Rev. Yearwood - iCitizenForum from George Turner on Vimeo.

I read it, saw it on youtube, and have a brain and therefore know that what McCain was saying was that he didn’t think the American public would mind having troops in Iraq if they were not fighting a war, hence the reference to South Korea and Japan. Obviously that statement is the polar opposite of saying that he wouldn’t mind a 100 year war.

But more important that my offense taken at the idiocy of the Democratic response to his statement, is the idiocy of the Democratic response to his statement, on two counts. Firstly, although McCain’s statement did not amount to the declaration of a crusade, it did sound like scarily like an endorsement of colonialism. Something that the Democrats, in their desperation to score cheap political points have almost entirely overlooked. Secondly the fact that the Democrats could seriously think that such transparent twisting of words is acceptable in todays world means that they have failed to grasp the independence of mind afforded to today’s generation by the internet.

To deal with the first point first, one has to ask what the troops would be doing for 100 years in Iraq if they were not fighting. In the example of South Korea that was used by John McCain, American troops were there to discourage an external threat, an invasion from North Korea, but where is that external threat to Iraq?

There isnt one, Iran would not want a repeat of the bloody Iran-Iraq War, and with Iraq now being ruled by fellow Shiites why would they need one. Turkey to the north may make threats to Northern Iraq but surely the US does not need to station an army in Iraq in order to stop the Turks invading. They are a NATO ally.

Is the reason to prop up our political allies? to support one faction over another in the internal politics of Iraq as British and American forces did in Basra last week? Then, they supported Maliki's government troops against Sadr's forces in what is now without a doubt a civil war?

Is the reason to guarantee the world’s supply of oil, of which a large part comes through the straits of Hormuz. This is what Alan Greenspan was referring to when he said that the Iraq war was about oil, not that the US was there to expropriate oil, but to prevent blockages of supply.

Now we are beginning to sound dangerously like colonialism. The Brits who were the most successful colonists of all time, more often than not stationed troops in countries, in order to guarantee supplies of the raw materials required to fuel its rapidly developing home industries and not to fight wars. It ruled countries by backing supportive political factions rather than through overt force as the amount of troops that little Britain could muster was simply never sufficient to rule over the vast areas of land that it nominally controlled. The British Empire was sustained on commerce rather than conquest and politics rather than persecution.

McCain's suggestion, that the US should have troops stationed around the world, that could interveene in internal politics in order to keep our friends in power would make Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson turn in their graves but McCain has been given a free pass on his statement as the Democrats have tried to wring the words out for any sound bite they can.

Now to my second point. We live in a world today where any statement can be instantly checked with a simple google search. In a pre modern communications age, politicians may well have been able to misquote each other endlessly when speaking to their own supporters. Today however politicians have to be more honest than ever. Consistently saying that McCain advocated a 100 year war is pointless if all you need to do to watch the original speech is to log on to youtube. Indeed it is worse than pointless it is damaging as it makes you look stupid or even untrustworthy.

The abuse of McCain’s 100 years, along with Hilary’s fantasy Bosnia trip perhaps shows that the democrats have yet to learn that in today’s world more than ever, you cant get away with making stuff up, especially when it is so easily checked out.

Finally, resorting to such tactics only serves to devalue the whole democratic system, as the public are reinforced with the idea that politicians cannot be trusted, and care more about getting themselves elected than the nation. If the Democrats were to think harder about the ideas that McCain's words represented rather than the opportunity to take cheap shots, it might well end up better for the Democratic Party, and for Democracy.

G

The speech by Karzai was largely unremarkable. He highlighted the huge progress being made in Afghanistan, particularly in the area of health care. He thanked the international community for helping Afghanistan. What more could we expect from a leader who owes his position entirely to foreign intervention.

However the most interesting part of the event was when Kabul University was allowed to ask questions of their president. As I reported yesterday, when given the same opportunity with the Secretary General of NATO the students fired pointed questions.

However with Karzi, not one student asked a question, but rather two students made statements thanking both President Karzi and the international community for all that they had done for Afghanistan and a third made a plea to the world's media to show the great things happening in Afghanistan.

Both yesterday and today the students who spoke were hand picked by the university, and todays display of sycophancy only served to put yesterday's exchange into starker contrast.

Saakashvili is in Bucharest this week to try and get Georgia a membership action plan for NATO, a measure that is the first, but definitely not irreversible step on the path to membership. His Bushian rhetoric is clearly symptomatic of the fact that America is the most forceful backer of closer ties with Georgia.

However as we know, Georgia will not have any concrete progress towards NATO tomorrow, out of the 26 members of the alliance only 18 favor giving MAP to Georgia and France and Germany have threatened the veto.

