19 May 2008
McCain Doctrine
In his thorough review of the process behind John McCain’s position on the Iraq War in the New York Times Magazine (“The McCain Doctrines,” May 18, 2008), Matt Bai waits until the final paragraphs to capture the essence of the Republican candidate’s convictions. Like General David Petraeus and other military experts, McCain can’t escape evaluating this and other conflicts, including Vietnam, within the boundaries defined by civilian authorities. For the military, that’s as it should be. However, Mr. McCain has long been a member of the civilian apparatus that is supposed to run things in this country. Whereas officials like President Bush rely on military views of the conflict as a convenience, Senator McCain does it as an unreformed habit.
Mr. Bai pegs McCain for not defining victory in Iraq beyond minimizing U.S. casualties and installing orderly democracy. The objective of the U.S. military has traditionally been effectively to enforce the security interests of the country as determined by our political leadership. In general, you don’t fight a war in order to win it; you fight it in order to achieve a political goal. When that political goal is only to protect our country’s ability to act willfully in international affairs—upsetting a cultural desire for authoritarian rule, for example—the effectiveness of our military is not the appropriate measure of the success of the war policy.
Our warriors may be competent to achieve a political goal, but their success is certainly not the standard for measuring the correctness of the policy. If it were, invasion and occupation of other countries with a minimum loss of the aggressor’s lives would be the height of accomplishment for any society. That’s certainly not the ideal we wish to choose for ourselves this election year.
In his thorough review of the process behind John McCain’s position on the Iraq War in the New York Times Magazine (“The McCain Doctrines,” May 18, 2008), Matt Bai waits until the final paragraphs to capture the essence of the Republican candidate’s convictions. Like General David Petraeus and other military experts, McCain can’t escape evaluating this and other conflicts, including Vietnam, within the boundaries defined by civilian authorities. For the military, that’s as it should be. However, Mr. McCain has long been a member of the civilian apparatus that is supposed to run things in this country. Whereas officials like President Bush rely on military views of the conflict as a convenience, Senator McCain does it as an unreformed habit.
Mr. Bai pegs McCain for not defining victory in Iraq beyond minimizing U.S. casualties and installing orderly democracy. The objective of the U.S. military has traditionally been effectively to enforce the security interests of the country as determined by our political leadership. In general, you don’t fight a war in order to win it; you fight it in order to achieve a political goal. When that political goal is only to protect our country’s ability to act willfully in international affairs—upsetting a cultural desire for authoritarian rule, for example—the effectiveness of our military is not the appropriate measure of the success of the war policy.
Our warriors may be competent to achieve a political goal, but their success is certainly not the standard for measuring the correctness of the policy. If it were, invasion and occupation of other countries with a minimum loss of the aggressor’s lives would be the height of accomplishment for any society. That’s certainly not the ideal we wish to choose for ourselves this election year.
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