[D66] Why the NOS mourns John McCain

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/27/pers-a27.html

Why the US ruling class mourns John McCain
27 August 2018

There is a well-known saying, of murky Latin origin, that one should not
speak ill of the dead. But when the death of an individual becomes the
occasion for such universal glorification by the political establishment
and the media, as with Senator John McCain of Arizona, a correction is
in order. This is especially necessary since the newly deceased had such
a lengthy record as a militarist and supporter of political reaction,
and the further promotion of such policies is the transparent purpose of
the hosannas being sung in his praise.

The Sunday television interview programs on five networks devoted the
bulk of their coverage to McCain’s life and career and to fond
reminiscences by well-heeled journalists and big-business politicians,
Democratic and Republican. “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd noted that
McCain was the single most-interviewed person on the program, appearing
73 times in his 36-year political career.

McCain was a right-wing Republican, but the loudest tributes to his
political record are coming from Democrats. Senate Minority Leader
Charles Schumer proposed renaming the US Senate’s Russell Office
Building. Instead of Richard Russell of Georgia, a Democratic Party
defender of Jim Crow segregation, the building would now be named after
a Republican defender of wars in Vietnam, Central America, Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said,
“Right now I'm just heartbroken. I think America’s in tears about the
loss of this great man.” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted, “John McCain
was an American hero, a man of decency and honor and a friend of mine.
He will be missed not just in the US Senate but by all Americans who
respect integrity and independence.”

McCain spent four years in the House of Representatives and 32 years in
the US Senate, but it would be impossible to cite a single piece of
legislation with which he was associated that benefited the broad mass
of the American people. As far as domestic affairs were concerned, he
was best known for voting (in the House) against the bill that
established a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In
the Senate, he was the lone Republican among the “Keating Five,”
senators who lobbied federal regulators on behalf of savings and loan
swindler Charles Keating in 1987.

The political embarrassment caused by this episode, in which McCain
narrowly avoided sanctions by the Senate Ethics Committee, led to his
involvement in a decade-long effort to establish at least token
limitations on corporate contributions to political campaigns. But the
McCain-Feingold bill, as it became known, was ultimately gutted by the
Supreme Court, which rejected most limitations on corporate purchasing
of legislators as an infringement on “free speech.” Throughout his
career, McCain was a reliable vote for the Republican right—for the
Gramm-Rudman Act to slash federal social spending, for the impeachment
conviction of President Bill Clinton, and for (with a few exceptions)
measures to deregulate business and cut taxes for the wealthy.

The overriding feature of McCain’s career, however, was his reflexive
hawkishness on foreign policy. He supported war after war, intervention
after intervention, always promoting the use of force as the primary
feature of American foreign policy, and always advocating the maximum
allocation of resources to fuel the Pentagon. In his honor, after his
diagnosis with brain cancer made it clear that he was unlikely to
survive this year, his Senate colleagues named the 2018 version of the
Pentagon budget bill the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act.

McCain’s identification with militarism began with his family
background: his father and grandfather were both admirals and now have
US Navy warships named after them. McCain graduated from the Naval
Academy and became a pilot, leading to his capture in Vietnam and
five-and-a-half years of imprisonment. No doubt the circumstances he
faced there were very difficult, but any sympathy must be tempered by
the fact that he became a POW after dropping bombs on largely
defenseless people, making him a front-line participant in one of the
greatest war crimes in history, the savage American onslaught on Vietnam.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted in a commentary published after
McCain sought to lecture the Vietnamese in 2000 about their political
and economic policies:

    While McCain gives sermons to the Vietnamese, let us recall that
American military forces carried out mass executions, bombed civilians,
defoliated half the country, carried out rape and torture, burned
villages, shot children, threw prisoners out of helicopters and cut off
the ears of people both alive and dead, keeping them as mementos and
trading them for cans of beer. Not every soldier perpetrated such crimes
individually, of course, but the military intervention as a whole was of
a brutal, anti-democratic, imperialist character, which inevitably found
expression in such sadistic conduct.

