On ABC’s The View this morning, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was asked about the great strain placed on U.S. troops due to the Iraq war. McCain recognized the strain and said that in order to motivate Americans to join the military, the government should provide stronger “educational benefits”:

There a certain number who will join out of patriotism, thank God. And then there’s those who turn 18 or 19 or 20 or 21, and they look at their options. And one of the thing we ought to do is provide them significant educational benefits in return for serving. Americans will always serve their country. Americans will, if they’re motivated to do so.

Watch it:

McCain’s support of “significant educational benefits” is ironic, considering that he is still “hedging on whether he will support a ‘GI Bill for the 21st Century,’” as Jon Soltz and Gen. Wesley Clark note in today’s LA Times. That bill, sponsored by Sens. Jim Webb (D-VA) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE), would help fund higher education for service members who had served in active duty since 9/11.

“As de facto leader of the party, McCain could signal to other Republicans to sign on to the bill and assure passage,” Soltz and Clark note. VoteVets and BraveNewFilms has released a video on the new GI Bill and McCain. Watch it:

On the View, McCain said, “that’s what I believe I can do as President,” referring to implementing the benefits for troops. Curiously, he won’t do it now.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) appeared on ABC’s The View this morning. He discussed his “mistake” of opposing a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and said, “If we are wrong on a position, we then should admit it.” But when Joy Behar asked whether he would admit that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, McCain answered flatly, “No”:

BEHAR: Do you admit now that it was a mistake to go into Iraq?

MCCAIN: No. … The problem was not the fact that we went in, to be honest with you. The problem was the mishandling of it for nearly four years. If we had done the right thing from the beginning –

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: We would have been in Afghanistan.

MCCAIN: But Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq.

BARBARA WALERS: Why do people think it is, that we don’t have the troops there that we need?

MCCAIN: I know a lot of people think that and we do need more troops there.

Watch it:

In fact, the U.S. commitment to Iraq has continually drained resources from the fight in Afghanistan. Appearing on PBS’ Newshour in January, former CentCom Commander William Fallon pointed to Iraq to explain the resurgence of the Taliban in 2007 — the deadliest year for U.S. soldiers there:

Well, back in 2001, early 2002, the Taliban were pretty much vanquished. And I wasn’t over there during the intervening years. But my sense of looking back is that we moved focus to Iraq, which was the priority from 2003 on, and the attention and the resources focused on a different place. There’s been some resurgence in the Taliban. This is a country — Afghanistan needs a lot of work in the business of rebuilding itself.

The strain on the troops created by the war in Iraq has clearly left fewer resources for the fight in Afghanistan. Last week, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody insisted that the “Army is out of balance” and that the “current demand for our forces… exceeds the sustainable supply.”

Before leaving, McCain assured the women of The View that, as president, he would “get” Osama bin Laden “and bring him to justice.” Apparently McCain is overlooking the fact that the reason bin Laden is still on the loose is because the fight in Iraq diverted attention from perusing the terrorist leader in Afghanistan.

Yesterday in a town-hall style meeting, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) left the door open to launching preventive wars against other countries, similar to the U.S. invasion of Iraq:

Q: My question is, if you are elected president, will you reject the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war?

McCAIN: I don’t think you could make a blanket statement about pre-emptive war, because obviously, it depends on the threat that the United States of America faces.

If someone is about to launch a weapon that would devastate America, or have the capability to do so, obviously, you would have to act immediately in defense of this nation’s national security interests.

Listen here:

The Bush administration and its conservative allies have often used the terms “pre-emptive” and “preventive” war interchangeably, confusing the American public. But as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) noted on the Senate floor in 2002, the Bush doctrine of preventive war has dangerous consequences for U.S. security:

Traditionally, “pre-emptive” action refers to times when states react to an imminent threat of attack. For example, when Egyptian and Syrian forces mobilized on Israel’s borders in 1967, the threat was obvious and immediate, and Israel felt justified in pre-emptively attacking those forces. The global community is generally tolerant of such actions, since no nation should have to suffer a certain first strike before it has the legitimacy to respond.

By contrast, “preventive” military action refers to strikes that target a country before it has developed a capability that could someday become threatening. Preventive attacks have generally been condemned. For example, the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was regarded as a preventive strike by Japan, because the Japanese were seeking to block a planned military buildup by the United States in the Pacific.

The war in Iraq was a preventive war. There was no imminent danger. In his response yesterday, McCain responds to a question about “pre-emptive” war, but clearly leaves the door open to the Bush doctrine of “preventive” war. He stated that he would consider attacking countries who even have the “capability” to launch a dangerous weapon — whether or not there is an imminent threat.

