A CASE OF COLD FEET? WHO TO FEAR?

McCain’s campaign has overtly descended into leveraging fear, ostensibly related to Obama’s lack of foreign policy and military experience, but more likely seeking a darker subliminal foundation. It is a timeless strategy to provide a clean rational as a permission slip for views with emotional roots unacceptable to the conscious mind or for public expression. Yet it is McCain that should be feared as experience can blind as well as enlighten and Presidents can be subliminally motivated by emotion as well as voters.

Until recently few would view a McCain presidency as anything fearful. He certainly does not look frightening and in times past has been widely viewed with favor for his independence from his party on domestic issues. After he lost to Bush the straight talk express jumped the track, principle finally yielded to ambition and McCain became just another pandering politician; some what pathetic in contrast to his own prior heroic example. Still for many, anywhere left of the far right, he seemed among the least objectionable of the Republican candidates. That is until he started ranting about staying in Iraq for a hundred years to achieve some undefined victory over an ill defined enemy and proscribed “bomb, bomb Iran” as a solution to our difficulties with that country. Such views in a Presidential candidate, especially given recent history, should give rational minds pause.

We now know that the Bush administration intended from the beginning to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq following the war, which is to say “bring it under our sphere of influence”. This of course means it was about oil all along. Such thinking reflects the obsolescent concepts of the “neocons” that have dominated Bush foreign policy. McCain’s statement about Iraq and Iran, as well as about dealing with Russia and China reflect the same mind set, one from a world that passed away in the last century, one in which military power is the prime measure of national stature and one in which great powers cobble together alliances and dependencies in an effort to construct self-sufficient economic spheres upon which to found that power and compete, empire against empire, through force and the threats of force. In such a world might makes right, there being few other arbiters of any conflict.

Economic integration (globalization) has changed how the world works, muting the validity of traditional conceptions of how nations succeed and interrelate. The bomb made all out war between great nations impossible but economic integration has made any real war between great nations impossible. The very commencement of such hostilities today would result in economic chaos to all that a half century ago could only be visited upon the vanquished after years of sustained warfare. A nation’s power and prestige today is a function primarily of economics not military power, its success determined by ability to play well with others, trade and compete. Nations have found it necessary to submit to the rule of law rather than the law of the jungle as the price of gaining access to world markets. Only backward nations prefer independence of action to economic success (North Korea and Iran). The most important discussions between nations today involve central bankers not generals.

More importantly, economic integration has changed the source of violent conflict. The principle conflicts today are not between nations so much as between cultures. With a few exceptions, terrorism is a much a threat to the governments’ of the states from which it springs as others. Economic integration promotes social integration. Together these have given rise to cultural insecurity. For some nothing is more fundamentally threatening. Terrorism is the heat of paranoia arising from the crushing together of cultural plates being driven by the pressure of economic integration and globalized mass communication. Having no nation, terrorism is a poor target for military power. Useful in a situation such as Afghanistan, where the State had overtly been co-opted by terrorist, the use of military power is otherwise as likely to promote as prevent terrorism, Iraq being a prime case in point. It is obvious that violence that emanates from a mindset and not a state and which takes the form of suicide attacks is not likely to be defeated by the use of force or the threat force. If the causes of terrorism are not addressed we can maintain troops in Iraq for a millennium and there will be no resolution to the “global war on terror”; no surrender on the deck of some battleship. Yet McCain is all about achieving military victory over terrorism by staying in Iraq where there was none before we arrived and were our presence is a continuing provocation to it. A surgeon may as rationally refuse to close his incision until the patient is well as to say we will not leave Iraq until terror is defeated, even more so as we have cut on the wrong patient.

Like Bush, McCain will provide the friction of belligerence where the lubrication of discourse is needed. He will maintain an alien occupation where distance and self sufficiency are needed. He will generate instability where economic opportunity is needed. It is a classic case of "experience" being counterproductive as his experience originates in another world and another time and likely has been adversely colored by his bitter personal Vietnam experience, another doomed from the beginning military adventure that he personally invested in and which one now must suspect he is subliminally motivated to vindicate with “victory” in Iraq, there being no other apparent explanation for his obsession with staying when rationally victory is by definition leaving.

Bush has been a destructive monster on the world stage, undermining our essential economic strength, our values and our credibility as a nation while promoting world violence by waging an unnecessary war in pursuit of irrelevant and unattainable goals. McCain will be his twin reincarnate, ignorant of the critical realities around him, inclined to unilateral military solutions to complex multilateral problems and oblivious to the opinions of other nations. He will fill veteran's hospitals not universities, lay mines not open minds. It is a mentality he was raised with, steaped in a family military tradition.

The bumper sticker says, “these colors do not run the world”. True, but they can lead the world, forward into the world that is emerging, one built on security derived from mutal dependence and ruled by law developed by consensus, economically integrated, secure to and tolerant of cultural diversity, or backward into arrogant supper power unilateralism, instability and violence. For clarity the later is the course we have been on and I for one am fearful of continuing it.