My point was, and continues to be, how long do we have to stay in Bosnia?
How long do we have to stay in South Korea?
How long are we going to stay in Japan?
How long are we going to stay in Germany?
All of those 50, 60 year periods.
No one complains.
In fact, they contribute enormously, their presence, to stability in the world.
The point is, it's American casualties.
We got to get Americans off the front line, have the Iraqis, as part of the strategy, take over more and more of the responsibilities, and then I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years.
What they care about.
We continue to be concerned about Iranian taking the Al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.
If we pull out of Iraq, then obviously the Iranian influence is dramatically increased.
Al-Qaeda has greater influence and endangers the region dramatically.
It's common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran.
That's well known.
If we leave Iraq, it will enhance Iranian influence in the region to the detriment, I think, of every nation in the region.
You said that the Iranians were training Al-Qaeda.
I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not Al-Qaeda.
Didn't they get the idea that maybe John McCain has no idea what he's talking about?
Occupy Iraq for 10,000 years?
Confusing Al-Qaeda in Iraq with the government of Iraq?
Those factions backed by Iran?
Is this man fit to be the President of the United States?
Fred Kaplan wrote a great article for Slate.
He's the author of Daydream Believers about the war party's crazed mindset and their newest frontman.
John McCain, I'm sure, plays a part in that.
But he's the focus of this new article.
How much does John McCain really know about foreign policy?
Welcome to the show, Fred.
Thanks.
Good to be here.
I'm glad to have you here.
I'm glad that you're asking this question.
It seems like everybody in the media just accepts that John McCain was tortured.
He's a war hero.
He's an expert.
He's experienced.
He's beyond reproach when it comes to foreign policy.
There's certainly, apparently, no reporters anywhere in D.C. who know more about it than him.
They always defer to his expertise, overlook any flaw.
And this is, I dare say, almost heroic that you would even ask the question of whether John McCain is really the foreign policy genius that he's proclaimed to be.
Well, you know, it occurred to me, I mean, Obama was over in Europe and the Middle East and the big question in all the headlines, you know, I remember there was a headline after his first day in Iraq.
The big headline was that he hadn't made any gaps yet.
Everybody was waiting for him to step on some rhetorical landmine, basically.
You know, the inexperienced junior senator from Illinois, he's going to screw this up.
Big risk.
And while he was over there, McCain was making comments that if Obama had made them, would have been just killing.
I mean, for example, referring to the Iraq-Pakistan border, which, you know, doesn't exist.
Iran is between Iraq and Pakistan.
Actually, I have that clip.
If Obama had said that while he was over in Iraq or Afghanistan, I mean, everybody would have quite rightly been all over the guy, like, oh, this proves that he's really not fit for this.
Let me play this clip, Fred, for the audience here, for the people who didn't hear it.
It's real short here.
I have a lot of work to do, and I'm afraid that it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.
All right.
Now, I got to tell you, I sort of want to let him slide a little bit, because I do a lot of talking all day every day here on this radio show.
And there are times where I know I heard a recording once where I referred to the end of the Second World War in 1845.
No, no, no.
Absolutely.
No, you're absolutely right.
But what I'm saying is, I'm confirming your point, that if Obama had said that, that would be taken as indication, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
McCain says that the implicit presumption is that, well, he's an expert, he was obviously just committing a gaffe.
But, you know, one gaffe after another, confusing Sunnis with Shiites, thinking that Iran is training al-Qaeda.
You know, once they start to pile up, my point is that the basic assumption ought to start to be questioned.
And secondly, is this guy really, does he know what's going on in the post-Cold War world?
And I moved beyond that and said, well, let's look at some of the things that he's actually proposing.
You know, substantive things in prepared speeches.
And they just don't make any sense for the world as it is.
For example, he talks about kicking Russia out of the G8, the League of Industrial Nations, because they don't share our democratic values.
I mean, you know, it would be nice, maybe, except for two things.
One, nobody else in the G8 is in favor of doing this.
Two, the kinds of issues that the G8 is dealing with now, global warming, climate change, terrorism, nonproliferation, common energy policy, these kinds of things really can't be done sensibly without Russian participation.
He talks about forming a League of Democracy to take joint action when the UN fails to do so, ignoring a few things.
First of all, the democratic nations are sometimes at odds with one another on what kind of action to take.
For example, France and Germany did not go along with us on intervening in Iraq.
Number two, most of the issues that are now pressing on us have, you can't really divide them into democratic, non-democratic.
The issues which I just mentioned sort of transcend those considerations.
And number three, by creating this kind of block of democratic nations and excluding those that aren't, he's just sort of stirring a recipe for a new sort of Cold War, a new way to divide the world when, in fact, we should be coming up with ways to find common interests among nations with which we might have problems on some issues.
You know, we're no longer in a bipolar world where there's the East and the West, one side and the other side.
