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Bad ideas all around

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Via Steve Clemons, there’s Douglas Bandow’s comprehensive review of John McCain’s bizarre foreign policy pronouncements. It’s a reminder of just how consistently McCain has been ill informed or wrong — wildly so in many cases — on the most significant foreign policy questions of the past decade. This is true not merely with respect to Iraq and Iran (where his enthusiasm for conflict is apparently boundless), but in every other region of the planet as well.

It also reminded me to take a look back at the piece that appeared under McCain’s byline in Foreign Affairs in late 2007. Though not as dismaying as the mound of foam that Norman Podhoretz issued on behalf of Rudy Giuliani a few months earlier, the article is basically a K-Tel anthology of deep thoughts from the Bush administration. Lots of manifest destinarian nonsense, enormous statements about the “great struggle,” and an array of proposals that the costs (both financial and diplomatic) war in Iraq has rendered incredible. Does McCain seriously believe, for instance, that anyone would be willing to join a “League of Democracies” guided by the United States? Why not just go ahead and call it a “Coalition of the Willing?” McCain even argues that the US should create a “modern-day OSS” to “fight terrorist subversion.” I suppose their are less diplomatic ways of pointing out that the CIA is no longer politically correct to the anti-Islamofascist right, but I’d have to count this one (belatedly) as one of the least useful ideas of 2007.

I understand McCain will be fishing around for a vice president over the next few months. He really should consider keeping Cheney on the job. And Stephen Hayes, I’m sure, would make a fine Secretary of State.

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