Fault him for being wrong, if you like: you can't call John McCain inconstant. Fair weather passed Baghdad and with it left a number of onetime meliorists, many of them covering their escape with essays on how they, personally, would have performed as commander-in-chief. The Arizona senator? Not a month after William F. Buckley, Jr. admonished him, in the form of a syndicated column, to disavow, McCain avowed, and became the second most powerful man in Washington to irrevocably endorse the Iraqi campaign. He scheduled an announcement speech to earn the most headlines; he even called the military operation "necessary and just."
With the political melee several months from now and Republican presidential primaries even further away, one can still pause and consider President, or Secretary, McCain. As a senator John McCain has adopted and opposed various resolutions during hostilities, often crosswise the Bush administration. His positions taken in turn would win and then lose him certain votes, and will if his name is on ballots in 2008. But on Wednesday McCain spoke elementarily, he spoke of Iraq — which he would say was a single subject.
"The war on terror, the war for the future of the Middle East, and the struggle for the soul of Islam — of which the war in Iraq constitutes a key element — are bound together," was McCain's thesis. "We must," the senator continued, "gain the active support of modernizers across the Muslim world, who want to share in the benefits of the global system and its economic success, and who aspire to the political freedom that is, I truly believe, the natural desire of the human heart."
We know, or can be reminded, that the second clause is multiply attributed to George W. Bush, the man to whom few apparently listen or invest confidence. John McCain would then have found, in underwriting the president's message, only the president's delivery lacking.
This point only needs placement. I observed then — and maintain still now — that the president was neither fatigued nor unprepared for the first debate in the fall of 2004 with John Kerry, but instead stunned and then exasperated by, then unresponsive to, the substance of the opposition party's dispute. Why had the senator narrowed the war to Osama bin Laden when thousands of terrorists were contracting with al Qaeda independently, far from Afghanistan? How could anyone submit foreign affairs to an inimical committee of nations? President Bush decided not to reconcile the evidence of his last three years in office with nonsense, and repeated his argument until time was called.
The world is at present beheld by war opponents as a series of crude divorces. Lines of reason are interrupted by subjective hops across an intellectual archipelago. Iraq? Distinct, extraneous. How to answer why there is an anxious and especial presence of the enemy in-country? Insist that antagonists are popular, or funds of miscarriage, and homesick for "the real war" in Afghanistan. Failing the aforementioned? Avoid the Iraqi capital, ostracize its elected government and try to expedite the termination of its new alliance with Washington. The broader war, its name, its meaning? That's easy: have Congress elide it.
George Bush has served the United States as an earthy man leavened by simple adages and a diligence suppressing any desire to explain the obvious. His office was prodigious during the eighteen months after September 11th, when no one could afford to collude. Without fluent address, the president has seemed to respond to opponents with rote or outraged silence. However absurd the other side gets, and it is getting wildly this way, Bush doesn't pierce and pull down their contentions — restraint that might be mistaken for assent.
The White House was spared John Kerry's supercilious indecision when the president was re-elected. Four years of traducement are borne well by George Bush's clarity of purpose and plain manner. Did the burden need to amount to what it does, now, in its entirety? Through a lingering presidency are those terrible months to find liability in every gift, to consign the incumbent as a man who lost sight of what he alone started. George Bush leaves either way. His replacement should look to surpass him where he was unable, however scrupulously he is followed. Of the candidates — that could be the senator who, making a speech the president should have, voiced an echo, in word and sincerity: "The judgment of history should be the approval we seek."