No nation has ever benefitted from military defeat, and I draw a bright line between (a) the I-told-you-so recriminations of those who wisely opposed the invasion before it began, and (b) the dishonorable glee of those who don’t even bother to disguise their desire for American defeat. ~Robert Stacy McCain

All right. Now if McCain can just show us an American who doesn’t even bother to disguise his desire for American defeat and expresses such glee, we might be getting somewhere. Preferably, he could show us more than one, and ideally he would find people of some consequence who hold this view. At least then we might be able to judge whether he is simply defining opposition to the war as desire for defeat, or if he has a more specific sort of argument in mind. Otherwise, drawing this bright line is not very remarkable, since pretty much everyone stays on the right side of that line. Of course, if he is equating mere opposition with defeatism–and therefore with a kind of treachery–that would be an indefensible position.

This statement implies that there is some significant group of American war opponents who actually hold this view, and it also assumes that the only alternative to such recriminations is longing for the U.S. to be defeated. I don’t think either is true, and one of my frustrations with war supporters–particularly with war supporters who recognize the blunder for what it is but insist on persevering in the blunder anyway–is their tendency to argue against antiwar positions that do not exist. It would be interesting to hear what McCain thinks victory would look like. Whenever someone says something to the effect of, “Victory is our exit strategy,” I await the list of obtainable objectives that we have not yet reached that distinguish some rational pursuit of a definable victory from an open-ended commitment to keeping well over a hundred thousand American soldiers in a foreign country. I have been waiting for more than five years.

McCain continues:

America is too big, too rich and too powerful to safely disarm. We cannot assume the sort of inert, cowardly pacifism that dominated England in the 1920s and ’30s without inviting aggression. The alternative to American strength is not “world peace,” but rather the removal of any meaningful constraint on the imperial appetites of America’s enemies.

Too big to disarm? Is that the imperialist version of “too big to fail”? Ahem. Then again, who is talking about disarming? Disarmament would entail not simply ending foreign deployments or reducing the size of the armed forces, both of which are advisable and ought to be among our goals, but actually scrapping some huge part of the military. Again, if you can find someone arguing for this (and I’m not sure that even Kucinich would go this far), that would be worth knowing. Who said anything about pacifism? There simply aren’t that many pacifists, and there is hardly anyone alive in the West today making the case for actual pacifism. (For that matter, pacifism did not dominate interwar England, either, but why get caught up in detail?) McCain has erected here not just one strawman, but an entire gang of them.

Whose aggression will we be inviting? Where? Against whom? Unless McCain wants to defend the proposition that it is the business of the United States government to provide security for the entire globe, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Here’s a better question: who are our enemies, and what “imperial appetites” do they have? Arguably, Al Qaeda has the grandest objectives of all and also the fewest resources to reach them. Those states that have the means to pursue “imperial appetites” have shown little or no inclination to sate such appetites, assuming that they have them at all, and it is not a given that they are our enemies in any case. Of course, virtually no one who calls for ending foreign deployments, whether in Iraq, elsewhere in Asia or in Europe, assumes that an era of world peace is going to dawn. What we do expect, or at least what I expect, is that Americans will not be sent to fight in conflicts except when it is actually in our national interest to do, and we will have a much more constrained and sane understanding of what that national interest is. Our allies either already can defend themselves against their neighbors, or they will acquire the means to do so.

More bogus charges follow–war opponents apparently wish ill to their own nation, want to celebrate American defeat, and so on. I won’t dwell on the obvious point that it is the war that has done great harm to our nation, our military and the reputation of our country in the world. We have incurred losses that cannot be undone, and each day we remain there our security erodes, but I do not assume that war supporters actually wanted these things to happen. However, that is apparently what McCain thinks of the six out of ten Americans who oppose the war–that they wish harm to America. If that is not the case, some specific examples of these nation-harming, defeat-celebrating, failure-loving pacifists would be helpful.

Filed under: foreign policy, politics