JOE CONASON: The Last Neocon

The Iraq Study Group shot down Bush's failed war strategy. Yet John McCain stubbornly supports it -- calling for more troops and promising unattainable victory.

Dec. 08, 2006 With the broad establishment acceptance of the Iraq Study Group's new report, the embattled neoconservatives have clearly lost the debate over Iraq. Their belligerent foreign policy has been universally discredited. Their strategic fantasies have led the United States into a losing war, to the great detriment of American security and prestige. Today their desire to send tens of thousands more troops into the Iraqi quicksand is shared by less than 10 percent of their fellow citizens, according to recent polls.

Yet even now they still can boast the support of the most formidable Republican presidential candidate expected to stand in the next election: Sen. John McCain, the last neocon.

At this late date, very few politicians are as eager as the Arizona Republican to echo the calls for escalation in Iraq now heard from neocon opinion leaders in the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review and the New York Post, whose front page caricatured James Baker and Lee Hamilton as "surrender monkeys" on the morning after they released the ISG's findings. Among his Capitol Hill colleagues, McCain was almost alone in joining the right-wing attack on the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission, whose report dismissed demands for additional combat brigades as unrealistic. He was enraged by the report's emphasis on political negotiations and on the excessive costs of the military effort. "Sustained increases in U.S. troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq, which is the absence of national reconciliation, Meanwhile, America's military capacity is stretched thin: we do not have the troops or equipment to make a substantial, sustained increase in our troop presence. Increased deployments to Iraq would also necessarily hamper our ability to provide adequate resources for our efforts in Afghanistan or respond to crises around the world."

Over and over again, regardless of the realities on the ground and in the armed forces, McCain urged President Bush to deploy enough additional troops to Iraq to constitute an overwhelming force, although the specifics of his plan (and exactly where he hopes to find several brigades of trained, equipped and combat-ready soldiers) remain murky. The credibility he earned from his suffering in a North Vietnam prison camp -- as well as his reputation for blunt honesty -- evidently exempts him from answering difficult questions about his plan for "victory." ....