The Real John McCain

As soon as John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, Democrats and Republicans in Washington and the press spared no opportunity to lavish praise upon this lifelong government employee.

The truth, though, is that in exchange for the billions and billions of dollars that McCain has confiscated from them for well over three decades, taxpayers have received an ever-burgeoning administrative state, relentless illegal immigration from the Third World, and, of course, war—and all while McCain has pretended to be a “conservative.”

Thanks to his labors, hundreds of thousands of human beings, both foreign and American alike, are now dead.

And hundreds of thousands more are traumatized, orphaned, homeless, maimed, and continually besieged by those murderous terrorist organizations, like ISIS, that have taken over their countries after McCain’s policies prevailed.

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McCain is not alone in having their blood on his hands.  Yet in a Regime, a Government-Media-Complex, comprised of warmongers, McCain enjoys the dubious distinction of being the warmonger par excellence.

On the false pretense that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat against the United States via the “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) that he never possessed, McCain urged as loudly and tirelessly as anyone for war.  Those libertarians and old right conservative sorts who exposed holes in the WMD narrative and forecasted the disaster to which such a war would lead were dismissed, ignored, or mocked.

Estimates of casualties vary, but today, some 14 years after McCain got his way, anywhere between 195,000 and possibly one million Iraqis are dead.  The Iraq Body Count project found that during the decade following the invasion, 174,000 Iraqis were killed. Of this number, 112,000-123,000 were civilian noncombatants.  At present, the number is closer to 200,000 civilian noncombatant deaths.

Between 2003 and 2014, nearly 5,000 American service members lost their lives in this war that McCain and his ilk cooked on the basis of a lie.

Yet contractors, aid relief workers, and journalists are also among those who lost their lives.

While we can tabulate numbers, the pain, suffering, and trauma endured by the loved ones of those killed is incalculable.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and American corpses that McCain and his comrades left in the wake of their rush to war, there are that many more who have lived but who suffer daily.

Reportedly, over 1,600 Americans deployed to do battle in Iraq became amputees.

Between Iraq and Afghanistan (another country to which McCain and his ilk wanted to see Democracy exported), the Pentagon, in 2009, estimated that as many as 360,000 Americans who served were suffering traumatic brain injuries.

In 2007, a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that approximately one-third of the 103,788 troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from multiple, major psycho-social disorders.  Veterans were committing suicide and no small number suffered from PTSD.

Upon conducting their study of 10,000 Iraqi school children, the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists and the World Health Organization determined that no fewer than seventy percent of Iraqi children are also in bad mental health.  Some have ended their own lives.

Possibly most heartbreaking of all is that McCain’s war, according to a 2012 UNICEF study of Iraq households, resulted in the production of 800,000 to one million Iraqi orphans.  About five percent of all Iraqi children under the age of 18 have lost one or both parents.

Millions of Iraqis, their homes destroyed, have been displaced.

Hundreds of school teachers and thousands of Iraqi doctors had been murdered by criminals and insurgents within three years of the invasion, and hundreds of other doctors had been abducted.

None of this even takes account of the vacuum that the US created in toppling Saddam Hussein, a vacuum that the Islamic State filled and that has exponentially exacerbated the chaos in Iraq.

So far, I have only focused on Iraq, with some nods to Afghanistan. But these are hardly the only two disastrous wars for which McCain has advocated throughout his all too extensive career.

Nor has McCain ever given so much as an indication that he has the slightest regret over Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, in the face of this ocean of blood and suffering for which he pushed, he has continued to urge more of the same.

For all of the attacks that McCain and his ilk have made against President Trump for the latter’s tweets and the like, let’s not forget that this is the same veteran senator and former presidential candidate who expressed his support for attacking Iran by singing, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!”

Nor was McCain a stranger to twitter.  On the eve of Libya’s Muammar Gadhaffi’s death, the stately McCain tweeted: “Qaddafi on his way out, Bashar al Assad [of Syria] is next.”

Unsurprisingly, Libya is another country that McCain thought President Obama waited too long in ruining. In 2011, he appeared on Wolf Blitzer’s program and forewarned of “the great task ahead” of “building a democracy in a country that’s never known it.” (McCain, here, reveals that these are not defensive wars that he favors; they are ideological crusades, specifically, a crusade for Democracy.)

McCain expressed irritation that it took Obama as long as it did, by his lights, to attack Libya.  Had Obama not led “from behind,” had he used “the full weight of American air power” sooner, “it would have been gone—over a long time ago [.]”

Today, Libya, being as it is in a state of “chaotic unrest” and “torn by civil war and battles with ISIS,” is far worse than it ever was under Gadhaffi.

Syria is another target of McCain’s.  He aches for the US government to force “regime change” and plant Democracy, hence proving that he’s learned absolutely nothing from the blood-soaked, world-shattering failures of his foreign policy of choice in Iraq and Libya.

We could go on.

The bottom line: John McCain is responsible for suffering and death that are as immeasurable as they were avoidable.

Only those of weak character can ignore or deny this verdict.

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