Moira Whelan has a good rundown of the whole question of where the “100 years” talking point came from, and is it really unfair to attribute a desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq to John McCain just because he kept emphasizing his desire for an indefinite military presence in Iraq before deciding it was politically inconvenient to be attacked for it.

One further point to ad is that McCain’s apparent belief that our military bases elsewhere in the Persian Gulf are entirely unproblematic seems to reflect a limited comprehension of the overall situation. After all, even our military presence in Saudi Arabia hasn’t been casualty-free and it’s extremely likely that we wouldn’t be able to keep all of the Gulf bases we currently have were the region more democratic. At the moment, the extraordinary weakness of the Iraqi state and the general lack of security have tended to obscure the basic reality of how unpopular are presence there is.

New ad continues to hit the 100 years theme:

They’re obviously making a rhetorical point at the end about being worse than Bush, but my guess is that on Iraq as such McCain is likely to be somewhat better as he has over the years seemed more engaged with the various tactical questions about how best to proceed. Where he’s most likely to be worse than Bush concerns our relationships with other major countries like Russia and China, where Bush has generally been cautious but McCain might take a substantially more confrontational approach. Still, for political purposes probably nobody’s going to care about Russia and China, so the fact that McCain, like Bush, will ensure that troops keep fighting and dying in Iraq for as long as he’s in a position to order them to do so does seem like the salient issue.

Matt Duss notes that Randy Scheunemann has a background as a lobbyist for the government of Georgia (the foreign country, not the state), the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, etc. To be fair to Scheunemann, though, this really seems to me a case where someone gets lobbying work because his sincere convictions (in favor of a more confrontational policy toward Iraq and Russia and basically everywhere) happen to line up with someone’s lobbying agenda.

It’d be like if Big Train started giving me money (which, frankly, they should) rather than like the highway lobby hiring me and then suddenly all my opinions change.

Jumping off some of Hannah Arendt’s observations about Vietnam, Dave Meyer has an excellent post about Iraq and war as a “signaling” strategy:

The official obsession with image developed over time in the Vietnam era. With Iraq, it was central from the beginning.  Before the war, Andy Card told Elisabeth Bumiller that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Tom Friedman thought invading Iraq would communicate a useful “Suck. On. This.” Jonah Goldberg glowingly attributed to Michael Ledeen the idea that “every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” There are countless examples, from high government officials to low pundits, of endorsements of Iraq for the message it would send, as an easy way to dispel the myth of American weakness. The Iraq war is a multi-trillion dollar public relations campaign, aimed at persuading hostile forces of our “strength.”

To add some further context and specificity, I point out in Heads in the Sand that the Bush administration wanted to simultaneously get more rigorous about cracking down on nuclear activities in unfriendly states and less scrupulous about U.S. compliance with the multilateral non-proliferation regime. Consequently, they wanted regime change in Iraq not just for its own sake, but also to “send a message” to would be proliferators in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.

As Dave points out, however, among many other problems with using war as a signaling device in this way, it has a very strong tendency to undermine democratic norms at home — “Effective marketing requires message discipline; in the context of a public relations war, there is a real sense in which dissent muddles the message.” This is especially true in the modern world where it’s essentially impossible to segment your message. In the past, it might have been viable for an administration to communicate one message, in foreign language, via the foreign press, to foreigners while allowing for a more muddled national dialogue in the domestic press and vernacular. But those days are gone, and today message discipline requires totally discipline.

I might also add that the problems here are a two-way street. Attempting this sort of messaging strategy gets you involved in illegal domestic propaganda but unless you actually succeed in snuffing out democracy (and perhaps not even then) you’re going to find it essentially impossible to communicate an unambiguous message abroad.

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet

Here’s Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s top foreign policy aide, talking about Georgia and U.S.-Russian relations and casually dropping tid-bits of his bizarre theoretical approach. For example, here’s his view of diplomacy:

Well, I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs. Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics.

That’s right, he thinks the entire process of bargaining for mutual advantage that lies at the core of diplomacy — and, indeed, of almost all constructive human interaction — is a relic of a bygone era of power politics. In the brave new future, either the Russians give way on all points, or else we raise up the national missile defense system and it’s bombs away.

For a more rational take on international relations, you might want to come by my Heads in the Sand event tomorrow at 6:30 PM at the Borders at 18th and L in DC.

UPDATE: That should be 6:00 PM at Borders, apologies.