How Johnny became a Neocon: NY Times on McCain

[seasat]

Well, that's not the exact title but it's the gist of the article. The NY Times just published a story about how John McCain jumped on the 9/11 rogue-state-rollback Neocon express. This article summarizes many of the reason why John McCain is a bigger Neocon than Bush ever wanted to be. Here's some excerpts:

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”
...
Whether through ideology or instinct, though, Mr. McCain began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same. He drew on principles he learned growing up in a military family and on conclusions he formed as a prisoner in North Vietnam. He also returned to a conviction about “the common identity” of dangerous autocracies as far-flung as Serbia and North Korea that he had developed consulting with hawkish foreign policy thinkers to help sharpen the themes of his 2000 presidential campaign.

While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.
...
It was during the Balkan wars that Mr. McCain and his advisers read a 1997 article on the Wall Street Journal editorial page by William Kristol and David Brooks of The Weekly Standard — both now Op-Ed page columnists at The New York Times — promoting the idea of “national greatness” conservatism, defined by a more activist agenda at home and a more muscular role in the world.

So basically, he read an article by the intellectual light weight duo of Kristol and Brooks and decided that we needed to invade everyone that looks at us wrong. The article goes on to document how McCain tried to tie the anthrax attacks and Mohammed Atta to Sadaam. I can't keep count of the number of things he was wrong about just in this article. To sum it up, McCain is a reactive individual who's first foreign policy instinct is to bomb a country.

[anonymous171]

1. He wasn't much of a republican before, so it must've been really easy for him to become a neocon.