..."We know that there will never be in our lifetimes a celebration like V-J Day," McCain said. "I don't know of any enemy we face, or possible adversary, where there's a clear-cut victory. In Iraq, we will withdraw with honor, and the troops will come home, and there are other conflicts--in Afghanistan, over time, we'll grow an army--but there will be no church bells ringing all over America and prayers of thanksgiving in cathedrals."
Is this because of the nature of modern America?
"It's the nature of the adversary," he said.
Two aspects of his answer were interesting to me: his conscious use of the term withdraw with honor, with its explicit echo of Vietnam; and his equally explicit echo of an idea advanced by Philip Bobbitt, a Columbia law professor and former member of President Clinton's National Security Council, who argues in his new book, Terror and Consent, that the struggle against terrorism is in fact a war but that, unlike with previous wars, we will not know when this war is over.
McCain calls Terror and Consent "the best book I've ever read on terrorism." He has been carrying it with him this campaign season, showing underlined passages to his staff and to reporters, and he invited Bobbitt to fly with him for two days. Terror and Consent was recommended to him by Henry Kissinger, for understandable reasons: Kissinger, a foreign-policy "realist," embraces Bobbitt's argument that the so-called Bush Doctrine is "incoherent" because its call for the democratization of Arab states undermines another of its principles, the need to "preclude" states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. "When we try to square the circle by connecting the means offered by the doctrine (unilateral action, preemption of the acquisition of WMD, counterterrorism) to its ends (promoting democracy), the doctrine falls apart," Bobbitt writes. "It is highly implausible that the president intended to suggest that the U.S. would, or should, use preemptive military strikes to impose democracy, or that democracy, whether imposed or not, supplies a check on proliferation, terrorism, or ethnic cleansing."
Bobbitt, like McCain, is also a stern critic of the Bush administration's endorsement of torture, and of what he called, in an interview with me, its "disregard" for the law. "Rather than seeking legal reform" to address the new challenges of terrorism, Bobbitt writes in his book, "the U.S. has used the inadequacy of the currently prevailing law as a basis for avoiding legal restrictions on government entirely."
The most controversial of Bobbitt's assertions is that the absence of actual stores of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq does not undermine the need for America to "preclude"--he prefers preclude to preempt--certain countries from developing WMDs in the future. Bobbitt writes:
The war against a global terror network, al Qaeda, is in an early phase. Yet already owing to the Coalition invasion of Iraq, terrorists from this network or any other cannot someday call on Saddam Hussein to supply them covertly with weapons with which to attack the West when he would not have dared to have done so directly, and when he, but not they, had the resources to buy into a clandestine market in WMD.The view of most Democrats, of course, is that the American experience in Iraq has almost fatally undercut the doctrine of preemption. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and a former Army officer, who traveled with Obama to Iraq in July, said of McCain: "I think he's ignoring the consequences of Iraq. First of all, the intelligence and the arguments for Iraq have been proven universally wrong. The logic now is, 'It doesn't really matter if there are no facts to support this operation, because there's always a chance that a country could go bad.' I think this is totally unpersuasive as a matter of logic or strategy. The other test of Iraq is that it has cost us strategically. Iran is a much more influential country because of the Iraq invasion." He went on, "You can justify practically any military operation, not based on the facts of the moment but on what might happen years from now."
| 