In January, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said, “There’s going to be other wars.” After yesterday’s comments, it looks those wars may be preventive wars — like Iraq.

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An article in this morning’s New York Times examines the “competition” between realists and neoconservatives in John McCain’s foreign policy:

Senator John McCain has long made his decades of experience in foreign policy and national security the centerpiece of his political identity, and suggests he would bring to the White House a fully formed view of the world.

But now one component of the fractious Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the so-called pragmatists, some of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake — is expressing concern that Mr. McCain might be coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush’s first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

This article is trying to set up tension where none really exists: The competition for McCain’s foreign policy soul is over. The neocons cleaned up, took the trophy, and went for beers (or maybe wine spritzers.) Of course McCain is still going to seek and take advice from a gallery of venerated foreign policy wise men, but the idea that there’s actually a conflict between the neocon and realist camps for John McCain’s attention is nonsense. Not only has John McCain long pitched his tent in the neoconservative camp, he advocates a view of American power diametrically opposed to the realism of people like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, whose pragmatic approach the neocons have derided in the past as an ideology of “managed decline.”

In a 2006 article tracking McCain’s foreign policy views, John Judis wrote that, starting in 1998, McCain began to “place his new interventionist instincts within a larger ideological framework. That ideological framework was neoconservatism.”

McCain began reading the Weekly Standard and conferring with its editors, particularly Bill Kristol…When McCain wanted to hire a new legislative aide, his chief of staff, Mark Salter–himself a former aide to neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick, consulted with Kristol, who recommended a young protege named Daniel McKivergan…Randy Scheunemann, who had drafted the Iraq Liberation Act and was on the board of Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, became McCain’s foreign policy adviser. One person who has worked closely with Kristol says of Kristol and McCain, “They are exceptionally, exceptionally close.“

McCain espoused a realist point of view in the 1980s and early 90s, supporting the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon even before the Marine barracks bombing sparked Ronald Reagan’s quick retreat, and later opposing the U.S. mission in Somalia (even introducing an amendment to cut off funds for the troops there, a move he later said he regretted). After the quick U.S. victory of the first Gulf War, however, his views began to move in a more interventionist direction, and by the late 1990′s he was firmly in the interventionist camp.

Unlike Bush, who came into office without having really thought much about foreign policy (apart from having derided “nation-building” during the campaign) and then landed upon neoconservatism after casting about for a suitable ideological framework for his post-9/11 vengeance policy, McCain derives his strong views on the vigorous and unconstrained exercise of American power from a righteous belief in American “national greatness.”

The bottom line is that John McCain has been tied to the neocons, both personally and ideologically, for nearly a decade. Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right, a history of the noeconservatives (and a self-described former neocon himself) described the relationship this way: “McCain represents for the neocons the ultimate synthesis of war hero and politician.”

And McCain, in turn, has been increasingly drawn to the neocons’ militaristic vision of the U.S. as an empire that can set wrong aright around the globe.[...] If McCain becomes president, the neocons will be in charge.

Gen. David Petraeus, top U.S. commander in Iraq, told Congress this week that he is recommending to President Bush that the United States “pause” the draw down of troops in Iraq this July for at least 45 days in order to assess the security situation there.

Bush has now accepted Petraeus’s recommendation, “leaving open the possibility that about 140,000 U.S. servicemen and women will still be in the war zone when the next president takes office.”

But there is one important decision-maker that Petraeus and Bush don’t seem to be listening to: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The AP reports that Maliki told Bush yesterday that he “disagrees” with Petraeus’s recommendation “citing the growing capabilities of Iraq’s own security forces”:

The prime minister told Bush during a 20-minute telephone conversation on Wednesday that Iraqi security forces are capable of carrying out their duties and U.S. troops should be pulled out as the situation permits, according to a senior government adviser who sat in on the phone conversation. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the confidential details.

Bush actually agrees with Maliki. Last month, Bush said the Iraqi government’s offensive against Shi’ite militias in the southern city of Basra “shows the progress the Iraqi security forces have made during the surge.”

Moreover, Bush has also said that if Maliki wants U.S. troops to leave Iraq, then “we would leave“:

BUSH: We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It’s their government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave. [...] We are there at their request. […] but if they were to make the request, we wouldn’t be there.

Bush has consistently expressed confidence in Maliki’s leadership and judgement saying he had seen “the strength of his character,” that he is a “strong leader,” and a “good guy” with “deep determination.”

If Bush has so much confidence in Maliki’s character and leadership abilities, then perhaps he should take his advice.