Richardcyoung.com

The Online Home of Author and Investor, Dick Young

  • Home
  • How We Are Different
  • About Us
    • Foundation Principles
    • Contributors
  • Investing
    • You’ve Read The Last Issue of Intelligence Report, Now What?
  • Your Survival Guy
  • The Great Reset
  • COVID-19
  • My Rifles
  • Dividends and Compounding
  • Your Security
  • The Swiss Way
  • Dick Young
  • Debbie Young
  • Key West
  • Paris
  • Dick’s R&B Top 100
  • Liberty & Freedom Map
  • Bank Credit & Money
  • Your Survival Guy’s Super States
  • NNT & Cholesterol
  • Work to Make Money/Invest to Save Money
  • Your Health
  • Ron Paul
  • US Treasury Yield Curve

Who Was John McCain?

August 28, 2018 By Richard C. Young

Senator John McCain November 30, 2016. U.S. Customs and Border Protection Photo by Glenn Fawcett

Writing in The American Conservative, W. James Antle III, remembers a time earlier in his career when Senator John McCain was more skeptical of putting America troops in harm’s way. Antle reminds readers of McCain’s skepticism of interventions in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti. He writes:

“The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had WMD, was wrong,” McCain wrote with his co-author Mark Salter. “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

For years after all of this became obvious, McCain didn’t in fact accept very much in the way of blame for it. Instead he heaped scorn on political rivals who opposed the decision to invade and attributed many of war’s dire consequences, including the emergence of ISIS

Earlier in his career, McCain was far more skeptical about the use of military force. He spoke out against a closely allied president of his own party, Ronald Reagan, on the dispatching of U.S. troops to Lebanon and continued to do so after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. In the early 1990s, he opposed repeating this error in Bosnia, arguing that we shouldn’t take sides in a foreign civil war because of the difficulty in “distinguishing between friend and foe.” He was against humanitarian interventions in Somalia and Haiti.

“I don’t think our vital national security interests are at stake,” McCain said in 1994. “In Haiti, there is a military government we don’t like. But there are other governments around the world that aren’t democratic that we don’t like. Are we supposed to invade those countries, too?”

An unfair criticism of McCain is that his choice of Sarah Palin to be his 2008 running mate encouraged the lower-brow forms of populism the senator would later lament, culminating in President Trump. While Palin had many flaws, the truth was the opposite—there needed to be more creative efforts by responsible Republican leaders to engage the base’s anger, not less.

The outpouring of grief that has followed McCain’s passing owes as much to the sense that a better political climate is being buried with him as it does to his military service. Some on the right now see McCain’s virtues—civility, graciousness in defeat, policing the Republican ranks against racial intolerance—as vices. The left last year vacillated between celebrating McCain and vilifying him in the cruelest imaginable terms based on whatever vote he was casting on Obamacare at the moment.

Let us emulate John McCain’s contributions to peace at home and chart a different course abroad.

Read more here.

If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.

Related Posts

  • John McCain & John Bolton—Neocons Ablaze
  • RIP John McCain
  • John McCain Was a War Hawk
  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Richard C. Young
Richard C. Young is the editor of Young's World Money Forecast, and a contributing editor to both Richardcyoung.com and Youngresearch.com.
Latest posts by Richard C. Young (see all)
  • CDC Admits It Was All A Lie - August 15, 2022
  • Mises and Rothbard Finally Get Their Due - August 15, 2022
  • Is Merrick Garland Taking the Blame to Protect Biden? - August 12, 2022

Dick Young’s Must Reads

  • America’s Colleges Have Become Progressive Liberal Rat Holes
  • V4 Stands Against North African and Middle Eastern Invasion
  • My Battle-Hardened Stock Market Strategy for the Worst of Times
  • Robo-Advisors: When You Have a Lot More to Lose than Money
  • Being Fully American Means Americans First
  • Government Should Be Small, Laws Unobtrusive, and Men Left Alone
  • To Me There Isn’t a Better Way to Live
  • Hungarian Hardliner Viktor Orban Shows European Globalists the Way
  • What’s the Best Survival Currency?
  • Soros’s Open Society Foundation, Charles Koch Team Up

Our Most Popular Posts

  • Who Benefits from and Orchestrated the Trump Raid?
  • CDC Admits It Was All A Lie
  • Did China Buy Land in North Dakota to Spy on Air Force Base?
  • DEMOCRATS PLAY DIRTY: Megynn Kelly Calls Bulls#$t on "Classified Documents" Story
  • The Higher Taxes, Bigger IRS, and More Inflation Act of 2022
  • BECK: The Democrats' Dangerous FBI Raid Endgame
  • DOJ Career Officers Disgusted by Garland's Political Raid on Trump
  • WATCH: Doocy Breaks Jean-Pierre with Trump Raid Questions "No Comment"
  • Republicans Acquiesce to Democrats' Abuses of Power
  • The Great Jon Rappoport on Kari Lake

Disclosure

RSS Youngresearch.com

  • Fear is a Terrible Emotion: How You Deal with It MATTERS
  • The Victims of a Decade of Easy Money
  • What Happens if the Chinese Blockade Taiwan?
  • Buying A Boat: Who’s Looking Out for You?
  • Is It Time to Talk About the Defects of Index Funds Now?
  • Your Survival Guy’s Favorite Number is 72: Here’s Why
  • Disney Catches Netflix in Streaming Wars
  • PRIMARY RESULTS: Pro-Trump Candidates Clean Up
  • Prices for Electric Vehicles Going UP
  • Europeans Closing Businesses Early to Save on Energy

CDC Admits It Was All A Lie

Nancy in Taiwan, Paul Pelosi in Court?

Fear is a Terrible Emotion: How You Deal with It MATTERS

Mises and Rothbard Finally Get Their Due

Don’t Republicans Feel Stupid Now?

Russia Holding Europe’s Largest Nuclear Reactor Hostage

Copyright © 2022 | Terms & Conditions | About Us | Dick Young | Archives