America’s policy spoiler

Twice-failed presidential candidate, Republican Senator John McCain is all over the place these days. It’s no exaggerating to say; one can hardly pick up a newspaper without seeing his name in some headline, often partnered with his sidekick Lindsey Graham. Who is he and why does anyone bother to listen to him? He holds no official position, but clearly has a jumped-up sense of his own importance, fed by the right wing’s incomprehensible adulation.
McCain’s views are held up as a sacred cow by the likes of Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News who recently told off a guest for contradicting McCain’s wisdom on Syria. And his influence is such that even the President defers to his opinion.
No doubt he has his good points as well as bad. He’s a proponent of free trade but has little interest in protecting workers rights or supporting federal minimum wage provisions. He believes in the importance of retaining social security while being vehemently against publicly funded health care. A pilot during the Vietnam War, he was captured by the Vietcong, imprisoned in the “Hanoi Hilton” and tortured, becoming a nationwide celebrity upon his release. He has since defended the Geneva Conventions and abhors coercive interrogations involving bodily or psychological harm. Over the years, he has embraced the causes of Native Americans. However, his stances on issues pertaining to the MENA region can be summed-up as bombastic and bullying. McCain’s hawkish statements on Egypt, Syria, Iran and North Korea are well known. He’s entitled to his views, of course, but when their loud expression undermine or contradict White House policies and poison delicate situations, it’s beyond me why the powers that be don’t try to rein him-in. For instance, he’s directly responsible for Egypt’s interim government shutting the door on foreign mediation between the authorities and the Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike the EU’s Catherine Ashton, whose approach was reasonably respectful, McCain and Graham arrived to throw mud at the army and the interim President Adly Mansour, which was why they were asked to butt out. McCain hasn’t forgotten the slight to his overblown ego.
Whereas President Obama is taking ‘a wait and see’ position on whether or not US annual aid to Egypt should be cut, McCain has made it his mission to ensure that it is, while complaining Obama’s failure to punish Cairo for effecting what he calls ‘a coup’ — never mind that the army-backed transition is supported by the majority of Egyptians — has weakened US credibility in the Middle East. His lack of foresight is glaring when anti-Americanism is rife within Egypt where many are calling for an end to the Egyptian-US relationship in favor of Moscow. That’s a big step that neither the Egyptian military or government will take lightly, but there is no doubt that the authorities are miffed over Obama’s apparent embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood and his lack of condemnation over the organization’s use of violence to turn back the clock.
McCain is equally filled with doom and gloom over the prospects of disarming the Assad regime in Syria of its chemical weapons. In concert with his shadow, his yes-man, Lindsey Graham, he has condemned the agreement formulated between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov as giving Bashar Assad time to delay and deceive “using every trick in Saddam Hussein’s playbook”. On this the disturbing duo is guilty of willful amnesia when it was the Bush administration that tricked the world into believing Saddam had WMD and planned to use it on US interests. It goes without saying that both McCain and Graham voted in favor of military force against Iraq that turned out to be the biggest US blunder in modern history, the specter of which hangs over decision makers even today.
I wouldn’t be surprised if McCain’s personal animosity towards President Putin is a factor in his rush to dismiss the current initiative on Syria that has received the world’s cautious approval. In the past, he’s accused Putin of “trying to reassert Russian Empire”, saying “I looked into his eyes and saw three letters – a K, a G and a B, highlighting the Russian leader’s former prominence within the now defunct KGB. So, naturally, he’s up in arms over President Putin’s recent column published in the New York Times questioning the idea of American exceptionalism touted by Obama in his address to the nation last week. McCain was arrogant enough to believe the editor of Pravda would leap at the idea of publishing his, no doubt scathing, riposte. “Op-ed for Op-Ed: McCain to strike back in Pravda” was emblazoned across CNN’s website. Trouble is the powers that be at the Communist newspaper knew nothing about it. That’s because McCain’s handlers had sent the piece to a website founded by former Pravda journalists — Pravda.ru. With McCain’s cronies waiting with bated breath to read their idol’s thorny pearls of wisdom, the column is yet to manifest; perhaps because a lowly website is beneath him.
On Israel, he’s a typical sycophant. He once said: “No American leader should be expected to sell a false peace to our ally, consider Israel’s right to self-defense less legitimate than ours, or insist that Israel negotiate a political settlement while terrorism remains the Palestinians’ preferred bargaining tool.” He has also referred to the US as a Judeo-Christian country. McCain is a political dinosaur who the establishment should put out to pasture before he poisons US foreign relations in the Middle East and with Russia at a moment in history when America’s influence is acknowledged to be on the wane. He’s pushing Obama to cut aid to Egypt; he’s against him on the Syria deal — and he’s unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Palestinian State. If Americans want to continue fawning all over him, that’s up to them. But isn’t it about time his name was left with airport immigration chiefs all over the Arab world as a persona non grata?

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