McCain and Iraq

Somebody made the comment that we should clean house with Congress, kick them all out and grab 535 people off the street to replace them. I thought this was a silly idea until I heard McCain say we need more troops in Iraq, and for an indefinite time.
My point is that the man in the street has got more sense about Iraq than a powerful and important senior Senator.
McCain said if we don’t fight Al Quaeda and Bin Laden over there, then we got to fight them here. Although Fox news and Murdoch may think we re fighting some slippery fanatics like Bin Laden and his recruits around Baghdad, the guy in the street knows his son is actually dodging bullets from the nationalistic factions of a civil war. .He also knows those bullets are stolen from arsenals not protected by us and that the shooters, possibly sympathetic to radical islamofascists like Bin Laden are actually Sunni and Shiite Iraqis who want us the hell out of their country.
But McCain is running for President and his base thinks the demon leaders of Iran and Pakistan are Khruschev or Hitler incarnated and that their only goal in life is to blow us up or have their kids do it after they are fully brainwashed that America is the devil.
McCain and Charlie Rangel may be playing a macabre game of chicken where they plan to run their ideas into each other until one realizes the other is serious. Rangel wants a draft- McCain says we need more troops .The Pentagon has quantified that need- hundreds and hundreds of thousands more- and McCain says maybe for a hundred years! Rangel says you can’t have more troops without a draft- so he is daring McCain to agree with him. Well, here is the problem: he just might do it.
Will Rangel and the Democrats then have to go along because they will look silly or ignorant for pushing for the draft and then saying, “ Hey, we were only trying to make a point!”
This is dangerous stuff and the folks in the street, as well as those in the suburbs and suvs know better than these false sages.
Maybe there should be a school for senators where they are actually taught history and diplomacy instead of jingoism and soundbites. Of course McCain knows better than to repeat blather put out by the white house in 2003,4,5, and 6 that if we don’t fight them there, we got to fight them here. Of course he knows that Iran is not Iraq, that Iran has never attacked anybody, that we encouraged and sold weapons to Saddam so he would attack Iran. And you know he has to know that sending more troops to Iraq will only fan the hate flames even more.
Then , is he being coy or silly? McCain is one of the shrewdest politicians on the block- not the best, since Bush/ Rove beat him in 2000, but still not a dim light. He may be serious that we need a draft and that hundreds of thousands of American kids need to be in the Middle east staving off the inevitable attack of the head choppers. I don’t want to do the math, but that might take a lot more than hundreds of thousands, and it might take a very long time since it is clear that by adding troops to the mix we are increasing the enemy. This is like the sorry carpenter who said, “ I’ve cut this dam piece of wood three times, and it’s still too short!”, repeating his mistakes thinking he’ll get it right eventually.
The fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East, may not be driven by the simplistic logic that we are just protecting Israel’s hide, is one of ideology. Maybe the senior Senator and many others who think like him believe the stuff we see on Fox tv or the pseudo documentaries on the internet showing what appears to be the entire middle east chanting death to America every day at 5 pm. The blurring of cultures, countries and clans in the minds of Americans is understandable with our limited attention span, but not in the minds of Congressmen who send our kids to war. Sunnis, Shiites, Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Pakistanis, Saudis, Yeminis are not all one common enemy simply because most of them happen to be Muslim. But then I haven’t read the Koran! Maybe I forgot to read the Bible, too, where Joshua was told by Jehovah to slaughter all the people, women and children- leave not one standing. I’m not disparaging anybody’s faith here, but there is a reason intelligent people kept it out of politics a long time ago. It divides us, demonizes an enemy quicker and cuts off all rational debate faster than you can say my God is better than yours.
Unfortunately McCain’s base and too many of the rest of us with limited time and attention span are guilty of confusing faith with facts. The facts are that we invaded a sovereign country, falsely justifying it, killed thousands and thousands of innocent civilians, lost too many of our brave soldiers, some who were supposed to be helping out here after our natural disasters, and now are trying to attain some kind of Nixonian peace with dignity while leaving Iraq burning and bleeding.
Maybe 535 people off the street would be as short-sighted as our powerful Senators and Congressmen, but at least they wouldn’t have to be pandering to a base for a presidential run and thus irresponsibly calling for a continuation and escalation of such costly ideological fantasy.
McCain and Rangel and all the rest should be supporting the inevitable, in deed. What is it? It is a coalition of middle eastern countries with our help, hopefully, joining together to bring law and order to Iraq. That means international troops with a time table to police the streets and villages of Iraq until the violence is contained. It means Maliki, Sadr and Bathists included in this. It means bringing cool heads to the table who represent more than one side. It means a discussion of partitioning which allows for the even sharing of the oil resources. It may mean a reevaluation of our need for huge bases and 110 acre compounds in the middle of Baghdad. It means grownups coming to the table with advisors who are experts on the middle east and the cultures that live there. It means curtailing the rhetoric that blurs and confuses. I say this is the inevitable, because even if we go in another direction toward more war, it will still be the only eventual solution.