Missoula Notebook

And Stop Calling Us “My Friends”!

By Sutton Stokes, 8-22-08

“My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.” -John McCain

“Today, we are all Georgians.” -John McCain

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now. Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.” -Mikhail Saakashvili, President of Georgia

I couldn’t at first decide what was more astounding about this week’s diplomatic overtures by president-elect-in-his-mind John McCain to Georgia (the country): that he felt free to make them in the first place, or that the Georgian president — who otherwise seems to be a bright young man — actually believed that U.S. troops would come parachuting to his aid, just because men like McCain and George W. Bush have been sticking their tongues in his ear these last seven years.

But finally, I decided to just concentrate on the bizarre fact that so many prominent members of our ruling class are still open to the idea of using American military force for no particularly good reason. I mean, sorry, Georgia, but frankly — when the story first broke here — most Americans probably thought, for a second or two, that Russian ships were coming up the Savannah River. You see, we don’t really tend to own world maps over here, and besides, the oil isn’t turning out to be as sweet as we’d hoped. But by all means, give us a call if you get your hands on some of the good stuff.

You might think that our ongoing adventure in Iraq would have taken some of the shine off of the concept of idealistic military intervention in other country’s affairs for Americans, but, apparently, you’d be wrong: as things went south in Georgia last week, more than a few members of not only our punditocracy but even our government — including, possibly, our next president — were shown to still carry in their hearts a brightly burning desire for another “good war.”

There’s something about having the world’s mightiest military that makes you itch to use it, I guess, perhaps in the same way that owning a gun can lead to dangerous fantasies of saving your family or maybe even your whole block from marauders in the night.

It is with dismay, then, that I consider recent polls showing Senator McCain gaining on Senator Obama in their race for the presidency, apparently a result of McCain’s ham-fisted but effective appeals to Americans’ worst impulses. (As just one example of how little the McCain campaign thinks of our ability to detect bullshit, we are supposed to accept that the Senator couldn’t possibly have broken the rules governing Reverend Rick Warren’s recent bizarre religio-political interrogation of the candidates — despite the distinct appearance that he could have — simply because he is ”a former prisoner of war”.)

And most incredibly, it seems that it is McCain’s recent inarticulate snarlings about the need to counter Russian aggression — admittedly the first moments in months when the Senator has behaved like anything other than an animatronic mannequin in the American Adventure show at Epcot Center — that have been most well received, proving that it is still a little early to hope that Americans have learned anything from the Iraq debacle other than that it sucks when wars get all confusing and stuff but maybe the next one will go better.

Is it really the best time in American and world history to elect as president a man who cannot understand world events except as a series of crises, and who has made a specialty in his Senate career of articulating aggressive and warlike courses of action in response to virtually every foreign policy problem that arises?

Senator McCain stands accused of many character and other flaws — a quick temper, lack of moral conviction, cynical grandstanding, bitter partisanship, ignorance of basic foreign policy, dishonesty — but his recent apparent enthusiasm for using military means to restrict Russian influence to Russian borders, as if the Soviet Union still existed and were still espousing world domination, as if American forces weren’t already bogged down by a much less formidable enemy, as if America had so much credibility in the world that it could afford to do without Russian help on issues like, say, nuclear non-proliferation in countries like, say, Iran — well, to me, all of this suggests that Senator McCain’s biggest flaw is, simply, a lack of imagination.

I hope it will not turn out that the majority of American voters are so similarly handicapped that they will come running when he calls them to heel in November.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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