What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam

As John McCain continues to insist that the war in Iraq is winnable, even if the US has to occupy the country for a hundred years, Joe Conason over at Salon has written a very interesting article about what McCain's Vietnam experience tells us about, not how he sees the past, but more importantly about how that vision of the past might provide a key to what a future McCain presidency might portend.

Indeed, what is most striking about McCain's attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won -- that we should have won -- with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable," he said. "I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed." Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal."

Very few military historians agree with McCain's bitter analysis, which suggests that a ground invasion and an even more destructive bombing campaign, with an unimaginable cost in human life, would have achieved an American victory. But perhaps because he is obsessed by the humiliation of defeat -- which fell directly on his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., who served as the commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam conflict -- the former prisoner of war seemingly can formulate neither a rational assessment of that war's enormous costs nor of its flawed premises and purposes.

I have come across this insane argument before, that if America had been willing to fight harder and longer, then the Vietcong could have been defeated. In this mindset the deaths of 58,000 Americans and a million and a half Vietnamese - after sixteen long and bloody years - simply wasn't enough. The war should have gone on longer and more should have died.

It's an argument for victory that, whilst immoral in it's dismissal of the sheer cost in human life of continuing the Vietnam war, it also presupposes that the Vietnam war was a noble war that was worth fighting in the first place. In much the same way as McCain makes that erroneous assumption about the Iraq war.

In the case of Vietnam we were told that the collapse of south Vietnam would lead to "a domino effect" across the region with country's falling to Communist rule. In the end, the south fell... and nothing happened. No domino effect took place.

McCain has famously said that the US should only go to war where her vital interests are at stake, and cites this as one of the lessons learned from Vietnam.

But, just as the Gulf of Tolkin incident was manufactured, the Iraqi WMD - which were supposedly the reason why Saddam had to be invaded - have also turned out to be entirely bogus, and yet neither seems to effect McCain's view of either conflict.

He appears to think that war is noble for the simple reason that America is involved in it and that American victory matters more than any price in human life that such a victory might cost.

That's what he argued about Vietnam and that is what he continues to argue about Iraq.

But underneath it all, there is something that he hasn't learned. Some wars are simply bad wars.

WWI and WWII were noble wars fought for a good cause. Vietnam was not and neither was Iraq. McCain is simply unable to make that distinction. Which is why, at this moment in American history, he simply lacks the vision which America needs to correct a historic mistake.

His lesson from Vietnam is that the US should have stayed longer and lost more American and Vietnamese lives. He now wants to apply that crackpot theory to Iraq.

He was wrong then and he is wrong now. Hopefully, most Americans will realise this and prevent him from getting anywhere near the White House.

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Tags: John McCain, Vietnam, Iraq, US election 2008