Senator John McCain’s influence on Republican activists may be minimal these days, but his comments on ABC’s “This Week” program today still put the GOP presidential field on notice they won’t be able to get away with appeasing isolationist elements in the party with impunity. In a pre-recorded interview with Christiane Amanpour, McCain took a shot at those presidential candidates as well as members of Congress who are opposing the U.S. intervention in Libya and calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
While some Republicans, such as the surging Michele Bachmann, have denounced the Libyan intervention and claimed it was unrelated to U.S. security, McCain says they aren’t thinking clearly about the use of American power. McCain pointed out the need to stop the Qaddafi regime from committing mass murder in Libya was very real:
If we had not intervened, Qaddafi was at the gates of Benghazi. He said he was going to go house to house to kill everybody. That’s a city of 700,000 people. What would be saying now if we had allowed for that to happen?
McCain is right. I wonder what, if anything, the anti-interventionists have to say in reply. But the main point here isn’t so much about Libya, it’s about the Republican vision of America’s role in the world. As McCain pointed out, the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan was unafraid to stand up freedom anywhere in the world.
While Bachmann’s objections to Libya are probably more a matter of knee jerk opposition to anything proposed by President Obama, the paleoconservative “Pat Buchanan wing” of the GOP seems to be making common cause with liberal-leaning “realists” like Jon Huntsman in order to create the impression Republicans have gone back to the sort of isolationism that characterized the GOP in the pre-World War Two era.
Though such sentiments earn Republicans applause from liberal newspapers and pundits, this actually gives an opening to a candidate like Tim Pawlenty. Were Pawlenty to start hammering Bachmann and Mitt Romney, who waffled on Afghanistan in last Monday’s debate, he might discover a more compelling rationale for a candidacy that is otherwise faltering. War weariness about Afghanistan may be spreading, but the idea an anti-war candidate can win the GOP grass roots is a proposition difficult to accept.
Even more to the point, McCain’s comments point up the difficulty for any Republican to publicly espouse an anti-war stance, since it will expose them to stiff opposition from a party core that is still intensely patriotic and deeply committed to the idea that bugging out of wars against Islamist terrorists is not something Republicans do.
