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Warriors who are not insane understand that war presents them with a choice between greater and lesser evils. The greater evil is defeat. But the lesser evil, killing — killing civilians, among others — is bad enough. McCain endorses the viewpoint of his father, who as a submarine commander during World War II “executed his country’s policy of total war, a policy that attacked the sources of the enemy’s material support just as vigorously as it attacked the enemy’s armed forces. He had sunk a great many merchant ships on his patrols in the Pacific.” Either Washington should have waged total war in Vietnam, McCain writes, or it should never have entered the war at all.
Sarah Palin is a prolife absolutist who makes no exception for rape or incest; yet, as I wrote earlier, the circumstances of her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy will remind other women why they’re prochoice. John McCain presents himself to voters as prolife, but his career contradicts him. I’d like to hear him explain why a combat pilot may choose death as the lesser evil yet a pregnant woman must not.
It’s been written that McCain is a man with religious beliefs that he, like many military types, is simply reluctant to discuss. Perhaps. But whatever his faith is, his memoir strongly suggests his life’s not centered on it. He writes. “I thought glory was the object of war, and all glory was self-glory.” But no, “Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return.” McCain thinks long and hard about glory, and the commonplace idea that it flows to and from God doesn’t seem to have occurred to him at all.
