Hey, kids! We're America! We may be bunch of Gloomy Gusses after years of misbegotten interventionism, but we really need to listen to what our kindly old uncle John McCain just told Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg -- that we can solve all of our foreign policy problems if we just fight two wars at the same in the same place:
McCain's second criticism: Obama is not attacking the root cause of the Syrian war, which is the behavior of President Bashar al-Assad's regime and its supporters in Iran. He said the U.S. should be bombing government targets at the same time it is bombing Assad's Islamic State enemies. I, too, am dispositionally interventionist, but it seemed to me that McCain was outlining not only a formula for chaos, but also a program that could not possibly be sold to the American people.Can you imagine McCain seventy-odd years ago? "Roosevelt has allied the U.S. with Stalin? The president can't just limit himself to fighting Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini! Soviet communism is a mortal enemy of our way of life! And Stalin is a brutal dictator! We should be fighting Stalin and the Axis powers at the same time! C'mon, it's not that hard!" I don't know how McCain can say such nice things about Winston Churchill when even he didn't have the guts to try to crush Stalin and Hitler at the same time.
I asked him this question: "Wouldn't the generals say to you, 'You want me to fight ISIS, and you want me to fight the guys who are fighting ISIS, at the same time? Why would we bomb guys who are bombing ISIS? That would turn this into a crazy standoff.'"
"Our ultimate job is not only to defeat ISIS but to give the Syrian people the opportunity to prevail as well," McCain answered. "Remember, there are 192,000 dead Syrians thanks to Assad. If we do this right, if we do the right kind of training and equipping of the Free Syrian Army, plus air strikes, plus taking out Bashar Assad's air assets, we could reverse the battlefield equation."
