I have nothing against John McCain. The man is a war hero. He has carved out a distinctive career as a political maverick. And his support for the surge in Iraq showed a willingness to stake out a position that, at the time, seemed politically suicidal.
But McCain keeps saying stupid things. In March, he wasn’t clear whether condoms prevent HIV (they don’t – but that’s another story), while ten days ago, when Obama finally slayed Grendel’s wife, he gave the worst speech I have ever seen. (Fox’s reaction was priceless, while you can watch McCain’s ‘lime green’ speech here if you missed it.)
This week, McCain has been in trouble for his assertion that bringing American troops home from Iraq was “not too important.” Here’s the full quote:
Interviewer: And a lot of people say the surge is now working.
McCain: Anybody who knows the facts on the ground will say that.
Interviewer: If it’s working Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?
McCain: No. (Shrug.) But that’s not too important. What’s important are the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine.
All this echoes his remarks from January, when in response to a question, he advocated keeping troops in Iraq for 100 years if casualties could be eliminated – a way of controlling “a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training and equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day.”
Again, McCain took US troop presence in Korea and Japan as yardstick for what the US could achieve in Iraq, echoing the Bush administration’s desire for a network of permanent bases in the country.
What’s the problem with this vision? Apart from its improbability, there’s the evidence that suggests that an enduring US presence would be highly likely to provoke an equally enduring campaign of suicide bombing.
Someone should therefore ask McCain – how many suicide attacks does he want?
My source for this assertion is Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Pape has compiled a database of all the suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003. The database forms the basis of his book – Dying to Win: Why Suicide Terrorists Do It.
Here’s Pape’s headline finding (emphasis added):
What nearly all suicide attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
Pape identifies three risk factors that he believes are likely to lead to sustained campaigns of suicide attacks (one-off strikes are rare, he says). First, a national group believes it is occupied by a foreign power. Second, the occupier practices a different religion. And third, the occupier is answerable to a democracy back at home.
Of nine occupations that have generated suicide terrorist campaigns, eight met all three conditions, and the last, of the Kurds in Turkey, met two of the three. Further, with respect to the fourteen nationalist rebellions that have taken place since 1980 and that were directed against a democracy with a different religion, these three conditions account for the presence or absence of suicide terrorism in all fourteen, once concessions to ordinary rebellion alone are taken into account.
For Pape, ‘alien occupation’ is an powerful accelerant for violent unrest. Religion, meanwhile, is the most effective way to cement an occupier’s alien status. And democracies are vulnerable to suicide terrorism because they are relatively easy to coerce. His study, he claims, accounts for the pioneers of suicide terrorism – Tamils, who are mainly Hindu – as much as it does for various Islamist variants.
Pape’s arguments are convincing – with the proviso that suicide terrorism is already mutating from this nationalist base. Even so, occupation will remain the most effective way of creating a pool of those ready to engage in suicide tactics.
That’s the danger of McCain’s foreign policy vision:
- It is possible that the best in counter-insurgency tactics, combined with an inspired political strategy, could prepare the ground for a relatively stable Iraq (and Afghanistan).
- It is also arguable that the US is now obliged to pursue this result. (Pape would disagree – he advised Ron Paul on foreign policy and is relatively isolationist.)
- But McCain’s belief that the US could then settle in for a peaceful and permanent occupation… Well, that borders on the criminally deluded.
McCain has argued that failure in Iraq is unthinkable. It would be “a historic loss at the hands of Islamist extremists who, after having defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the United States in Iraq, will believe that the world is going their way and that anything is possible.”
But he too seems to believe that “anything is possible” with the right strategy and tactics. “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed,” he argues, “That’s fine with me, I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence.”
No it’s not fine, John. The peaceful and permanent occupation of Iraq is a chimera; a piece of wantonly wishful thinking. It makes me wonder. Can the world really afford another fantasist in the Oval Office?
