It's not clear to me tht conservatives should really want to open a deeper conversation around John McCain's assertion that he'd happily see us stay in Iraq for 100 years. While it's true that he also said, "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed," it's not true that that's an exculpatory explanation. Rather, it's heads he's an imperialist, tails he doesn't know what he's talking about. You can take McCain's comments one of two ways: The first is that he's almost obsessive about projecting his comfort with American military power. No one forced him to say we should be in Iraq for 100 years. The questioner mentioned Bush's comment that we could be there 50 years, and McCain, with no prodding, doubled it. Add in his endless support for the surge and our deployment, his military heritage and his belief in the justness of American might, and you're looking at a leader who is constitutionally incapable of pulling the troops out of Iraq. It's just not in him. The second way to understand the quote is that McCain is dumb. American occupations in Arab lands are not gladly accepted, trouble-free things. They inflame public opinion, create insurgencies, and power terrorist movements like al Qaeda. If his endpoint is a continued, peaceful occupation, we're going to have an endless violent occupation on the way to never getting there. And drilling down another level, what you're left with is a guy who can't see any reason to leave Iraq, ever. If there's violence, we should stay to combat it. If there's peace and acceptance of our troops, we should stay to, well, it's not quite clear what we're there to do, but whatever it is, McCain's supports it. So we won't leave as a result of conflict and we won't leave as a result of its cessation. What other options are there, but endless occupation? To call this imperialism is an insult to the coherence of the imperialist ideology. It's an impulse for military deployment masquerading as an actual approach to world affairs.
