McCain's Vietnam obsession

As one of his first high-profile acts as a freshman House member from Arizona in 1983, McCain shocked his colleagues by joining 26 other House Republicans in voting against President Ronald Reagan's effort to keep U.S. troops in Lebanon for an additional 18 months. During a debate long on references to Vietnam, McCain delivered a speech on the House floor on Sept. 28, 1983, that could have come right out of the Powell Doctrine playbook:

"The fundamental question is, What is the United States' interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, What peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, What government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, How can the U.S. presence stabilize the region? ... The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place. I am not calling for an immediate withdrawal. What I desire is as rapid a withdrawal as possible."

Congress voted to keep troops in Lebanon anyway. Less than a month later, on Oct. 23, 241 service members were killed in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.

In the run-up the Gulf War eight years later, McCain, by then a senator, again used Vietnam to warn about the dangers of placing ground troops in harm's way. In the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Kuwait, McCain repeatedly and publicly expressed serious concern about committing ground troops to the effort. "Listen, if there's one lesson of the Vietnam War, it is that you'd better have enough to do the job when you get there, so I don't know what the level of casualties are going to be," he said on Oct. 25, 1990, on CNN. "I believe that a scenario of 10,000 or so is not unreasonable or unbelievable, but I'll tell you this: We'd better not fight a tank-war battle on the ground. We'd better use what we've got the most of and the best of and that's our air power."

But on Jan. 11, 1991, McCain voted with his party and with the congressional majority in favor of using force. And again he invoked Vietnam. "During this debate," he said on the Senate floor, "we hear time and time again references to the Vietnam War and how we want no more Vietnams ... I think you could make an argument that if we drag out this crisis and we don't at some point in time bring it to a successful resolution, we face the prospect over time of another Vietnam War."

A year later, he used Vietnam to justify two contradictory decisions on the use of American military force. In a Dec. 3, 1992, interview, CNN's Frank Sesno noted that McCain had cited Vietnam as a reason for supporting the first President Bush's decision to send forces into Somalia. He asked McCain why Somalia did not carry the same risks as Lebanon, given that McCain had invoked Vietnam to explain his opposition to committing troops there.

"I see significant differences," answered McCain. "I do see a way in, a way to affect the situation, and a way out. I did not see that in Lebanon, when I opposed our deployment of Marines in Lebanon. I do not see that in Yugoslavia, as tragedy -- as tragic as that situation is." He also conceded that Somalia did not meet one of his Vietnam-derived tests of U.S. military involvement, but said he was setting that aside. "In this case, clearly United States national -- vital national security interests are not at stake, and that's usually a criteria [sic] that I always use. But the fact is that the magnitude of this suffering is so horrible and so inhumane that I think it compels us to act with other nations, but clearly with the United States in the lead, to try to alleviate this suffering."

On Oct. 10, 1993, McCain sponsored an unsuccessful amendment to cut off funds for the military operation in Somalia. Two things had changed since the previous December: A Republican president had been replaced by a Democrat, and on Oct. 3 and 4, 19 American soldiers had died in the debacle known as the Battle of Mogadishu and memorialized by the book and film "Black Hawk Down." On the Senate floor, McCain criticized the mission in Somalia as "some kind of warlord hunting, nation-building law and order endeavor, which has no beginning, no end, no clear-cut policy, no military objective ... Bring those young men and women home from Somalia and stop the killing."

Speaking about the resolution to Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation," McCain used Vietnam to explain why he now wanted to leave. Oddly, he applied a Vietnam-derived lesson about "chaos" that was the precisely the opposite of the one he is now using to justify staying in Iraq:

"I would hope that chaos would not ensue if we left because I believe there's other United Nations forces which would take our place and, hopefully, carry out their responsibilities. But frankly, it's eerily reminiscent of the Vietnam rationale for remaining in there, and when we left Beirut after a disaster along the lines which we have now, we did not suffer from some kind of a serious loss of our prestige. There's so many holes in this argument for remaining there it's difficult in a short period of time to identify them all, but I can tell you right now, Bob, the American people are not c -- are not deceived by this. They want our troops out. They think we've completed our mission and I agree with them."

In the summer of 1994, McCain applied the kind of Vietnam-derived lessons he'd used to explain his desire to leave Somalia to oppose an invasion of Haiti, which President Clinton was considering. "I am opposed to an invasion of Haiti," said McCain on the Senate floor on Aug. 5. "I do not think it is in our national interest. I do not think it is worth the risk of American lives.

"I believe once we are there, without the ability to disengage, the ability to form some international force -- which we are finding nearly impossible to get together -- the chances of their succeeding are about the same as those of the multinational force that tried and failed in Somalia."

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