In the White House?

The recent front-page New York Times story (15 June) about John McCain's National War College thesis raises a most important issue once again - the relationship between war and "politics". That issue is often formulated as a choice between "total war" - mobilizing enough force to destroy the enemy's ability to resist - and "limited war" - using military force to achieve a limited political goal. The former ends with the enemy's "surrender" or destruction; the latter in a negotiated peace. In McCain's thesis, the Times stated,

"American officials, he (McCain) had argued, had fostered a myopic focus on the prisoners by forsaking the goal of unconditional surrender (of the enemy) in favor of a negotiated peace" (with North Vietnam).

"Total war" is the notion that war is similar to a struggle between two individuals, which must be fought to a finish - the finish being unconditional surrender to the United States' will.

"Limited War," on the other hand, is the recognition that military action can only be justified by a political objective. "Total war" is a crusade: "limited war" is the application of military power to a political objective which negotiation has failed to achieve, and which can therefore only be achieved by an extreme level of political coercion - military action. Once that political objective has been made achievable by military force, military action is no longer appropriate. A quote from the article summarizes tellingly McCain's view of war:

"American elected officials, he argued, had fostered a myopic focus on the prisoners by forsaking the goal of unconditional surrender in favor of negotiated peace, enabling the North Vietnamese to turn their hostages into a bargaining chip. Many Congressional resolutions, favorable to the enemy, were based solely on the guaranteed return of Americans from North Vietnam'' he wrote.

McCain also, in his thesis, condemns the anti-war movement in the US as aiding the enemy and betraying the prisoners who resisted the North Vietnam propaganda. He also condemns the movement as being unpatriotic.

This alone, in my view, should disqualify him from ever sitting in the Oval Office as Commander -in-Chief. In our American democracy, what the minority believe is just as important as what the majority expresses. Our president, contrary to the opinions of the Bush-Cheney team, is not an emperor. When a reporter asked Cheney last week if he did not care what the people thought (about the war), he answered emphatically, "No". Apparently John McCain thought, while a War College student, that the public demonstrations against the conduct of the war in Vietnam were evidence of treason on the part of the protesters. Fortunately for us, our elected officials recognized that the demonstrators needed to be heeded, and pulled our troops out.

South Vietnam fell, eventually, to the North Vietnamese armed invasion after we left, and is now a far more prosperous place than when we evacuated our officials and friends from it. Vietnam is united, their economy is prospering under the communist control, and the dire predictions of the spread of communism to other countries in South East Asia have proved to be untrue.

No one doubts John McCain's military courage. I, as a Vietnam veteran myself, admire him for it. But the battlefield is not the White House. In the Oval Office I want intelligence, compassion, truth, wisdom, and a large capacity to listen and evaluate.

True courage is "every other virtue at the testing point." Obama has it in spades. Spades trump hearts in that chair.