Andy McCarthy: McCain's credibility as commander-in-chief is a "mirage"

An attack from the right on Maverick’s most sterling credential. How much is resolve worth without a winning strategy behind it? Says McCarthy, not much.

In reality, a McCain presidency would promise an entirely conventional, center-left, multilateralism…

Much scorn deservedly came Governor Mike Huckabee’s way when, in his own Foreign Affairs piece, he scalded the “Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality,” so “counterproductive at home and abroad.” Yet McCain’s very similar (if less-bracing) riffs have drawn little attention. The Bush years, he says, have left us in desperate need “to restore and replenish the world’s faith in our nation and our principles.” “America” thus “needs a president who can revitalize the country’s purpose and standing in the world.” Even as such important European governments as France and Germany have become more conservative and drawn closer to American leadership, McCain laments that President Bush has “frayed” the “bonds we share with Europe” — thanks, no doubt, to “the kind of abusive tactics properly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions” that he intimates have been standard fare.

Close your eyes, and you can hear these same lines regurgitated by any conventional Democrat, whether it’s Sen. Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, or even Sen. John Kerry — the Democrats’ last standard-bearer who, you may recall, entreated McCain to be his running mate, the extent of their common ground being patent. Contrary to the assurances of McCain’s admirers, his own essay tells us the senator is still the same guy who in 2000, upon being asked what he would do immediately upon being elected president, said he would turn, among others, to Sen. Kerry, Sen. Joe Biden, and Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser) to “to get foreign policy, national security issues back on track.”…

In terms of the greater war on terror, which is the central foreign-policy challenge for the next administration, the surge is vastly overrated, and the rationale for it is confused at best. We are not just at war in Iraq; we are at war with radical Islam. We don’t need a Baghdad strategy; we need a global war strategy — or, at the very least, a regional one. Victory is not an Iraqi “democracy”; it is an America safe from Islamic terror.

Indeed, although an Iraqi democracy that’s crushed Al Qaeda under its bootheel would be a nice first step. Any reason to think Mitt Romney would be any better on any of this, incidentally? It’s fun to play presidential rotisserie league and imagine how Newt Gingrich, say, might game out a civilizational struggle with the Middle East’s more regressive elements, but we’re stuck wth Mitt as the alternative and the two pillars of his campaign have been social values and, lately, the economy. His own foreign policy plan ends with a long section advocating multilateralism, although it’s couched in terms more palatable to conservatives — blaming the UN’s failings instead of the Bush administration’s “arrogance” — than McCain’s is. In fact, Romney’s plan specifically envisions economic measures to help tamp down radicalism, something which Huckabee was bludgeoned for in his own Foreign Affairs essay. So who or what are we waiting for here? Who’s going to be the candidate to throw down the gauntlet to jihadism? Wait for the next post for that.