Waging a new military campaign to elect McCain
8 comments May 8th, 2008
How will the Republicans help John McCain win in November? Here’s what might happen. I don’t raise this to the level of prediction. Right now it’s just a hunch.
Democrats, especially if they nominate Obama, will be painted as the appeasement party, not to be trusted with the role of commander in chief of the world’s most formidable military. Obama, McCain is already saying, is the favorite candidate of Hamas, the terrorist organization. (McCain, you may remember, says he abhors negative campaigning.)
That might not do the trick, however. Americans are focused on the economy, and they’re not too concerned anymore with the war in Iraq and the “War on Terror.” The GOP can’t win unless they scare people to death.
The only way to refocus Americans on the bogeyman of danger — International Terrorism — is to do what George W. Bush may do, in an effort to help McCain win the presidency and the GOP to avoid disastrous losses in Congress:
Sometime this summer or early fall, an “incident” will occur that causes the U.S. to retaliate, probably with air-strikes, possibly escalating to sending in Marines.
Inevitably, the “incident” will be in the Middle East region, most likely Iran, or maybe Syria, or it could be an attack on Israel by Iran.
Do I think the incident will be staged? Obviously I don’t know. But my knowledge of history informs me that we’ve done it before.
LBJ had his Gulf of Tonkin attack. The story at the time said that North Vietnamese gunboats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Turned out this was a “Wag the Dog” attack because it didn’t happen. That’s not my opinion. That’s what the declassified U.S. government report concluded.
Nevertheless, it was ballyhooed in the media at the time, and it gave Johnson a reason to send 500,000 troops to Vietnam.
Or how about the explosion that blew up the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, back in 1898. The American press, led by Joseph Pulitzer (the yellow journalist they named the prize after ) and William Randolph Hearst, immediately hit on a slogan “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain” to sell papers and stoke fires of resentment against the colonial power that ruled Cuba.
That resulting hew and cry gave President McKinley the cover he needed to wage the war against Spain that kicked the colonial power out of Cuba, and out of the Phillippines, as well. Both countires became American protectorates, so that the U.S., the nation begun as a revolt against the British Empire, ended the 19th century as a colonial power.
So, who or what caused the Maine to explode and sink? To this day, the U.S. Navy says it doesn’t know.
In 1941, the American people remained isolationist despite the twin terrors of Hitler ravaging Europe and the Imperial Japanese forces marauding China and the South Pacific.
On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, causing the U.S. to finally enter the war that had been raging for two years in Europe and longer in Asia. Britain, undergoing severe bombing by the Luftwaffe, was begging us to join the fight to smash Hitler before he controlled the entire European continent.
Debate continues to this day over whether President Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance that the Japanese were planning to attack, but did nothing to prevent it in order to change public opinion in favor of war against the Axis powers.
(I must add that I agree with Winston Churchill, who, when asked if he thought the Americans would join the war, said, “The Americans will always do the right thing — after they`ve exhausted all the alternatives”)
In more recent history, we have the Bush administration’s “weapons of mass destruction” argument for invading Iraq. Turns out there were no such weapons; the administration embellished — fictionalized — parts of the intel reports.
No, I don’t believe we staged the 9-11 attacks, and I believe our invasion of Afghanistan was fully justified. We should have stopped there, however. The Bush spin machine, unfortunately, used 9-11 to gin up war fever to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11.
Betcha didn’t learn any of that in high school histroy class.