The United States, furthermore, doesn't have the kind of power, doesn't have the kind of leverage that it did in that kind of world.
We should be seeking ways to find lots of coalitions with countries that share our interests on some issues, even if they don't on others.
We should be finding ways to unite our friends and divide our enemies, and what McCain is proposing will do the exact opposite.
It will be dividing potential allies and uniting our enemies.
So that's my basic beef about John McCain.
You know, I wonder about all this stuff about democracy.
I mean, I thought it was pretty well established that, other than perhaps a couple of true believers, some say Paul Wolfowitz or something like that, but for the most part, isn't it pretty clear that the neoconservatives don't really mean a thing about democracy?
They just want regime change.
They're imperialists, and democracy is the window dressing they sell us.
Does he really believe that the world ought to be divided this way?
Is this just an excuse for more conflict?
I don't know what he believes, quite honestly.
I mean, the thing about McCain is, you know, there have been times when some of his advisors have been, you know, raving neocons.
There are other times when they've been sort of old guard classic realists.
You would think that after the debacle of Iraq, looking at one of Bush's only successes in foreign policy has been when he's completely violated all of his neocon principles, namely the negotiation in North Korea.
You would think that maybe McCain would be reaching out to some of his old friends like Colin Powell or Brent Scowcroft, people like that.
He's not at all.
In fact, he's leaning more and more in the opposite direction, which really makes no sense.
Quite often, the rhetoric of democracy has been window dressing for a sort of neocolonialism.
And, you know, the shame of it, and I'm not being at all sarcastic about this, the shame of it is that on the issues that really concern our security directly, we need to reach out to countries that aren't democratic.
And while it would certainly be a good idea to create incentives that lean them in a more democratic direction, there's nothing that we can do to push them in that way.
We tried that.
It just didn't work.
And so one thing that I like about Obama, whose views on foreign policy I don't find perfect, but still one thing I like about him is that he starts from the position that you accept the world as it is.
You then want to change it in certain ways, but you start with it as it is.
You don't start with it as some kind of fantasy of what you would like it to be.
And I find it very interesting that he comes at this not from, say, reading Hans Morgenthau or something, but from reading Saul Alinsky as a community organizer in the streets of Chicago.
I have found myself more and more attracted to Obama the more I read about his inclination, his instincts, to be a very pragmatic politician.
But the kind of critique that I'm offering of McCain is not one of some dreamy-eyed idealist.
I think he's the dreamy-eyed idealist.
I'm actually a pretty hard-nosed realist when it comes to these things, and my problem with him is that his premises about the way the world works are either false or just based on daydreams, and that's what I find dangerous about him.
It's this kind of militarism combined with a dreamy-eyed vision.
That's what has been most dangerous and deadly about the last eight years, and in that sense I see McCain as just a continuation.
One thing that strikes me when I watch McCain on TV lately, and I guess I'd probably argue that back in the 90s he seemed to actually be interested, but it seems now that he doesn't really know anything more than his talking points.
That's why he confuses al-Qaeda in Iraq with accusations against the Mahdi army and whatever.
It's because he's not even reading these stories at all.
He doesn't know.
He doesn't really care.
So it's hard for him to keep his talking points straight on these complicated issues.
You can tell on any issue.
You can sometimes tell when a guy has really studied and immersed himself in the issue and really knows what he's talking about or she's talking about, or when he or she is just, as you say, just reading talking points.
And I think you're right.
When you start mixing up Sunni and Shia and mixing up Iran and al-Qaeda because, well, they're both sort of anti-American, so they must be kind of linked in some way, it is a sign of really lack of comprehension of what's going on.
But it's more than just that.
It's also dangerous.
If you're going to treat all of our enemies the same because they are our enemies, you're missing all kinds of opportunities to divide them against them.
For example, this has been a big problem of the Bush administration, who until very recently refused to talk with Syria.
Because, well, Syria is just a junior partner with Iran.
Iran is part of the Axis of Evil.
We don't negotiate with evil.
We defeat them.
All right?
Well, you know, this passes up an opportunity, and I'm not saying, maybe this is dreaming too, but at least it's worth pursuing, of luring Syria over to the other side, or at least to making them neutral, to splitting up that alliance.
You know, it would be as if Franklin Roosevelt, looking out on the world in 1941, says, well, Nazism is evil.
Communism is evil.
I'm not going to form an alliance with Stalin in order to beat Hitler.
In fact, I'm going to declare war on both of them.
And, you know, the world would have gone up in flames.
We would have gone down to horrendous defeat on this high moral dungeon.
Yeah.
Nobody ever really succeeds in invading Russia.
Yeah.
Well, you know, another thing here is that Bin Laden's message, and I don't know, I don't really have any reason to believe that it actually is catching on that strong.
