It really put things into perspective for me. There's a man running for President who basically wants to take the Bush/Cheney policy forward, a man who is smarter than George Bush and a better strategist. He's also a man who suffers from a short fuse. Dreyfuss talks about how hotheaded McCain is. He goes so far as to say:
I’ve met McCain up close. I rode around the bus with him nine years ago when he was campaigning in New Hampshire. I found him scary up close. I think when you see him two feet away, he looks like somebody whose head could explode. He’s got a very barely controlled anger underneath his sort of calm demeanor that he seems to almost grit his teeth to keep inside.
So, is this who we want answering the phone at 3 am?
I mean this with absolutely no disrespect, but when a man has undergone torture, as McCain did in Vietnam, then I think there's always got to be the question of his fitness, emotionally and psychologically to put his finger on the nuclear button and to be the Commander in Chief.
For some time now, I've wondered if part of the energy that moves Cheney isn't a desire for revenge against perceived enemies (in his case whoever he blames for the demise of the Republicans during the Nixon Watergate era). Now, I'm thinking that it's conceivable McCain has an underlying need to "get even" (perhaps in some unconscious way) for the suffering he underwent at the hands of America's enemies...
I recently watched The English Patient. It addresses that very issue. Willem Dafoe plays a man who was tortured by the Nazis. He believes he was ratted on the "English Patient," Ralph Fiennes' character, and plots his revenge accordingly. The story has a redeeming end, but the point is well made: war damages people. Part of the reason that torture is so horrifying is because of the psychological destruction it does to the human psyche. I would argue that it damages the collective human psyche, not just the individual who undergoes the torture, that we all become less human when we treat humans so vilely.
I'm not in anyway suggesting that knowing about torture is the same as being tortured, I'm just saying the entire human race is debased by the act of torture.
I have great respect for what John McCain underwent as a prisoner of war, but I've been incredibly troubled by the way he stepped back from his position on torture, deciding it's an American value after all to torture high value targets.
In any event, you should listen to, or read what Dreyfuss had to say this morning on Democracy Now! about John McCain's foreign policy:
Here's an excerpt:
Scheunemann [who’s running McCain's foreign policy task force] founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002 with White House support. He was also a founder of the Project for a New American Century, which was the sort of ad hoc think tank that the Neocons put together. All of this is a sign of—and the fact that McCain would name him as his chief adviser—that McCain, in a way that Bush never did, is a true Neocon.
He [McCain] is someone who in his soul believes in the use of American military power, and as he said in his rollback speech, not just to deal with emergent threats to the United States, but even to enforce the prevalence of what he called American values—that’s a codeword for democracy—so that countries whose internal functioning—let’s say Russia today, under Putin and Medvedev—that countries like Russia that don’t seem as democratic as we like would then become ostracized or sanctioned or subject to various kinds of hostile, both political and military, sanctions. So this is what I find extremely troubling about McCain.
And if you look at his broad policies that he’s outlined, he has suggested point blank that we’re in a long-term, almost unending struggle with al-Qaeda and various other forms of Islamism. And as a result, he wants to create a whole new set of institutions to deal with those. One of those institutions would be what he calls the League of Democracies, which is basically a way of short-circuiting the UN, where Russia and China, in particular, but also various non-aligned countries often stand up to the United States.
Is this really who Democrats want to put in power? I can't believe it is. I'm convinced we must get back to the real issue here, which is getting a Democrat into the White House.