From McCain’s pre-Iraq invasion speeches to his campaign’s recent
embrace of Bush’s imperial presidency, American voters should realize
that if they choose John McCain, they will be locking in at least four
more years of war with much of the Islamic world while selling out the
Founders’ vision of a democratic Republic where no one is above the law.
Take,
for instance, an address that McCain gave to the Munich Conference on
Security Policy on Feb. 2, 2002. In the speech – with the ambitious
title, “
From Crisis to Opportunity: American Internationalism and the
New Atlantic Order” – the Arizona senator laid out the “full monte” of
a neocon agenda.
In those heady days after the U.S. ouster of
Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, McCain hailed “a new American
internationalism” designed “to end safe harbor for terrorists anywhere,
to aggressively target rogue regimes that threaten us with weapons of
mass destruction, and to consolidate freedom’s gains through
institutions that reflect our values.”
To McCain, this meant
that the United States had a fundamental right to invade any country on
earth that was viewed as an actual or potential threat, a theory of
American exceptionalism to international law that was at the heart of
Bush’s strategy of “preemptive war.”
- “Americans believe we have
a mandate to defeat and dismantle the global terrorist network that
threatens both Europe and America,” McCain said. “As our President has
said, this network includes not just the terrorists but the states that
make possible their continued operation.
- “Many of these are
rogue regimes that possess or are developing weapons of mass
destruction which threaten Europeans and Americans alike. We in America
learned the hard way that we can never again wait for our enemies to
choose their moment. The initiative is now ours, and we are seizing it.”
Neocon Forerunner
McCain even presented himself as a forerunner to Bush’s neoconservative policies.
- “Several
years ago, I and many others argued that the United States, in concert
with willing allies, should work to undermine from within and without
outlaw regimes that disdain the rules of international conduct and
whose internal dysfunction threatened other nations,” McCain said.
- “Just
this week, the American people heard our President articulate a policy
to defeat the ‘axis of evil’ that threatens us with its support for
terror and development of weapons of mass destruction,” McCain said in
reference to Bush’s warning to Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
- “Dictators
that harbor terrorists and build these weapons are now on notice that
such behavior is, in itself, a casus belli. Nowhere is such an
ultimatum more applicable than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.”
McCain then reprised what turned out to be the bogus case for invading Iraq.
- ”Almost
everyone familiar with Saddam's record of biological weapons
development over the past two decades agrees that he surely possesses
such weapons. He also possesses vast stocks of chemical weapons and is
known to have aggressively pursued, with some success, the development
of nuclear weapons,” McCain said.
- “Terrorist training camps
exist on Iraqi soil, and Iraqi officials are known to have had a number
of contacts with al-Qaeda. These were probably not courtesy calls,”
McCain added in the smug, sarcastic tone common to that period.
As
it turned out, the “vast stocks” of chemical weapons and the prospect
of nuclear weapons were non-existent. The “terrorist training camps” on
Iraqi soil were hostile to Hussein’s secular regime and were located
outside Baghdad’s control in areas protected by the
U.S.-British-enforced “no-fly zone.”
Evidence collected after
the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 revealed that Saddam
Hussein rebuffed overtures from al-Qaeda, which he regarded as an enemy
in the Arab world. Those contacts were not even “courtesy calls.” [For
details, see
Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.]
Rush to War
However,
in February 2002, McCain was a leading voice in the neocon rush for war
in Iraq, as an extension of Bush’s “war on terror.”
- “The next
front is apparent, and we should not shirk from acknowledging it,”
McCain said. “A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an
entire state at his disposal, flush with cash from illicit oil revenues
and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international
community's demands that he come clean on his programs to develop
weapons of mass destruction.
- ”A day of reckoning is approaching.
Not simply for Saddam Hussein, but for all members of the Atlantic
community, whose governments face the choice of ending the threat we
face every day from this rogue regime or carrying on as if such
behavior, in the wake of September 11th, were somehow still tolerable.
- “The
Afghan campaign set a precedent, and provided a model: the success of
air power, combined with Special Operations forces working together
with indigenous opposition forces, in waging modern war.
- ”The
next phase of the war on terror can build on this model, but we also
must learn from its limitations. More American boots on the ground may
be required to prevent the escape of terrorists we target in the
future, and we should all be mindful that such a commitment might
entail higher casualties than we have suffered in Afghanistan,” McCain
continued.
- ”The most compelling defense of war is the moral
claim that it allows the victors to define a stronger and more enduring
basis for peace. Just as September 11th revolutionized our resolve to
defeat our enemies, so has it brought into focus the opportunities we
now have to secure and expand freedom.”