It seems like the jihadist movement is kind of treading water, even with the American interventions in Iraq and so forth, but it seems like the message he's trying to sell is that if the people of the Middle East watch closely, they will be able to discern that actually America is at war against all of Islam, that we do not differentiate between this sect or that, and so they shouldn't either.
It's time for everybody to join together to fight against us.
It seems like, you know, particularly with all the discussion about a possible American-Israeli attack on Iran right now, this is the kind of thing that could really do damage in turn.
I don't think it's really going to happen, by the way.
But, yeah, you're right.
The more that you talk like this, the more that you feed into Bin Laden's propaganda.
And what's ironic about it is that finally, you know, at least the Bush administration in practice, if not in declared policy, is pursuing policies that do take note of these subtle distinctions in Iraq and elsewhere.
And McCain, you know, to me, McCain is actually not even learning some of the more productive lessons of very late era Bush that are worth learning.
I think in some ways he would be not just a continuation, but a throwback to the, you know, say, Bush of three or four years ago.
Yeah, the first term Bush, even worse.
Or early second term.
It's amazing how many periods you can divide this into as a kind of back and forth of getting more or slightly less dense about the way the world works and what to do about it.
Well, let me pitch this out.
Let me try to be the devil's advocate here and say that, well, John McCain, he's an old man, he's running a tireless campaign, and he just hasn't had much time to read antiwar.com a lot lately and keep up with the news.
But that once he's president, he'll be back on top of things.
You know, once you're president, you've got to come at your day's work with at least some basic principles.
It's an outlook.
I mean, you are so busy as president, the campaign is nothing compared to that.
You know, here's the thing.
I used to be a Washington reporter.
I was a defense reporter for the Boston Globe for many years.
And I would sometimes talk with McCain.
You know, I'm talking going back 20 years now.
I always thought he was a pretty smart guy who had a handle on things.
I think part of it is that he's gotten older, but part of it is that the world has changed.
Not since 9-11, but since 1991.
The end of the Cold War really changed the whole scheme of things.
America's place in the world.
You know, America drew a lot of its power from the fact that, from the existence of the Soviet Union, from the bifurcation of the world into two blocs.
Some of our power derived from, well, the fact that a lot of the Eastern bloc looked as an appealing alternative to the regime that was enslaving them.
And a lot of countries in the West looked to us as protection against the Eastern Empire.
Once the Eastern Empire is gone, they don't need our protection so much.
They can go their own way.
They can pursue their own interests.
At the same time, China is coming up as an alternative source.
India is coming up.
Our economy is going down.
We owe some of our debt to Chinese banks.
We don't have that much leverage in the world.
And therefore, it is no longer the case, if it ever was, that we can sneeze and the rest of the world catches cold.
Remember that old phrase?
We can scour and certain countries tremble in their boots.
It doesn't happen that way anymore.
Yeah, it seems like the reality that you describe is greatly at odds with the neoconservative slash McCainian vision of how the world is now.
We're supposed to have, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it's not that we're losing all our satellites.
Now the whole world is our satellite.
There's no one to oppose us, they seem to believe.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
They thought that the end of the Cold War made us stronger.
In fact, you know, undefiable.
When in fact, in a certain sense, it made us weaker.
It made it harder to gain leverage.
To the extent we want to expand our interests or pursue our interests even, we have to be even more determined to form alliances, coalitions.
It's harder to do so.
It involves more compromise than it used to.
In fact, it requires a lot more delicacy and a lot more moral peril as well.
We have to sort of form alliances with entities that we'd rather not.
So yeah, it's a much more complex world and these kind of simplified visions like, well let's kick Russia out of the G8 because Putin is not a very democratic guy, it just doesn't wash.
Now let me ask you about that.
I'm sorry, we're at the time here.
I just want to give you a couple more minutes if I can to ask you about the Russian thing.
I asked Philip Giraldi, the former CIA officer on the show the other day, and he didn't know the answer to this either.
Are there, as far as you know, any real so-called geopolitical reasons why America needs to be confronting Russia this way, or is this simply ideology?
It's not even pipeline politics or anything.
No, I don't see it at all.
Russia is gaining immense wealth entirely because of oil revenues.
It's actually now beginning to manufacture goods on the basis of this.
Well, I was a Moscow correspondent from 1992 to 1995, and it's a very different place now.
I think it's time, in fact, to...
Trying to confront Russia is just going to be a resource-draining loser.
I think it's time to...
I'm not saying we have to cave in of our principles or abandon our own interests, but it's time to reach out and build as many alliances on common interests with Russia as we possibly can.
Agreed.
All right, everybody, that's Fred Kaplan from Slate Magazine.
He's the author of Daydream Believers.
Of course, the website is slate.com, and the article is How Much Does John McCain Really Know About Foreign Policy?
Thanks very much for your time today.
Okay, thank you.
