Sen. John McCain has proudly touted his record on veterans throughout this campaign. “I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I’ll take care of them,” he said in last week’s debate. In May, McCain said he has the “judgment necessary to care for the veterans.”

In an interview with ThinkProgress today, Rep. Chet Edwards (D), who represents Crawford, TX and is a leader on veterans issues in Congress, ripped McCain’s record on veterans:

If you look at John McCain’s record on veterans issues, it’s a failed one. … Even the Vietnam Veterans of America, those who served with Sen. McCain in Vietnam, have given Sen. McCain a ‘D’ voting record when it comes to voting to improve veterans health care and benefits. … But I think America’s veterans and voters have a right to know before the election that his voting record in the Senate has been a failed one.

“If his voting record had prevailed over the last several years, veterans would have poorer health care and fewer benefits than they have today,” he said. Watch it:

Indeed, McCain’s voting record in the Senate on veterans issues is abysmal. He has received failing grades from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Disabled Veterans of America, and Vietnam Veterans of America. McCain has voted against money for VA outpatient care and treatment and against increasing VA funding by $1.5 billion by closing corporate loopholes, to name a few.

“My message to veterans is that a vote for Sen. McCain is a vote to show respect for one veteran and his service in Vietnam,” Edwards said. He added that the mainstream media has “ignored the failed record of John McCain.” “You’ve got 25 million veterans in America, and again I bet the vast majority of them would be shocked and deeply disappointed to find out McCain has a failed voting record on veterans.”

On today’s Morning Joe, John McCain condemned the deficiencies of the bailout bill which he voted for last night, and stressed that the bill was a necessary emergency measure, not a cure:

This is a tourniquet, this isn’t a cure, okay? This is a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Now we have to go about fixing the fundamental problems in our economy, and that’s going to be long and hard and tough. It doesn’t solve the problem.

Watch it:

In an article last December, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen used the same metaphor to explain the U.S. military’s tactic of dividing Baghdad’s violently cleansed sectarian neighborhoods with a series of concrete barriers:

Kilcullen stresses that the walls are temporary. He compares them to tourniquets. “It’s something you do when patient is bleeding to death. But you don’t leave it there forever or it causes damage.”

I commented at the time that “a tourniquet is also an excellent metaphor for the surge itself: It’s helped, in some respects, to stop the bleeding, but it’s made it impossible to save the leg.” The surge was an emergency measure to staunch the flow of blood in which Iraq was drowning, but not a cure for the fundamental political problems driving the violence. As was discussed in a recent Center for American Progress report, it now seems that “the surge has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions.”

In this respect, the surge and the bailout are similar. As Ed Paisley, Brian Katulis and I wrote last week, both solutions “do not address the core problem, and do not speak to the failed conservative ideology that generated the crises”:

Just as the emergency escalation of 30,000 troops to Baghdad represented a form of triage for President Bush’s disastrously counterproductive Iraq “crusade”…so too the Wall Street bailout represents an attempted rescue of unfettered financial markets sorely lacking in prudent regulatory supervision.[...]

Bailing out Wall Street does not resolve the deep problems in the U.S. housing market created by the out-of-control securitization of individual home mortgages. It only shifts these debts onto the American taxpayer. Similarly, the surge has failed to address the disastrous consequences of the invasion of Iraq, leaving problems such as Iraq’s massive refugee crisis, the outflow of terrorist tactics and technology from Iraq to the surrounding region, and festering anti-Americanism for the next administration to deal with.

The $200 billion surge and the $700 billion bailout represent the failure of two of the main planks of the modern conservative agenda: Economic deregulation and the “war on terror.” While McCain admits the shortcomings of the bailout fix, he he is completely unwilling to do so in regard to the Iraq surge, which he has made the centerpiece of his campaign. McCain has also tried to downplay how deeply complicit he was — both as a self-described “deregulator” and as one of the most strident advocates of the Iraq war — in creating the disasters that have required such drastic measures to contain.

Back before McCain decided that the Russia-Georgia crisis was “the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War,” in 2006 McCain called Iran’s nuclear activities “the most grave situation that we have faced since the end of the Cold War, absent the whole war on terror.”

Responding to the idea that Iran — the world’s fourth-largest oil producer — might attempt to manipulate oil prices in response to sanctions, McCain declared:

If the price of oil has to go up, then that’s a consequence we would have to suffer.

In his convention speech, John McCain condemned Russia’s leaders as “rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power.” But what McCain still doesn’t seem to recognize is that Russia’s resurgence and Iran’s nuclear program have both been enabled by huge oil revenues which are a direct consequence of destabilization resulting from the Iraq war.

According to a leading oil economist, the Iraq war “tripled the price of oil…costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone”:

Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), [said] that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel [of May 2008], if it had not been for the Iraq war.

Back in 2006, NPR correspondent Eric Weiner contemplated the prospect — then scarcely imaginable — of oil at $100 a barrel. Today’s news is that the price of a barrel of oil has fallen below $100.

So, to sum up: War John McCain supports waging indefinitely = regional destabilization = increased oil prices = higher revenues for regimes John McCain wants to contain. It would be great if he understood these consequences.