McCain's Two Big Ideas

For his campaign John McCain is selling himself as our foreign affairs / security expert, asserting his manifest superiority in this realm over the Democratic candidates. "You wanna talk about war? Well, I know war!" Yet his statements on Iraq seem to suggest the opposite: that, when it comes to what is actually happening on the ground in Iraq, he's pretty much clueless. Take for instance his repeated assertion that Iran is training Al Qaeda terrorists and sending them back into Iraq to kill American soldiers. This is of course impossible. Al Qaeda is Sunni, Iran is Shiite, and never the twain shall meet.

It was almost inevitable, though, that he make this particular mistake. What he did was conflate the two Big Ideas about the war that he is deploying on the campaign trail: (1) that the enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that struck us on 9/11 and that (2) the enemy in Iraq is Iran. Never mind that these two assertions are mutually exclusive. McCain will continue to assert them.

Why? Because the reality on the ground of Iraq is too complicated for public consumption --also too damned hopeless. McCain's big ideas simplify things. According to McCain, the war in Iraq is a proper response to the crime that was committed against us on 9/11 and the enemy in Iraq is a coherent nation state that potentially could be defeated in a war. See? Simple! Wrong on both counts, but simple.

McCain's strategy is borrowed from Bush and his cronies: just keep saying the same thing over and over again, regardless of its relation to the truth (for example, that there is a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein), and perhaps enough people will believe it for it to have a political effect.