McCain's Vietnam Lessons Unlearned?

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McCain's Vietnam Lessons Unlearned?

Analysis by Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Apr 16 (IPS) - Throughout a long career in politics, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has had his foreign policy shaped by his and the United States' experience in the Vietnam War.
But that shaping has been very dynamic -- not beholden to any one particular lesson of the conflict, but rather taking each political situation presented to him and viewing it through the lens of Vietnam, often with mixed results.

The most potent example of this today is also one of the biggest campaign issues -- McCain's support for the Iraq war. The war, many feel, violates some of the primary lessons of Vietnam that were thought to be solidified in the Powell Doctrine of former George W. Bush secretary of state Gen. Colin Powell (Ret.), who along with McCain was informed by his service in Vietnam.

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"Just like that, in 1997 and 1998 he did a complete 180 when he started hanging out with the neo-conservative crowd," said Schecter, whose book on the Arizona senator, an unsympathetic profile called "The Real McCain", was recently released. "McCain has broken with his bothers in arms to join this group of armchair warriors who theorise on blackboards and computers and have never been actually been to war."

The allegiance with that crowd was codified in 2000 when neo-conservative Randy Scheunemann was added to McCain's 2000 presidential bid as an advisor. For his 2008 run, McCain has taken on Scheunemann as his foreign policy chief.

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Perhaps the biggest gap in logic for McCain's use of his experience with defeat in Vietnam to bolster the war effort in Iraq is based on his contention that the U.S. must not lose its will to fight.

"It's a trick because that observation assumes that the United States could have won in Vietnam if only it had not withdrawn, which is not true," Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a Middle East expert, told IPS. "Yes, it's very unfortunate to be defeated in a military endeavour, but it happens. So suck it up and get over it."

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