John McCain and The Politics of Shame

Ezra Klein may be young in years, but he is very wise, and only a bit snarky:

I hold John McCain's foreign policy in rather low esteem. It is wrong, yes, but just as bad, and maybe more dangerous, it is profoundly immature. It is a foreign policy built upon perceived slights, personal grievances, and pride. It is a foreign policy that would risk great power conflict because Putin didn't pass the potatoes quickly enough at last year's G8 luncheon reception. The fact that he didn't accidentally declare us at war with China this evening struck me as something of a victory.

Ezra is on to something here: "Perceived slights, personal grievances, and pride." Okay, how do these traits manifest themselves in McCain's approach to foreign policy? Of course, we can for the sake of convenience label the sum of these qualities as as "bellicosity," "bullying," "neo-conservative posturing" and the like, but I think that misses something more intimate and personal that lies behind the slights and grievances and hostility.

And I think McCain himself betrayed these inner workings last Friday when he returned, again and again, however unwittingly, to a single underlying theme that seemed to frame his views of foreign policy. Here are the money quotes which to my mind reveal the psychology that informs the philosophy behind John McCain's foreign policy:

And I want to tell you that now that we will succeed and our troops will come home, and not in defeat, that we will see a stable ally in the region and a fledgling democracy.

The consequences of defeat would have been increased Iranian influence.

And we will come home as we have when we have won other wars and not in defeat.

But if we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and adopt Senator Obama's plan, then we will have a wider war and it will make things more complicated throughout the region, including in Afghanistan.

And they all say to me that we don't want defeat.

A war that I was in, where we had an Army, that it wasn't through any fault of their own, but they were defeated. And I know how hard it is for that -- for an Army and a military to recover from that. And it did and we will win this one and we won't come home in defeat and dishonor and probably have to go back if we fail.

But the important thing is, if we suffer defeat in Iraq, which General Petraeus predicts we will, if we adopted Senator Obama's set date for withdrawal, then that will have a calamitous effect in Afghanistan and American national security interests in the region.

The consequences of defeat, which would result from his plan of withdrawal and according to date certain, regardless of conditions, according to our military leaders, according to every expert, would lead to defeat -- possible defeat, loss of all the fragile sacrifice that we've made of American blood and treasure, which grieves us all.

Count 'em, 11 references to the word "defeat"---and all in the last 40 minutes of the debate. He used the word "defeat" in reference to Iraq, and in reference to Iran. He used it in reference to Afghanistan, and he used it, most tellingly, in reference to Vietnam. It's a curious choice of words, when one considers that "defeat" is a condition that politicians encounter regularly---say, when your preferred piece of legislation gets voted down, or when your policy recommendations are ignored by your superiors, or when your own constituents decide, as is their wont from time to time, to toss you out of office in favor of someone else. Many politicians are as defined by their defeats as by their victories---think Nixon in 1960 or Al Gore in 2000. So why the near-obsession with the conceit as an extension of foreign policy?

Now, Webster's defines "defeat" as "nullification" or "frustration"---which again doesn't really seem an adequate description for the current state of affairs in Iraq: Not with relatively calm conditions in much of the country, greatly reduced American casualties, an American client government installed in Baghdad, and a Sunni insurgency that has largely been either (a) ethnically purged by various Shia militias or (b) co-opted into the Sunni Awakening via a stead stream of American bribes. In the case of Iraq, we're past the point of discussing a military "victory" or "defeat" anymore---that question was answered within a few weeks of the 2003 invasion when Saddam's forces were routed. So again, one seeks a proper context for McCain's fixation on defeat.

However, if one substitutes the words "humiliation" or "shame"---a feeling of inner, psychological defeat, in other words---in place of "defeat" as it's typically used in conventional political or military argot, it all starts to make a little sense in McCain's case. Sidney Shanberg continues the narrative from a recent dispatch that most of the American newsmedia is treating as if it were a live grenade:

It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his post-war behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo---to try to break down other prisoners---and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain . . .

In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value. Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch and called him the "Crown Prince," something McCain acknowledges in the book.

Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. (In later years, he said he tried to hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."

One can only imagine the overriding shame and humiliation the man must have carried around with him for years after the war was over---and perhaps he still does, even now. It certainly helps explain his obsession with "defeat", and with his lecturing the audience, over and over again, that "Senator Obama doesn't understand" why the avoidance of defeat at all costs is so crucial---lectures which, while obsequious and paternalistic, were in my opinion sincere and heartfelt. I really do believe that McCain thinks this way, and that this much of the man's outraged public persona is genuine. Why otherwise go to such repeated lengths to remind the audience of Obama's naiivete?

But it is all based, as Ezra notes, on personal grievances---and on personal griefs, years in the making, which have yet to be resolved in the man's psyche. My own read on his tense and testy performance in Oxford last week, is that McCain isn't as much at war in his own mind with the Iranians or al-Qaida---or even Obama---as much as he is still at war with himself. Sidney Shanberg again:

Many stories have been written about McCain's explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loathe to speak openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: "This is a man not at peace with himself."

One wonders if future generations won't find parallels between our current presidential campaign and some archetypal Parsifal legend, with McCain cast as the wounded Fisher-King presiding over an infertile wasteland, and Obama as the prodigal knight who returns to restore the land. But for now, let's just say that what we've seen and heard from McCain in recent days should give every thoughtful voter pause. He's not simply a candidate with an ideological agenda and a set of policies---he's got decades-long scores to settle, and psychic defeats to avenge, and that's what makes him truly dangerous.

---Vitelius

Comments

[Sybil]

Well written article.