A big, incoherent piece in the Times over the weekend almost, but not quite, shows how McCain's foreign policy is crazy. Immediately after 9/11, McCain went around telling everyone that "this is war," and by October 2001 he had picked Iraq as the only way top stop Al Qaeda, making his case for invasion six months before the Bush Administration did. Then we have this:
To his admirers, Mr. McCain's tough response to Sept. 11 is at the heart of his appeal. They argue that he displayed the same decisiveness again last week in his swift calls to penalize Russia for its incursion into Georgia, in part by sending peacekeepers to police its border.
His critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.
But the Times never sees fit to mention that Al Qaeda and 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq, because that would actually help their readers understand that McCain was wrong and that he made a bad judgment call that put our troops lives on the line. There are no shades of gray here! This is one big reason why the American electorate succumbs to a strong-and-wrong foreign policy -- the news media has such a hard time pointing out the wrong part. And now McCain is trying to do the same thing all over again with Georgia.
--Tim Fernholz
