While campaigning in New Hampshire, Senator McCain told a questioner that it "would be fine with me" if the United States had a military presence in Iraq for 100 years. He did not ask if the American people or the Iraqis want that, nor did he consider who would pay for it.
The Senator wants to expand the Army and the Marine Corps to 900,000 soldiers. He envisions a U.S.-led “League of Democracies” that would invade foreign countries" to fight terrorist subversion" when the United Nations could not or would not do it.
Senator McCain has been a leading supporter of the Bush administration’s less than successful troop "surge" in Iraq because he, like the President, assumes that an overwhelming military presence can achieve “victory” over the hidden insurgents. Some of the Senator’s advisers appear to be the same "neoconservatives" who lobbied for the ill-prepared Iraq invasion and who believe that we Americans have the moral obligation to reshape the Muslim world in our image.
No red-blooded American will disagree with McCain’s demand that there must be an end to terrorist attacks by clandestine conspiracies against American and other Western targets. The Senator and his supporters, however, fail to recognize that the root cause of the Muslims’ hostility toward us and our allies is our insistence upon occupying and controlling their part of the world.
In nine study tours into Muslim societies over the past thirty years, I have learned that these people do not hate us but that at long last they want to be free from colonial interference. After 400 years of Turkish and 200 years of European colonial rule over the Middle East, another century of foreign domination is simply intolerable to any self-respecting Arab. Does McCain seriously believe that we Americans have a God-given right to impose our will on the world's 1.3 billion Muslims?
Since they lack the military strength to defend themselves against the uninvited foreign invaders, radical Muslims have come to fight them and their supporters with the brutal weapon of suicide bombings. That is unlikely to end until we see the light and get out of the territories on the other side of the globe where we do not belong. A Rand Corporation report recently characterized the “U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world” as “at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible.”
By the grace of God, we Americans have the good fortune to live in a beautiful, rich, and powerful country. Why then would we want to waste the lives of brave fellow citizens and trillions of dollars on the other side of the world for oil or any other material gain? We are rich enough to pay for any of the resources Muslim countries have to offer.
I agree with the Senator from Arizona that we must end the scourge of hidden insurgencies. Since they may strike any time and anywhere in the world, however, we cannot eradicate them militarily. Yet, it is in our power to give all Muslim countries their full sovereignty back and tolerate their way of life, however different it may be from our own, as long as terrorists based on their soil do not physically attack us.
We certainly do not help our cause if we prosecute indicted Al Qaeda members outside the rule of law by which we live. We also abet the terrorists’ recruiters if we torture captured terrorists. Senator McCain was right in his opposition to the Bush administration’s toleration of torture as an interrogation technique.
If we seriously want to end the terrorist Muslim resistance to Western control over their societies, we cannot continue to dominate them. A century of foreign occupation, be it over Iraqis or Palestinians, would only continue, if not worsen, America’s and Israel’s alienation from them.