John McCain’s Imperialism

When I woke up this morning the television in the living room was already tuned to the Today Show and I walked into the following exchange between host Matt Lauer and GOP presidential candidate John McCain:

LAUER: A lot of people now say the surge is working.

McCAIN: Anyone who knows the facts on the ground say that.

LAUER: If it’s working, senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?

McCAIN: No, but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine.

Whether you’re a progressive, a paleoconservative, or a libertarian, there is so much wrong with McCain’s worldview that it’s hard to know where to begin. For those of us that have long questioned America’s forward-leaning foreign policy of maintaining military bases in nearly 200 foreign countries, McCain’s lazy acceptance of century-long foreign occupations is discordant, to say the least. While McCain is careful to use the examples (Korea, Japan, and Germany) that cause the least foreign blowback, that doesn’t change his unquestioning support for century-long foreign occupations.

To begin with, we must ask why we would want to maintain a military occupation of Iraq for 55 years (as in South Korea), 63 years (as in Germany and Japan), or 100 or even a million years, as John McCain has advocated. But to even engage in such a mental exercise is to engage in magical thinking. After all, McCain continues to insist that our unending occupation of Iraq is predicated on a low level of day-to-day casualties. It’s in this sense that McCain maintains, falsely, that ‘The Surge’ is working. For McCain, the object of the The Surge is bring down casualty rates to a point where there is no domestic political opposition to a permanent occupation of Iraq. But even as the military claims that May brought the fewest number of casualties of any month since 2003, Iraq is embroiled in too much violence to even approach McCain’s requisite level of calm.

Also on Sunday, Turkey bombed a mountainous region in northern Iraq where Kurdistan Workers Party rebels are based, the Turkish military said in a statement. The Kurdish rebel group is fighting for independence in Kurdish regions in southeastern Turkey.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Sunday, a roadside bomb killed an American soldier in eastern Baghdad and a suicide bomber in a van killed an American soldier in Kirkuk, the United States military said. The van attack also wounded 18 American soldiers.

A mortar shell struck near the American-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, killing three civilians and wounding seven.

Three roadside bombs left for Iraqi police patrols and at a police recruiting center in Baghdad killed four policemen and recruits and wounded 33 policemen and bystanders, officials said.

In northern Iraq, gunmen opened fire on a police patrol in Mosul, killing three policemen. Southeast of Baghdad, gunmen killed five shepherds in a field.

The Surge would have to work several orders of magnitude better than the status quo for it to quell domestic opposition to the occupation of Iraq down to the level of domestic opposition to the occupation of, say, Okinawa. And then we need to factor in the consideration that America actually turns a profit on its occupation of Japan rather than blowing 10 billion dollars a month on the project like we do in Iraq.

We do have some military justification for our ongoing military presence in Europe and East Asia, but it’s not ‘just fine’ as McCain asserts. It’s something we need to put on the table and discuss. Yet, to compare the kind of policy debate we might have over our forward basing strategy with the quagmire in Iraq and to say that ‘it’s not too important’ when we’ll be able to extract our troops from that sinkhole, just shows how imperial McCain’s mindset is.

Invoking terrorism as a new justification for maintaining our Cold War military posture, McCain shows no clean break with the ‘thinkers’ in the Project for a New American Century. McCain still sees it as America’s sole responsibility to fulfill the four vital missions laid out by PNAC:

Homeland Defense. America must defend its homeland. During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence was the key element in homeland defense; it remains essential. But the new century has brought with it new challenges. While reconfiguring its nuclear force, the United States also must counteract the effects of the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction that may soon allow lesser states to deter U.S. military action by threatening U.S. allies and the American homeland itself. Of all the new and current missions for U.S. armed forces, this must have priority.

Large Wars. Second, the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also to be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces. This resembles the ‘two-war’ standard that has been the basis of U.S. force planning over the past decade. Yet this standard needs to be updated to account for new realities and potential new conflicts.

Constabulary Duties. Third, the Pentagon must retain forces to preserve the current peace in ways that fall short of conduction major theater campaigns. A decade’s experience and the policies of two administrations have shown that such forces must be expanded to meet the needs of the new, long-term NATO mission in the Balkans, the continuing no-fly-zone and other missions in Southwest Asia, and other presence missions in vital regions of East Asia. These duties are today’s most frequent missions, requiring forces configured for combat but capable of long-term, independent constabulary operations.

Transform U.S. Armed Forces. Finally, the Pentagon must begin now to exploit the so-called ‘revolution in military affairs,’ sparked by the introduction of advanced technologies into military systems; this must be regarded as a separate and critical mission worthy of a share of force structure and defense budgets”.