McCain’s full embrace of
this neocon global theory – both in its grandiose substance and its
grandiloquent rhetoric – marked the over-the-top hubris that
contributed to the suppression of any serious pre-Iraq War debate in
the United States and then to the ill-considered rush to invade Iraq.
As
the war in Iraq turned sour and anti-Americanism swept the Middle East,
McCain began criticizing the Bush administration not for its imperial
overreach but for not reaching even farther. McCain began advocating a
larger U.S. expeditionary force to pacify Iraq, a policy that gave rise
to the “surge.”
‘League of Democracies’
Despite these
tactical differences, McCain has shown no sign of rethinking his vision
of an alliance of “willing” nations going around the world challenging
and replacing disfavored governments. Indeed, he has made this neocon
concept a centerpiece of his presidential campaign.
The
presumptive Republican presidential nominee has proposed a “
League of
Democracies,” which would apply economic and military pressure on
“rogue states” when the United Nations Security Council refuses to do
so.
Though McCain has dressed up his League of Democracies in
pretty language about respecting international law and spreading
freedom, its essence is to make permanent Bush’s “coalition of the
willing” concept used in Iraq.
McCain insists his League won’t
supplant the Security Council, but it would do just that, fulfilling a
long-held neocon dream of voiding the international system that U.S.
leaders fashioned after World War II to enforce the Nuremberg principle
that aggressive war was the “supreme” international crime.
McCain’s
League would create for the U.S. President a standing organization for
engaging in aggressive war against “rogue regimes” whether they are an
immediate, potential -- or imaginary -- threat.
The irony is
that when McCain and Bush talk about the danger of “rogue regimes”
operating outside international law and threatening other nations, that
is exactly what their neocon theories have made the United States: a
country that – along with a few allies – becomes a law onto itself.
Similarly,
McCain and Bush share the view that the President of the United States
should embody and personify these new imperial powers. Just as the U.S.
government can act in any way it sees fit under these neocon theories,
its Commander in Chief also can do whatever he wants without legal
constraints.
That was spelled out by a top McCain adviser,
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, declaring in a letter to the right-wing National
Review that McCain agreed with Bush’s assertion that the President may
override laws that he deems an impediment to fighting the “war on
terror.”
Holtz-Eakin said McCain supports Bush’s program of
warrantless wiretaps despite the Fourth Amendment’s protections against
unreasonable searches and a 1978 law requiring the Executive to gain
approval from a special court for intelligence-related wiretaps inside
the United States.
- “Neither the administration nor the telecoms
need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and
trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the
wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Holtz-Eakin wrote in describing
McCain’s position.
Article II Powers
Holtz-Eakin further
cited Article II powers of the Constitution in explaining how McCain
would act as President, suggesting that McCain – like Bush – would
exercise virtually unlimited executive powers for the duration of the
indefinite “war on terror.”
McCain also has announced that he
would appoint Supreme Court justices like Samuel Alito and John Roberts
who – along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – represent four
votes in favor of reinterpreting the Constitution to grant the
President the broad powers claimed by Bush and McCain.
If a
President McCain gets to replace one of the five other justices with
another Alito or Roberts, the new court majority could, in effect,
rewrite the rules of the American Republic to declare the imperial
presidency “constitutional.”
If that happens, the American
people would no longer possess “unalienable rights,” as promised by the
Founders and enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The
President would possess what the neocons call “plenary” – or total –
power.
That means the President would have the authority to
arrest anyone as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” deny the person the
right to a lawyer or a trial by jury, and subject the individual to any
treatment that the President sees fit, from indefinite imprisonment up
to torture and death.
This neocon vision also holds that the
President – on his own authority – could take the nation to war
anywhere in the world for whatever reason.
In essence, the
United States would cease to be a democratic Republic with citizens
guaranteed fundamental liberties and with an Executive possessing
limited authority constrained by the Legislature. All meaningful power
would be invested in the President as a modern-day monarch.
John
McCain may criticize President Bush on the edges of neoconservative
policies, such as failing to prosecute the Iraq War more aggressively,
and he may differ with Bush on the efficacy of torture, given McCain’s
own mistreatment as a Vietnam prisoner of war.
But there should
be no doubt that a McCain victory would give the neocons another
four-year lease on the White House. And, after those four years, there
might be no feasible way back for the great American Republic.
Writings 
Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two
previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty
from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press
& 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com 
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