While we've been preoccupied with Wasilla, Trig, Track, Todd, Bristol and Levi, the Bridge and the Road to Nowhere, the deep critique of celebrity politics, the bucolic life of small-town Alaska and its proximity to Russia, the virtues of drilling, and lately, the meltdown of global financial markets, Jeffrey Goldberg has published an important piece on "The Wars of John McCain," referring not only to the actual war John S. McCain III fought but to his mentality--and also the wars of his father, the Vietnam admiral, and tangentially, his admiral grandfather, and by implication, the whole chain of American wars to which he is evidently devoted, wars that McCains have fought in, as the current McCain is proud to repeat.

Goldberg's view is that, while McCain "has advisers from both the neocon and realist camps," there's "one area [where] he has been more or less constant: his belief in the power of war to solve otherwise insoluble problems." Though Sarah Palin may not be sure what exactly was the Bush Doctrine of 2002, McCain knows just what it was and persists in upholding the dangerous notion that the U. S. is justified in launching a war unilaterally whenever it believes itself endangered. (Goldberg makes the common mistake, as did Charles Gibson, of calling this "preemption." That term should be reserved for cases of attacking first to avert an imminent attack. What McCain and Bush agree on are the merits of preventive war.) Thus McCain's perhaps playful but symbolically screamingly telling Beach Boys gag earlier this year, "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

Goldberg maintains that McCain is an unreconstructed Vietnam revisionist. McCain thinks that war was "winnable." As Matt Welch writes in his most useful, important, and disgracefully neglected book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick (p. 210), "He returned from Vietnam a fervent believer in the domino theory, but somewhere along the line changed his mind, without ever (to my knowledge) discussing the implications of discovering that the basis of the U. S. foreign policy he fought for was untrue" (my italics). "His taste for interventionism during his first 15 years of office was tempered greatly by Vietnam," Welch adds (p. 61), but McCain's temperance long side wore off, as witness his yelling "Next up, Baghdad!" on board the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Persian Gulf on Jan. 2, 2002 Although after Sept. 11 (according to Elizabeth Drew, Citizen McCain, p. 145), he co-sponsored with John Kerry a resolution limiting the president's right to declare war--he told NPR that the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution "taught us that we ought to be very careful what we do in the passions of the moment and we may regret later on"--he has not thought through why the Vietnam war, his war, was drastically misguided. Just as he avoids self-reflection, like another Republican president you can think of, calling it "this psycho stuff," he avoids, or is incapable of, careful reflection on the rights and wrongs of American foreign policy. He reveals no signs of any subsequent thought about why that war was a disaster.

McCain's beloved surge is his attempt to win the Vietnam war after the fact. Goldberg writes this about McCain's former Hanoi cellmate, friend, and supporter Orson Swindle:

I told Swindle that McCain had argued to me that he doesn't think about Vietnam overly much when he thinks about the wars of today.

"Bullshit," Swindle said. "He'll say Vietnam didn't affect him, that he doesn't think about it, that he's aloof from it. But I see it. It's there."

Like his father, John McCain thinks the Vietnam war should have been fought and could have been won. For its loss, on the strength of what he tells Goldberg, he blames--surprise!--the media and civilian authorities. (Here he resembles an earlier revisionist, John Rambo.) He blames Walter Cronkite for turning against the war. He seems to think that had it not been for Watergate, Nixon would have been free to use air power to stop the North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam.

And then consider this: Goldberg hands him a copy of a 1972 NYT op-ed by his father, maintaining that "Vietnamization is successful." "Hey Lindsey," McCain says to his traveling companion, Lindsey Graham, "look at this article. This is from when The New York Times still published op-eds by McCains"--this said "with a half-smile." It must have slipped his mind that on March 12, 2003, just before the launch of the Iraq war, the Times published an op-ed under his name, containing these lines:

no one can plausibly argue that ridding the world of Saddam Hussein will not significantly improve the stability of the region and the security of American interests and values....Isn't it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness?

But back to the subject of the senior McCain's belief that "Vietnamization [was] successful." As Jeffrey Klein wrote in July, "If Admiral McCain believed this, he was the only top American official who did. By then the author of the Vietnamization strategy, General Creighton Abrams, was privately calling it 'Slow Surrender.'"

Nixon approved of Admiral McCain's uplifting talk about how the Vietnam war was going. Klein adds this chilling footnote:

Admiral McCain played a key role in Nixon's nuclear brinksmanship during October of 1969, when 71% of Americans approved of their war president. Nixon concocted an astonishingly secret operation to fake a nuclear attack on North Vietnam. From Oct. 10 through the end of the month, Nixon ordered the US military to full global war readiness alert with no explanation. Nixon knew both his Secretaries of State and Defense opposed his nuclear brinksmanship. Admiral McCain, however, was in Nixon's loop and urged maximum mobilization, including the deployment at sea of as many threatening Polaris nuclear missile submarines as possible. On Oct. 27, Nixon dispatched 18 B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to the northern edge of the Soviet Union, where they circled for three days. This signal to the Soviets and the North Vietnamese ("Compromise on our terms or else!") was completely hidden from the American public and virtually all of the top military brass. Nixon's mad bypassing of the chain of command caused tactical screw-ups, including near collisions of the nuclear-armed bombers with other planes over Alaska. And the bottom line? The operation failed to budge the North Vietnamese.

Back to the current John McCain's fanciful views of the world, the world he purports to be so "experienced" about. John McCain thinks that "we have succeeded in Iraq." He told George Stephanopoulos recently that "we were greeted as liberators" there. He thinks a 100-year occupation in the middle of the Middle East sounds like a good idea, at least if it can be accomplished without American casualties--and if McCain thinks that premise realistic, he is a pipe dreamer.

Last month, he gave us intimations of his kneejerk belligerence with respect to Georgia and Russia, but the media have not paid attention to the wider implications. For his part, McCain doesn't go around giving speeches about what energizes him and gives his life meaning--war. "it's very hard to run for president on this idea [of preventive war] right now," McCain told Goldberg. That's why he doesn't talk about it much; why he'd rather talk about Sarah Palin eyeball-to-eyeball with Russia.