There are many complex reasons why the major European powers have opposed this move, many of which involve the ambiguous nature of Georgia's breakaway provinces Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Russia's interest in the region.

On this matter Saakashvili was on the offensive today, comparing the timidity of the Europeans with the appeasement of Nazi Germany. He went on to say that the enlargement of NATO should be be about principal and not politics.

Speaking with one of his assistants after the speech I was told that no one in the Georgia expects them to be offered MAP at this summit, but the fact that 18 countries supported it was definite progress and that they could be hopeful.

One might wonder why Saakashvili would choose to aggravate the very people he is hoping to persuade to support membership in the future with such caustic remarks. But as Dan Fried, President of the Atlantic Council of the US reminded us in introducing the Georgian President, he is a revolutionary.

The students from Kabul had the opportunity to ask the Sec Gen questions and the first few to the podium took that opportunity to vent their frustrations at what they seemed to perceive as a NATO military occupation of Afghanistan.

With a poor audio connection I am unable to provide the full names of the students right now but I shall try to update this page later in the day once I have managed to review the tapes. All were either students or faculty of the University of Kabul.

The Kabul video link started with an address from the head of the law faculty who issued a warning for the West on their militarism in Afghanistan, saying, "if NATO spent just the fraction of the money it did on military operations on economic development and education Peace would come to Afghanistan much more quickly"

Next came the turn of the students who were far more caustic in their remarks. The first question asked why NATO had not launched a co-ordinated aid effort when it has a coordinated military one. One student from the French department, asked the Secretary General, in near perfect French, how NATO can claim the support of the Afghans when NATO bombs Afghanistan. A question from a member of the law faculty asked Scheffer his opinion of the characterization of NATO as, "the coalition of the unwilling"

To this last point, Scheffer replied that he has always pushed for the removal for national caveats but that this was not a new issue. During the cold war there were also national caveats. To the challenge of the lack of progress on development he said that NATO was trying to create the conditions for development and work still needed to be done. To the French student, he replied that he regretted every loss of civilian life in Afghanistan and that NATO was making large efforts to minimize or eliminate the loss of innocent life.

Other Afghan students who got to ask questions later in the meeting were supportive of the NATO military role. One made a plea to NATO to keep forces in Afghanistan and not to leave.

During his speech earlier in the session, the Secretary General reaffirmed the commitment of NATO to Afghanistan and said that victory was essential.

Whilst the opinions of the students were clearly not uniform, even amongst themselves, this video conference with the Secretary General should serve as a stark warning to the alliance who seems until now to have worked on the assumption that only the extremists and the desperate would join the Taliban. Although these students are unlikely to be found fighting in Kandahar after their graduation, their dissatisfaction must be taken seriously.

But lets start with a big one - Afghanistan. Whilst presiding over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on the NATO Summit, Senator Joeseph Biden recalled the answer a British soldier gave to him at the beginning of the Afghanistan war when he asked him how long the Brits would be willing to stay. "we have a saying in Britain" the soldier told him, "the small dogs stay in the ring until the big dog leaves". Biden then remarked that in his view, the big dog had left the ring to pursue other fights in Iraq.

Although it has become a favorite pass-time of American political commentators to berate the Europeans for not pulling their weight in Afghanistan,we should remember that NATO invoked article 5 for the first time in its history after 9/11 and were politely and not so politely told by then Secretary Donnald Rumsfeld that their help was not required. Once spurned already, why should Europeans accept the argument that it is they that have been weak, particularly when the conflict is viewed in an American war not even being taken seriously by the Americans. In Afghanistan, if America leads NATO will follow, but with US troops already stressed and an administration that clearly priorities Iraq over Afghanistan, we are unlikely to see any great increase in the commitment to Afghanistan from NATO next week.

MAP to Georgia and Ukraine? Russia made it a precondition of attending the summit that this issue would not be on the agenda. Russia is attending the summit, and so dont expect it to be discussed. Even if they were to discuss it, Germany and France would veto it and so why discuss it.

Energy Security? As Phil Gordon commented to Richard Lugar, the Europeans cant even form their own energy policy. I think we can forget about the possibility of NATO doing it before Europe.

Expansion? Even expansion to the Adriatic three is now under threat, due to one of those smallest of problems mentioned above. With the Greeks threatening to veto the entry of the Republic of Macedonia or FYROM over the issue of the name of the country; Macedonia's membership of NATO is now very doubtful. With Macedonia out this makes extending membership to Albania tricky as it might risk aggravating the Albanian population of Macedonia and we are left with the Adriatic one.

And thats it, the entry of Croatia is likely to be the only concrete outcome of this summit and despite being born in Zagreb and being incredibly proud of my Croatian heritage, reality forbids me from saying that this will be NATO's defining moment.

George Turner will be blogging from the NATO summit in Bucharest next week.