Matt Yglesias follows-on and makes a very good point:
A further thought on John McCain's "as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed" proviso to his Iraq forever policy. If we're so sure the soldiers aren't going to be in harm's way, then what's the base for? We're all very glad that our troops in South Korea aren't engaged in combat, but the point of having them there is that they might have to engage in combat. The hope is that they deter war with North Korea, but the risk is that they won't.
In McCain's world our troops need to continue fighting, killing, and dying in Iraq indefinitely in order to create a situation where, at some point, it becomes safe for them to stay in Iraq for no reason? It doesn't seem like he's genuinely thought this idea through. Maybe instead of lashing out at his critics, McCain should take some time to consider the issue and come up with a new position.
McCain would argue, I think, that the bases in Iraq would be used to combat al Qaeda. Which would be fine, I suppose, if they were a nation-state with an army, but of course they are nothing of the sort. Instead they are a stateless terrorist organization, one that would love nothing more than to have large, permanent US bases in the heart of the Middle East which they could regularly target. This reality only reinforces the point I was making earlier: so long as we have soldiers and bases in Iraq, there will be violence. That is what makes McCain's comparison to Japan, Korea, and Bosnia so ridiculous.
But perhaps what McCain envisions is a set of permanent bases in a free, stable, prosperous, democratic, neighborhood-friendly and pro-American Iraq. Except if that's his meaning, then Matt's point above still holds. If Iraq ever becomes all of those things, there will be no need for bases, because there will be no foreign threats for our soldiers to deter. It's all fantasy and nothing more.
Let's give Ezra the last word on this:
You can take McCain's comments one of two ways: The first is that he's almost obsessive about projecting his comfort with American military power. No one forced him to say we should be in Iraq for 100 years. The questioner mentioned Bush's comment that we could be there 50 years, and McCain, with no prodding, doubled it. Add in his endless support for the surge and our deployment, his military heritage and his belief in the justness of American might, and you're looking at a leader who is constitutionally incapable of pulling the troops out of Iraq. It's just not in him. The second way to understand the quote is that McCain is dumb. American occupations in Arab lands are not gladly accepted, trouble-free things. They inflame public opinion, create insurgencies, and power terrorist movements like al Qaeda. If his endpoint is a continued, peaceful occupation, we're going to have an endless violent occupation on the way to never getting there.And drilling down another level, what you're left with is a guy who can't see any reason to leave Iraq, ever. If there's violence, we should stay to combat it. If there's peace and acceptance of our troops, we should stay to, well, it's not quite clear what we're there to do, but whatever it is, McCain's supports it. So we won't leave as a result of conflict and we won't leave as a result of its cessation. What other options are there, but endless occupation? To call this imperialism is an insult to the coherence of the imperialist ideology. It's an impulse for military deployment masquerading as an actual approach to world affairs.
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