Richard Whalen

As we walked across Capitol Hill a few years ago, Senator John McCain turned to me and said: “Dick, I’ve always been kind of neoconservative.” He was referring to his maverick image but evidently did not realize then that the word “neocon” had become an epithet in the Iraq war debate.

But it is precisely the war debate and President George Bush’s references to the “enemy” when he endorsed McCain that compel many to remark that a McCain presidency would represent Bush’s third term. “The good news about our candidate is there will be a new president, a man of character and courage,” Bush said. “But he’s not going to change when it comes to taking on the enemy. He understands that this is a dangerous world.”

Ahead of the fifth anniversary of Iraq, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, an ex-Bill Clinton adviser, has just published a provocative tract, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. McCain, a consistent hawk, has begun shifting his ground on Iraq. “I will defend the decision to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime” – a war aim achieved four years ago. This statement of past U.S. war aims could provide an obvious rationale for withdrawal in the near future.

Pentagon plans for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq within 12-24 months are far advanced, using Kuwait as the exit to the sea. Rebuilding Iraq into a functioning modern democracy, as a President McCain presumably would discover, is not a mission suitable for the U.S. military.

McCain will soon have to indicate where he intends to go on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, if only to make his economic proposals, centering on tax cuts, credible in the light of that three trillion dollar price tag.