he's definitely old school. he wouldn't be open to any new ideas.
there wouldn't be any talking to adversaries. it would just be more of the same warring around while the bridges come falling down in the u.s. we really need a change of vision. what is mccain's?
but mind you, war or playing on american's fear of terrorists will be the crux of mccain's campaign. essentially his platform will be the message from clinton's recent ad: that we will not be safe under an obama administration.
i feel safe in knowing that obama won't work to rile up adversaries. he won't be calling them names and he'll have a more respectful tone. the u.s. has to now be a part of the world, not just the big guy on the block. obama's belief that we lead by example, is the best idea i've heard. i believe that obama will be tough when he needs to be. bush is like the big bully on the playground. the world is tired of that. we are too.
let me also point out, 23 million democrats have voted so far, vs. 14.5 million republicans. so, they got a lot of work to do.
the following are excerpts from a story by juan cole at history news network:
I mean, how great can the situation in Iraq be when our NATO ally has invaded the country we militarily occupy in order to kill guerrillas harbored by our Iraqi Kurdish allies, who have been slipping across the border for which we are responsible in order to kill dozens of NATO troops in eastern Anatolia?here's more:
McCain, who voted to go into Iraq and said it was "important" to do so, does not seem to have noticed that the price tag for it and Afghanistan is rapidly rising to $3 trillion to $5 trillion over the long term, or $10,000 for each man, woman and child in America. For a family of four, that is $40,000 or a whole year's salary that George W. Bush has stolen from us and given to his friends at Halliburton, Hunt Oil, Exxon Mobile, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Electric, etc., etc., etc. (See Tom Engelhardt on this and other morsels in Bush's Mulligatawny Soup of a war). Not to mention the nearly 4,000 killed in action and the thousands seriously wounded, with brain trauma, spinal injuries, confined to wheel chairs or forever impaired, who will need to be taken care of the rest of their lives (and guess to which address the bill will come-- not Crawford, Texas.) Is the war really unrelated to the growing bad times in the US economy?Bush's loathsome toadies actually come out and say that all this spending of our blood and treasure is the price of security. But Iraq did not attack the US and was no danger to the US, and the Iraq War is actually actively producing a terrorist danger to our security, according to veteran CIA official and now security analyst Marc Sageman. All this is not to mention the invidious way the Bush administration has framed the terrorism issue, as Noam Chomsky points out at Tomdispatch.
Back to McCain: Running on the efficiency and effectiveness of the failed state in Baghdad would be an extremely risky strategy if in fact the US corporate media were telling the American people the truth (or even just anything) about what is actually going on in Iraq and Iraqi politics. So here is a fact check on two of the claims McCain is making about supposed political progress in Iraq. He has been touting a new law on the treatment of ex-Baathists (who are mostly Sunni and have been treated harshly, contributing to the violence). And he has been ecstatic about the passing of a law on the provinces and some other measures, like the budget. But is any of these laws really likely to lead to ethnic reconciliation?
In his recent response to a measure introduced by Senator Russ Feingold aimed at ending the Iraq War, John McCain ridiculed Iraq War critics who doubted the surge and doubted provincial reconciliation (as at al-Anbar):
"In the face of these new facts, supporters of withdrawal changed their argument yet again. Maybe the surge had brought about greater security, they said . . . But this was irrelevant, they said, so long as national level political reconciliation is lacking – and since we can never expect that, the troops must leave. Yet they were wrong again. In January, the Iraqi parliament passed the long-awaited de-Baathification law that restores the eligibility of thousands of former party members for government jobs lost because of their Baathist affiliation."
the so-called surge is "working" but not really. there hasn't been political success in iraq. it's just blood and guts:McCain argues that violence is down in 17 of 18 provinces. That argument itself suggests the irrelevancy of the US to Iraq. There are no US troops to speak of in the 3 northern Kurdish provinces, or in the southern 4 provinces from which the British have largely withdrawn. There are few US troops in most of the 8 provinces where Shiites predominate. There was no troop escalation or "surge" in the Sunni al-Anbar province. So if violence has declined in 17 of 18 provinces, US policy cannot possibly have anything to do with most of that. General Petraeus has had significant successes in Baghdad, though at the unfortunate (an unintentional) cost of further turning it into a Shiite city from which most Sunnis have been ethnically cleansed. But Petraeus is doing the practical work of trying to make a bad situation better, and makes no claims for success in the political realm in Iraq. McCain is, in contrast, just doing US domestic politics with those hard won achievements of our suffering troops, and is mostly just running on pie in the sky.
