McCain in Iraq

As John McCain (Opportunist-AZ) conducts his eighth trip to Iraq since 2003, a number of voices are questioning the senator’s integrity.

With Lieberman and Lindsey Graham in tow, McCain hopes, Reuters says, “to project himself as a world leader while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fight out a bitter Democratic nomination process at home.” After Iraq, he will meet with Israeli, Jordanian, French, and British leaders.

While acknowledging that world leaders like British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy might see the trip as a chance to size him up as a potential president, McCain has said he is not traveling as a candidate.

Not traveling as a candidate, eh? Sure…except for the fundraisers, where bigwigs in London will pay upwards of $1000 a plate to share a meal with the senator.

And going to Iraq is inherently political. Could Obama or Clinton get away with claiming that a trip to Iraq or Israel was apolitical? McCain’s trip, as noted above, is meant to project the image that he understands the hard realities of the occupation - that only he has the sober decision-making ability to “win.”

Unfortunately for McCain, that image fell apart long ago.

Sen. John McCain is well-known for scorching denunciations of Democrats, who he says would raise the “white flag of surrender” by cutting off funds for U.S. troops in Iraq.

But 15 years ago, it was McCain himself who startled colleagues by proposing to cut off money for a struggling and embattled U.S. force in another perilous place: Somalia.

On the campaign trail today, McCain is seen as an unyielding hawk. But before his first presidential run in 2000, he declared he would work with the Democratic Party’s brain trust to devise his foreign policy.

And while he now describes himself as a “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution,” he infuriated Republicans as a freshman congressman in 1983 by trying to thwart President Reagan’s deployment of troops in Lebanon.

The presumptive GOP nominee for president, McCain — who leads a congressional delegation to Europe and the Middle East this week — has adopted a surprising diversity of views on foreign policy issues during his 25 years in Congress. It is a pattern that brings uncertainty to the path he would take if elected.

A “surprising diversity of views”? That’s charitable. One might also say he’s opportunistic and hypocritical. If you’re going to be an interventionist, you might as well be consistent. And if you’re going to claim that we can’t leave Iraq because it’ll plunge into violence, while omitting to mention that you supported “cutting and running” from Lebanon and Somalia (two of the world’s premier failed states), you have some questions to answer. I guess this inconsistency will give us something to look forward to regarding Iran, though. I’m sure the senator, who apparently understands foreign policy about as well as he understands economics, would be perfectly competent to open up yet a third front in the “Global War on Terror.”

Finally, McCain’s visit to Israel will underscore the absurdity of his desire to be a world leader. If Bill Clinton couldn’t solve the conflict, despite tremendous force of will, and Bush can’t solve the problem, despite slavish adherence to ideology, then how could McCain make any progress relying only on a borrowed ideology and a set of opportunistic policy positions? Inconsistency does not imply courage or creativity, the two traits that will be most necessary in a president who hopes to solve Israel/Palestine. McCain would flounder, potentially even more thoroughly than Bush has on the issue.

So let him trot around the world, raising money abroad because there’s none for him here. Maybe in McCain’s world, where riding by himself in a first-class train compartment makes him a “man of the people,” and shuffling through a Baghdad market with 100 armed guards and body armor gives him an insider’s view of the conflict, that’s enough to make him a world leader.

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