McCain in Cookooland

Juan Cole has a blog that focuses on what is happening in the Middle East, especially Iraq. He is a Professor of Middle East history at UofM, speaks and reads Arabic, and keeps track of what the Middle East Press is saying. Here he rips the latest nonsense from McCain who seems to have really lost it. You have to wonder if McCain has gone soft in the head given his age and all that he's been through as a POW.

McCain has fallen ill with Rumsfeld's Disease in part because he is losing in the polls because the public doesn't like his gung ho stance on Iraq. If only, he thinks, he could convince the public that actually things are turning around there.

And in part he has succumbed to it because of frustration with his colleagues in the Senate, who just voted to get US troops out of Iraq by March 31, 2008. McCain thinks things have improved so much that his colleagues are basing their decisions on old information.

The greatest fallacy of all is in McCain's assumption that short-term changes in the Baghdad security environment, produced by deploying an extra US division there, can necessarily be translated into long-term gains. It is much more likely that guerrillas are just lying low and will come right back out when the Americans draw back down (the US can't keep an extra division in Iraq forever.)

McCain is typical of the hawks of his generation, which lost the Vietnam War. For many of them, a war on Iraq promised vindication and restoration of pride. It had all the delights of a Rambo movie, but the advantage of being real. The problem is that in both cases, Vietnam and Iraq, the US fought local nationalisms dressed up in universal ideologies (Communism, Islamism & Baathism). It is a losing proposition, for the most part. Local nationalisms mostly win out these days.