Now that the funeral festival staged for John McCain has concluded, it is worth considering a couple of attendant issues.
The first is a question. Why were veterans’ organizations so insistent that the flag be flown at half-mast for McCain for multiple days? Yes, he was a veteran and a POW. He also consistently sought ever-larger appropriations for the Department of Defense. But in the ranks of today’s veterans there are an inordinate number of men and women who survived the unnecessary and interventionist wars that McCain relentlessly advocated and often caused. These men and women are also the comrades of the many thousands of Marines and soldiers who were killed, wounded, or maimed in those unnecessary wars, or who have killed themselves from the enduring, debilitating, and ultimately fatal impact of their military service.
These younger veterans know that they were sent to wars in which the republic did not have a dog in the fight; that they were sent to wars that their political leaders and generals were not going to allow them to win; and that it was people like McCain that drove a slow-motion, overseas U.S. military bloodbath for most of the past 30 years. One day at half-mast would have been more than enough – perhaps too much – to honor McCain as a former POW. He surely did not merit the four days of officially mandated grief, which was stage-managed by the bilateral and thoroughly Neocon political and media establishment. Their program was intentionally inflicted on veterans who suffered from the endless, always McCain-led war-making, as well as on the parents and families of those that McCain insisted be sent to their deaths in his always ego-satisfying but always unnecessary, useless, and unending wars.
The second issue lies in the nature of most of the crowd that filled the National Cathedral for McCain’s third – but not last – funeral service. Taken as a whole, those who filled the pews are the enemies of all Americans who value the lives of their soldier-children, who believe a war only ought to be fought in self-defense, and the growing numbers of those who are seeing the extraordinary costs in lives, limbs, treasure, and civil liberties that the political establishment’s post-1945 military interventionism abroad has yielded.
The elite crowd in the National Cathedral wept and spoke as if they were praising McCain, but the attendees were really there to praise interventionism and unnecessary wars, and to make an arrogant but – pray God — specious assertion that they are still in control the nation’s destiny. That assertion was their priority, and those attending the service did not care enough about honoring McCain’s memory – after all, he can no longer cause more wars – to prevent them from turning the occasion into an attack on the current president, the economic successes his team has scored, and the unnecessary wars he seems intent on gradually snuffing out. That this outrageously inappropriate, in-church, partisan political attack was led by McCain’s daughter suggests that more war is more important to these people than anything else, even the solemnity of the event and her Dad’s memory.
The final issue is a more hope than fact. It seems appropriate that McCain went to his reward just as an issue emerged that would have wet his war-mongering whistle. The media reports that the Russian and Iranian militaries are preparing to stage a campaign in the Idlib area of Syria, which is identified as the “last” Islamist stronghold in the country. This contention, of course, is the standard media/military/government lie; Islamist guerrilla groups remain present throughout both Syria and Iraq, and, although they solidly hold little ground, they are attacking in both countries, particularly in Iraq. Anyway, the reality is, for Americans, that it does not matter a whit whether Iranian and Russian forces are triumphant or are beaten like a drum. The outcome will be what it will be, and neither result will be any skin off the republic’s nose. The media also report that the coming campaign may create a “humanitarian disaster” in Idlib, a message that McCain and his war-adoring ilk loved to mix with their hatred of Russia, Iran, or any other of their endless enemies-of-the-day as a formula for forcing America into unnecessary wars.
Well, McCain is gone, and, so far, no other voice has replaced his as the major war-demanding advocate in Washington. One may yet arise, of course, on the issue of Idlib. But the fact remains – as it did when McCain was alive — that no American life or interest has been killed or damaged in Syria since the war began there in 2011, save for the losses caused by the unwise decisions to go there by several American journalists and NGO workers, and the national government’s mindless decision to uselessly risk of the lives of U.S. Marines and soldiers.
Overall, the destiny of Idlib, its combatants, and its people are a matter of supreme indifference to Americans, who will get along just fine no matter what happens Syria. If those war-mongers who attended McCain’s funeral service, and those who follow and support them, are concerned about Idlib, let them go there and participate in the fight. At the least, each should send a few million dollars of their spare and probably ill-gotten change to the inhabitants. Let them for once, put their own lives and money at risk, and leave the rest of the country alone.
Without McCain, the citizenry now has a chance to see the republic gradually return to sanity by becoming involved in wars only if its survival is at stake. Such wars will be few and far between, unless we are forced by the Democrats to fight a civil war here at home to preserve the republic they seek to destroy. No post-McCain military interventionist has the insulation from criticism that McCain had from being a former POW and from never letting anyone forget it. With his demise, perhaps President Trump, Senator Paul, and their lieutenants will be able to reteach the citizenry the worth and constitutional-appropriateness of an America First foreign policy in terms of preserving the lives, limbs, and minds of our soldier-children; accruing financial savings that fuel domestic infrastructure reconstruction and debt reduction, the full restoration of the civil liberties savaged by the national government since 9/11, and the reliable application in full of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments for all citizens.
So often in life goodbyes are bittersweet, but today it seems there are particular goodbyes that are far more sweet than bitter.