Once freed following the Paris agreement between Washington and Hanoi,
McCain came home a “war hero,” married the daughter of a
multimillionaire beer distributor in Arizona, and moved to that state to
begin a career in Republican politics. First elected to the House of
Representatives in 1982, he backed the US invasion of Grenada in 1983
and the Reagan administration policy of supporting fascist forces in
Central America, including death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala and
the contra terrorists at war with Nicaragua (he was on the board of the
US Council for World Freedom, the American chapter of the World
Anti-Communist League, for several years). After succeeding Barry
Goldwater in the US Senate in 1986, he backed the first Bush
administration’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and the full-scale American
war against Iraq in 1990-91, during which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
conscripts were incinerated by American bombs, rockets and shells.

After some initial reluctance, McCain backed the Clinton
administration’s military threats in Bosnia, including the bombing of
Serb forces, and then in 1999 cheered the full-scale bombing of Serbia,
declaring that the United States could accept no limitation on its
military operations in support of its aims in Kosovo: “We’re in it, and
we have to win it. This means we have to exercise every option.”

Like virtually every other Democrat and Republican, he supported the
October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, launching a war that is now
approaching the end of its 17th year, the longest in American history.

It was in the second Iraq War that McCain played his most prominent and
reactionary role, cosponsoring the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, along with
Democrat Joe Lieberman, endorsing the bombing of Iraq, first under
Clinton and then George W. Bush, cheerleading the 2003 invasion and then
pushing for a more aggressive use of force during the protracted US
occupation, culminating in Bush’s “surge” of additional troops in 2006-2007.

McCain was a full-throated supporter of whatever lie the Bush
administration chose as the basis of its war propaganda: Saddam
Hussein’s alleged ties to terrorism; his possession of “weapons of mass
destruction”; the desire to establish “democracy” in Iraq; and finally,
the need to preserve “stability,” i.e., to deal with the consequences of
the US destruction of Iraq as a functioning society.

Along the way, McCain found time to advocate military action against
North Korea in 2003, US intervention in Iran in 2007, and US support for
Georgia in the war between Russia and that Caucasian republic in 2008
(when he dispatched his wife Cindy to Tbilisi in a show of support).

McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign was defeated, in part because of
popular hostility to the war in Iraq, with which he was so identified,
and partly because of his failure, during the financial crisis of
September 2008, to respond as quickly as Obama to the demands of Wall
Street for a full-scale federal bailout of the banks.

Throughout the Obama administration, McCain was a firm supporter of the
Democratic president when he used military force, as in Libya, or
threatened it, as in the South China Sea, and a critic when Obama pulled
back, as in Syria. McCain and John Kerry introduced a Senate resolution
to sanction the war in Libya, and McCain called for US air power to be
used in “a heavier way.” In September 2013, McCain backed a resolution
passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to give US support to
military operations in Syria that would “change the momentum on the
battlefield” and strengthen forces opposed to the regime of Bashar
al-Assad. He repeatedly called for “more boots on the ground” for the
US-backed war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

In October 2016, while the Democratic Party was focusing its
presidential campaign on alleged Russian “meddling,” McCain authored an
op-ed column published in the Wall Street Journal in which he indicted
Russia for having “slaughtered countless civilians” in Syria through
“relentless indiscriminate bombing.” There was no little irony in the
former bomber of North Vietnam denouncing Russia for doing a tiny
fraction of the damage inflicted by the “shock and awe” campaign in
Iraq, which led to one million deaths and which McCain supported
enthusiastically.

We have noted the embrace of McCain’s legacy by his supposed opponents
in the Democratic Party. This is not merely the result of McCain’s
support for the bogus allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US
elections, peddled by the Democrats and much of the
military-intelligence apparatus. More than a decade ago, in the summer
of 2004, there were back-channel discussions between Kerry and McCain,
in which the Democratic nominee suggested the formation of a bipartisan
presidential ticket, with McCain running as his vice-president, to
oppose the reelection of George W. Bush. McCain toyed with the idea, but
ultimately decided to remain with the Republicans.

In 2007, when his second campaign to seek the Republican presidential
nomination was floundering in its initial stages, McCain was interviewed
on the “60 Minutes” program on CBS about the mounting opposition to the
war in Iraq. “At what point do you stop doing what you think is right
and you start doing what the majority of the American people want?” he
was asked. McCain responded, “I disagree with what the majority of the
American people want.” The Wall Street Journal hailed this
response—which essentially rejected popular sovereignty as the basis of
democracy—as “McCain’s Finest Hour.”

It is this absolute commitment to the defense of American imperialism
that endeared McCain to the US ruling elite as a whole and explains the
outpouring of adulation over the weekend.

Patrick Martin