Frank Rich: Tet Happened, and No One Cared

[Voice for Peace]

"
REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.

What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.

But Mr. McCain shouldn’t protest too much about the Democrats’ bogus attack. For him, this sideshow is a political lifeline, allowing him to skate away from his many other, far more worrying canards about Iraq. If anything, that misused quote may be one of his more benign fairy tales.....
"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/opinion/06rich.html?em&ex=1207627200&en=8515dfd7728d42cf&ei=5087

[ColbertWatcher]

1. But what kind of person...

...can imagine America in the Middle East for 100 years?

Rich is parsing words.

McCain's position on Iraq, the Middle East and which denominations of Islam is allied with each other are misguided to begin with and Rich does not need to be his apologist.

A warmonger can imagine America bogged down in a never-ending war.

A war profiteer can imagine America bogged down in a never-ending war.

McCain can imagine it, so can his party.

The 100 years quote defines McCain precisely because it shows that he is not a straight talker, not a maverick and too old and too cowardly to lead the nation away from plans designed by his corporate party masters.

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I took the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you'd say. Now where were we, oh yeah...the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

[Voice for Peace]

2. Here's Juan Coles' analysis of Rich's article -- I don't know if you read the whole editorial

but Rich is making a simple point -- that McCain didn't literally advocate for 100 years of war in Iraq, merely a US presence there -- which the Republicans, without much trouble, could easily spin as a benign presence -- thereby taking the punch out of the way both Obama and Clinton are referencing it. And Rich's larger point, which you may have missed, is that the reality of where McCain is ACTUALLY at is much more dangerous than that stupid statement.

From JC:

Frank Rich's "Tet Happened . . . and No One Cared" is an elegantly written and argued examination of the current situation in Iraq that seems to me to pretty much nail it.

Rich demolishes so many of the myths put out by McCain and the American Right generally. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Da'wa Party, which back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, are closer to Iran than the Sadr Movement. It was al-Maliki's parliamentary coalition that sought the cease fire by asking their Iranian patrons to broker a ceasefire. The main motivation for the attack on Sadrist neighborhoods in Basra was to ensure that ISCI wins the elections in that key oil province in October.

It is so refreshing to see an American commentator who clearly has the facts at hand and a sense of proportion in interpreting them.

Rich begins and ends provocatively in arguing that the charge that Sen. John McCain has advocated a hundred-years war in Iraq is a canard, and takes the focus off much more substantive errors that McCain does make.

The only thing I would say is that McCain's analogy to South Korea, which comes from rightwing imperialist historian John Gaddis of Yale, implies two things. The first is that Bush is Harry Truman and it is July 23, 1950 (just after the US lost the Battle of Taejon and had to retreat) and there is a danger of the Communists overwhelming the South.

In McCain's mind, 'staying the course' and supporting the surge is akin to Truman committing large numbers of troops to make sure that we fight to a stalemate, containing America's enemies in Iraq. Once a stalemate is achieved and acknowledged, as in Korea from 1953, there can be an enduring US military presence in Iraq.

So while it is not true, as Rich rightly says, that McCain wants to fight for 100 years, it is true that his analogy does imply several more years of hard fighting.

McCain sometimes says we are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq, and sometimes says we are fighting Iran in Iraq. Neither is in the least like North Korea. The Korea analogy is not really an analogy, since we are not fighting to support one half of a country against the other half, nor are we aiming at a successful partition of Iraq that leaves the enemy in control of half the country!

In fact, McCain warns that not pursuing complete military victory would result in "al-Qaeda" taking over Sunni Arab provinces of Iraq (presumably al-Anbar, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Diyala). But the Shiites now control Diyala even though it has a Sunni majority, and the strongest Iraqi military force in Ninevah/ Mosul is the Kurdish peshmerga. The Dulaim tribe in al-Anbar has turned against the Qutbists (which McCain incorrectly calls 'al-Qaeda'-- they don't take orders from Usama Bin Laden), and much weakened them.

So, there is no actual prospect of the Sunni radicals taking over Sunni Iraq. A majority of Iraqi Sunnis still tell pollsters that they are secular people who want a separation of religion and state, which is what you would expect in an ex-Baath population.

There is therefore no analogy to Korea. Who plays the North Koreans here? Is it our Shiite allies, who are allied to Iran? Is it the Sunni Arab Iraqis, whom the Shiites have ethnically cleansed from Baghdad under the nose of the US military?

Rich is right that the main danger of McCain is that his thinking on Iraq is muddled. But it is also a danger that he thinks he is Harry Truman and it is 1 August, 1950 in Korea. What he is actually offering the American public is a series of Gen. Douglas McArthur's "Home by Christmas" offensives, the ultimate result of which would be an uneasy stalemate in the Middle East with a division or two of US troops hunkered down for decades.

So, no, he hasn't advocated a Hundred Years War. But McCain is advocating the equivalents of the Battle of Seo ul, Heartbreak Ridge, and Porkchop Hill, followed by spending trillions on a permanent US base. These are all before us in his vision.

So the implication of the hundred years remark is not a hundred years war. But it is the promise of a potentially long and destructive military campaign to reduce Iraq. McCain would likely have to invade Basra and crush the Shiite militias there, and a series of Sunni cities, including Samarra and Mosul, may have to be destroyed.

To paraphrase a notorious comment from My Lai, what McCain is really offering is this: "We had to destroy the country to save it, sir."

The danger is a decade-long further war, waged in order to get to the point where the US military can stay in Iraq for 100 years.

So I wouldn't dismiss the danger implied by McCain's remark.

--
Posted By Juan Cole to Informed Comment at 4/06/2008 02:30:00 PM

[ColbertWatcher]

5. ...and he also said...

...if--if--there were no Americans

injured or harmed or wounded or killed

That is another one of those "Iraqis will greet us as liberators" lies that the GOP are so eager to use to justify their warmongering-war-profiteering ways.

Someone is going to get hurt, but they will never pull out of their investment.

McCain said he could imagine America there for 100 years.

In other words, the GOP can imagine privatized military action in another part of the world, but cannot imagine social security working past 2040.

It's about his inability to imagine the world beyond military involvement.

It's about his inability to imagine solutions beyond what will keep his party in power.

It's about his inability to do what it takes to lead.

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I took the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you'd say. Now where were we, oh yeah...the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

[pretzel4gore]

3. remember when we thought we'd have colonies on Mars

by the year 2000? In '2001, a Space Adventure' we could imagine interplanetary travel, with a groovy computer like HAL to rescue the damn fool humans who were acting suicidal after taking too much dope (if i remember the story correctly(?)) ....and this oddball mccain, who killed god-knows-how-many Vietnamese from the safety of 5 miles up in a useless war against a poor little 3rd world nation which has never held it against us, and incidentally a war that cost more then the entire space program even w/out factoring in the reactionary militarism that took root in america after we lost, and a war that gained us nothing but prepared the country for the very fascism that cost 50 million lives in dubia dubia two and enriched a generation of chicken hawks! Shame on that mindless moral imbecile!

[Kurovski]

4. McCain means we'll be there until the oil runs out.

McCain's masters don't give a ferret's fuck about how we control the flow, just so long as we're there to keep a stranglehold.