For Those Who THINK They Wanna Vote McCain

More specifically, for those who say things like, "If Hillary gets the nomination, I'm voting McCain."

Know who you’re voting for. Not too much has been said about McCain’s actual ideas for international policy. Sure, writers put out the gaffe where he accidentally said Al-Quaida instead of militants, but they don’t talk about how he’ll actually deal with the world - which is nothing nice, I can tell you. I’ve just listened to an interview on DemocracyNow!, with an investigative reporter, Robert Dreyfuss, who has outlined and critiqued McCain’s policy in The Nation magazine.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Dreyfuss, you got your title, "Hothead McCain," from a Republican senator. You’re quoting Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who said, "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me."

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Yes, I use that quote, and it says immediately after that, that shortly after saying that, Thad Cochran endorsed McCain. So it’s clear that the Republicans are gathering around their leader, despite the fact that many senators, not just Cochran, but many Republican senators view McCain with alarm...

Many Republicans didn’t like Bush and still voted for him, and despite many saying that McCain would be worse, they’re continuing their banality. It’s disgusting. These days there’s nothing conservative about being conservative. These neo-cons spend more and cause more problems than even old school Democrats did. At least Dems are smart enough to tax when they know they’re going to spend. The money’s gotta come from somewhere.

This McCain guy...to think that I actually liked him back in 2000 is making me grit my teeth more than he does. His political advisory list actually includes Henry Kissinger! As my brother would say, "W-T-F, man?!" Like we need anymore Nixon-era bullshit.

He actually has this plan that includes ignoring Russia - kicking it out of the G8. Not that I entirely like the idea of a G8 anyway, but I know that I’m not interested in my government starting a new Cold War. Is he retarded???

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, this is a theory that he developed way back in the 1990s, and he began speaking about it probably around ’96 or ’97, but it crystallized in 1999 in a famous speech that he gave, where he talked about the need to look around the world and figure out [rogue] states, and you can make up the list as easily as I. At that time, it would have been Iraq, Iran, Syria, Cuba, various countries in Asia and Africa that were under various kinds of rebellion, whether it was Somalia or perhaps Burma, perhaps Zimbabwe. I mean, a lot of countries were being put in the category of rogue states. Some of them were on the State Department list of countries that supported terrorism.

McCain looked around the world, and he said, OK, our job is basically to force regime change in all of these countries. And he signed on early to the issue of going into Iraq and forcing a regime change there, long before anybody really had any kind of concerns about al-Qaeda, long before Iraq’s connection to terrorism seemed important. It was simply a principle that any state that didn’t conform to an American view of democracy was liable to be rolled over or rolled back, in McCain’s view.

Many of his advisers, including Randy Scheunemann, who’s now running his foreign policy task force, were engaged in that. Randy was then a chief staffer for Trent Lott. He wrote the Iraq Liberation Act that the neoconservatives and Ahmed Chalabi championed and pushed through Congress. He, Scheunemann, founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002 with White House support. He was also a founder of the Project for a New American Century, which was the sort of ad hoc think tank that the neocons put together. All of this is a sign of—and the fact that McCain would name him as his chief adviser—that McCain, in a way that Bush never did, is a true neocon.

He is someone who in his soul believes in the use of American military power, and as he said in his rollback speech, not just to deal with emergent threats to the United States, but even to enforce the prevalence of what he called American values—that’s a codeword for democracy—so that countries whose internal functioning—let’s say Russia today, under Putin and Medvedev—that countries like Russia that don’t seem as democratic as we like would then become ostracized or sanctioned or subject to various kinds of hostile, both political and military, sanctions. So this is what I find extremely troubling about McCain.

And if you look at his broad policies that he’s outlined, he has suggested point blank that we’re in a long-term, almost unending struggle with al-Qaeda and various other forms of Islamism. And as a result, he wants to create a whole new set of institutions to deal with those. One of those institutions would be what he calls the League of Democracies, which is basically a way of short-circuiting the UN, where Russia and China, in particular, but also various non-aligned countries often stand up to the United States.

Also, he wants to create a new much more aggressive covert operations team. He says he wants to model it on the old Office of Strategic Services, the World War II era OSS, and to create this out of the CIA but include into it psychological warfare specialists, covert operations people, people who specialize in advertising and propaganda, and a whole bunch of other kind of—a wide range of these kind of covert operators, who would then form a new agency that would be designed to fight the war on terrorism overseas and to deal with rogue states and other troubling actors that we—or McCain decides he happens not to like at that moment.

In other words, he’d continue the Dick Cheney way of thinking with his One Percent Doctrine: all war all the time.