McCain is the Wrong "Wartime" President

Why, oh why, am I talking about a wartime president? The wheels are in motion to leave Iraq. And Kabul is talking about getting us out of Afghanistan. Wartime is-a-comin' to a close. Surely, though, surely, we won't go to war with Russia over the whole Georgia thing. Right?

Well, Sort of.

NATO ships have moved into the Black Sea. For humanitarian aid, of course. Right? The Russian President Medvedev has suggested that he's up for a Cold War. That's just rhetoric, though. Right? And Vladimir Putin is a crazy, unstable, power-hungry liability to world peace. But he's not the President anymore, right?

Depends who you ask. Senator John McCain proudly proclaimed that "We are all Georgians," a dubious claim to a country that is hard for even geography buffs to find on a map. As much as Russia's aggression seems unwarranted, what can the United States really afford to commit to? Georgia's President Saakashvili wasn't completely innocent in the conflict that has garnered so much attention stateside. Of course, John McCain didn't become a Georgian until they invaded a disputed province within their borders. Always looking for another excuse to keep us at war, wether we need to go or not.

Now, this doesn't mean we can just let Russia run roughshod over the former Soviet Satellites, but come on. War, aside from being violent, horrific, often unilateral, damaging to our reputation throughout the world, deadly to thousands of our soldiers, devastating to thousands of their families, injurous to tens of thousands more soldiers, traumatic for those that aren't physically harmed, and, lately, innefective at securing our stated goals for entering into conflict, is expensive. Everyone knows that $86 billion per year is the low number for Iraq spending. That's debt we are going to have to pay to China. That's money we could spend improving life at home, promoting trade, creating jobs, bolstering our economy.

Remember before when we were at Cold War with Russia? And everyone was afraid of a nuclear attack. Those nukes haven't disappeared. They're still pointed at our cities. How did we deal with them then? Diplomacy. The Cuban Missile Crisis took an intelligent, articulate, passionate politician who was able to negotiate - against the wishes of his military advisors - a truce, without, in those oh-so-familiar words, a shot being fired. The Berlin Wall was felled not by engaging in conflicts over small provinces in small countries, but by a speech (in front of thousands of Germans, I might add) by a man who, for whatever you may fault him, was called the Great Communicator. The worst foreign policy blunder possibly in all of recorded history, however, happened when a colonized state had to be "liberated" from "Soviet influence" in Vietnam - our only large "hot" conflict of the Cold War.

So who's it going to be? The War Hawk who defends the costly war in Iraq and seems scarily close to declaring the "liberation" of South Ossetia? Or the man in the mold of Kennedy, the smooth talker who will at least try to talk to other nations, who has proven that he will be heard by other nations? We can look as tough as we want, but if we go in guns blazin', like McCain would have us do, we become the Evil Empire. We don't want to be the bully in a world that outnumbers us. We don't want to threaten a China that is stronger than us, we don't want to try to push around a Russia that, because of their oil exportation, is growing as wealthy as us. We don't want to say "we don't need you" to a Europe that exceedingly doesn't need us. We must be a leader in the world, true. But with John McCain, we will be a leader that no one follows. A crazy old man dottering around in the woods.