WP: Troop Push Is Personal For McCain

[kskiska]

Senator Calls for Iraq Boost as Son Becomes a Marine

Tuesday, December 26, 2006; Page A01

As the Iraq Study Group issued its long-awaited report on the war, declaring that the United States should not dispatch more troops, Sen. John McCain reacted with his long-held and contrary view: It will take more boots on the ground, or the nation faces "sooner or later, our defeat in Iraq."

Then the Arizona Republican discreetly flew to San Diego, where the next day, Dec. 8, he sat under a hot sun to watch a skinny 18-year-old in military-issue glasses graduate from boot camp and become a Marine. His son Jimmy.

John McCain's public certainty about Iraq masks a more private and potentially wrenching connection. If more troops go there, as McCain hopes they will, his youngest son could be one of them, taking his place in a line of family warriors that is one of the longest in U.S. history.

Sen.-elect James Webb (D-Va.) also has a son in the Marine Corps named Jimmy. On the campaign trail, Webb declined to talk about his son, who is in Iraq, but he wore Jimmy's boots as he called for American forces to come home.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/25/AR2006122500548.html

[knight_of_the_star]

1. That is sick

So he's completely ok with sending his son into the woodchipper called Iraq? You would have to be pretty sick to be pushing for that kind of hell for anyone, nevermind your own child.

[IndianaGreen]

2. What is sick is that McCain is as deluded as Bush

Is he doing this because he wants to earn the support of the lunatic Right, or he is doing this because he is just refighting the Vietnam war in his head?

The war was lost a long time ago, and the Iraqis want us out.

[calimary]

3. That's an interesting point - is he just refighting Vietnam in his head?

I'll bet he is. Otherwise, why would he undertake a suicide move like advocating a piddly 20 or 30 thousand troops? That would accomplish nothing except offer the insurgents and other nutcases over there 20 or 30 more targets to shoot at. If you're really intent about "winning" a horrendous, hopeless piece-of-shit like this, what you'd need is probably at least ten times that. An overwhelming force. I dunno - maybe five or six hundred thousand? And where are we gonna get that many in as unpopular a war as this one? I am NOT advocating that, mind you. I think we oughta get the hell out of there, like maybe a year ago. Better still, we never should have gone in. But a paltry "surge" like that one isn't going to accomplish squat. And mccain damned well ought to know that, actual veteran soldier that he is. I mean, for Pete's sake, he's actually SEEN combat. He of all people ought to know better, as opposed to some coddled armchair "warrior" as that cardboard cut-out who fancies himself a commander-in-chief flatters himself to be. mccain ought to know better. Perhaps, also, he thinks he's somehow appealing to the hawk contingent that wants around-the-clock blood-n-guts. But that, alone, isn't enough in the vote department to get you into the White House. Especially now, when the trends are unmistakably AND increasingly AGAINST the war.

But hey, it's fine with me if he wants to ace himself out of the presidency. I don't want him in the Oval Office anyway.

[IndianaGreen]

5. Some Vietnam vets, like the Germans vets of World War I, have convinced

themselves that they could have won their respective wars had the politicians not tied their hands behind their backs. In Germany it was called "betrayal" and they blamed the Left, and Jews, for Germany's defeat rather than the generals and the Kaiser that led them into that folly.

[Hieronymus]

4. McCain is a sick man.

He's hired the man responsible for that racist ad against Ford in Tennessee to run his campaign.:crazy: