John McCain's Speech to the VFW

It is day two for me in Orlando and John McCain spoke to the convention today (after a lovely meal at the Olive Garden last night).

The VFW is about as good a crowd as McCain can get, and I happened to be sitting next to the Arizona delegation. The speech he gave was well written and McCain did a pretty good job delivering it. It was a formal setting before a large audience and he did well with he teleprompter. Despite all of these things, I fundamentally disagreed with a few points that he made:

Iraq
McCain ended the speech with a lot of eloquent sound bites and the one that stuck out to me was :
"It is every veteran's hope that should their children be called upon to answer a call to arms, the battle will be necessary and the field well chosen. But that is not their responsibility. It belongs to the government that called them."
It stuck out because it contradicted a lot of things he had said in the beginning of the speech about Iraq. Clearly, the battlefield in Iraq was chosen by us, but most Americans agree that it was a poor decision. And as for the war being necessary, our stated goals were accomplished before the first boot went north- Saddam had no WMD and he wasn't aiding Al Quaeda. Regardless, McCain used the speech to go on the offensive against Obama, saying that he had tried to "legislate defeat" and that Obama's "political self interest and the national self interest had parted ways."

In full disclosure, I supported the war in '02 and '03. When I was in Iraq, I convinced myself that even though there was no WMD, we had still lifted the "yoke of repression" from the shoulders of the Iraqi people. Then the insurgency came, and Saddam's reign of terror was replaced by the terror of sunni and shiite extremist who wasted thousands of lives fighting the US and themselves. It was sometime in early 2004 that I came to believe that the war was a terrible decision and that the president's handling of it was text book incompetence. Despite the fact that I came to oppose the war, I also opposed a withdrawal, thinking that it would lead to even greater insability. I have now come around on that point too- I firmly believe that so long as the Iraqi government can call in US troops, they Will never fully get their shit together.

All of that being said, I can't fault Barack Obama and the democrats of the 110th Congress for trying to end the war. I can't fault them for trying to implement the will of the majority of Americans who want this war to be over. While McCain rightly points out that Obama won't admit that the surge has had some impact, he is just as stubborn in not admitting that the war should never have been fought in the first place. Indeed, the war was far from necessary, and the field was not well chosen.

I will give McCain a lot of credit for one thing. His own son, a Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps was sent to implement the very policy that McCain so strongly advocated for. While I think the McCain is wrong on Iraq, he certainly is sincere in his beliefs.

GI Bill
McCain said that he sought a "better GI bill" and that's the one that passed. Of course that isn't what happened- McCain was opposed to the new GI Bill from the day it was introduced to the day it was passed. He never sought a better bill, he just introduced one that was watered down. Though the VFW has lost a lot of influence over the years, I give them a lot of credit on the GI Bill. The VFW stood up to the president and McCain on this one, and their efforts really paid off.

Odds and Ends
McCain's speech was preceded by a very lengthy speech given by a representative of a Russian veterans group who spoke through an interpreter. McCain spent a good bit of his speech talking about how terrible the Russians were while the Russian sat on stage. While I didn't disagree with what McCain said, the scene was less than diplomatic.
One of the ladies sitting behind me was from Arizona and when Cindy McCain went on stage, she said "Oh, there's McCain's wife, the one with all the beer. Why hasn't she joined the auxiliary?"

CDR