WHO WON/WHO LOST? WE ALL DID!

As Pat Buchanan falls over himself gushing with praise for Senator McCain's performance in the first presidential debate, it is worth pondering how debates are appraised. Do we judge a debater's performance based on the arguments proferred? Do we examine the facts brought forth in support of various points? Or, do we judge a candidate's performance based on the emotional appeal mustered in support of whatever platitudes a debater chooses to highlight?

Calling these "debates" is a misnomer. Confrontation would be a much better description. Ali might not have been as powerful a hitter as Sonny Liston, but he brought a poetry to the fracas that befuddled Liston and left him helpless in the ring. So, did the street fighting McCain better the calmer, more traditionally focused debater Obama? And, how are we, the people, affected by all of this babble, bluster and bamboozle blathered by one of the two major party candidates?

However we choose to evaluate this gab fest, let's not let the facts get in the way of an analysis since the facts didn't seem to matter much at all to Senator McCain. He claimed that he had warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as early as 2005. No, Senator McCain, you didn't. You supported legislation that would have removed these two quasi-governmental private corporations from HUD supervision and placed them, along with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, under a new independent commission. This legislation was aimed purely at the Enron-excesses of shoddy accounting that were designed to reward corporate executives with bonuses based on over-inflated and even non-existent earnings. That legislation had nothing to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's inability to raise capital to meet cash demands brought about by the cascading crisis in the credit market because of the mortgage-based securities wracked by default.

Senator McCain, despite his claim to have visited Waziristan, surely doesn't understand Pakistani politics. Former President Musharraf deposed a democratically elected government that had been mired in corruption scandals. He ruled, much as previous generals had, with the support of the Pakistani army. Was the deposed government a failed state, as McCain claimed? Hardly, though it was a corrupt regime. Was the Musharraf regime any better? Maybe. At least, it did provide stability until the anti-democratic tendencies of Musharraf brought about his rejection at elections he had tried his best to rig in his favor.

The larger point, of course, is what did 10 years of support for Musharraf yield. He did little to rein in the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service that had long supported the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as it kept Afghanistan weak and provided Pakistan with a platform to interfere in Afghani politics. The blowback came, however, in the emergence of a Pakistani Taliban that targeted the regime in Islamabad and has succeeded in assassinating Benazir Bhutto and in truck-bombing the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. Now, Pakistan is at risk of becoming a failed state, despite $10 billion of military assistance that did nothing to win the hearts and minds of rural Pakistanis who might have benefitted more had the United States invested in funding the decrepit public school system in rural Pakistan that, in its absence, has allowed anti-American, anti-Western, anti-democratic madrassas to flourish.

When asked about what lessons McCain had learned about Iraq, the Republican candidate once again demonstrated that he had learned nothing about Iraq, let alone Vietnam. He bemoaned the humiliation that American soldiers had felt upon their return to the United States after the debacle in Vietnam. Yet, what strategy would have provided "victory with honor" that McCain claims he seeks in Iraq? There was none. Vietnamization failed because the Vietnam War wasn't just an insurgency. It was a civil war where one side (Hanoi) had the support of two committed superpowers (the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China) and the ability to wait out a country (the United States) that had no idea what it was fighting for in Vietnam. It certainly was democracy because not a single government in South Vietnam had ever been democratic, aspired to democracy or demonstrated the ability to run a government free of corruption.

Obama correctly pointed out that it doesn't matter what happened, failed to happened, should have happened or might even happen in Iraq. The war was wrong from the outset. It was driven by a pre-existing desire to take out Saddam Hussein. It was draped in lies, exaggeratons and outright fabrications that claimed among other things that Iraq was behind 9/11 and harbored untold quantities of weapons of mass destruction. And, it was hyped as the best way to bring democracy to a region of the world where the battle between the forces of modernity and tradition had not even been decided and where unquestioned American support of anti-democrat and corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt dashed the hopes of positive forces for change.

To allow McCain, as Obama did, to claim that somehow victory was at hand in Iraq only if we follow the present course because of the surge was a grievous mistake. Correctly, McCain noted that the Bush strategy of attack and withdraw was all wrong. A counter-insurgency strategy where territory was seized, held and improved in order to win over the local populace was probably a better bet. Whether it would have succeeded with the paltry amount of American troops in Iraq is dubious at best. We do know that the "surge" would not have experienced the success that McCain seeks to claim for his own without the Sunni Awakening. Paying former Sunni insurgents to fight al Qaeda in Iraq after the Sunni insurgency had grown weary of al Qaeda excesses in Anbar was a wise strategy.

Yet, where has this brought us in Iraq. Finally, after many, many months of negotiation McCain pointed to the passage of an election law which might finally lead to the holding of regional elections originally scheduled for October 2008. At the same time, though, the Iraqi Shiite dominated government is hell-bent on unraveling the Sunni Awakening by refusing to integrate the Sunni Sons of Iraq into official Iraqi police and army units. Moreover, it has expressed its desire to prosecute Sunni Sons of Iraq for earlier transgressions against the government of Iraq while members of the Iraqi insurgency.

Does this point us in the direction of "victory with honor" or keep us heading down the road to continued engagement in an unstable and fragile Iraq? In the meantime, the meltdown in Afghanistan continues. Unstated, of course, is whether the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan is part of the problem or part of the solution. Certainly, bombing of civilians by NATO forces does not contribute to winning the hearts and minds of Afghanis. And, the lack of a sufficient level of ground forces that make it impossible for NATO to seize, hold and ameliorate territory to squelch the Taliban resurgence. Has the situation so deteriorated that not even additional forces in Afghanistan can reverse the decline, especially given the inability of Karzai to effectively govern territory held by the Afghani regime?

Unquestioned assumptions characterized the discussion of Georgia and the Ukraine. Strangely, Senator Obama expressed support for the admission of Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO, a course of action Senator McCain has advocated since his good friend Misha, the young, American educated president of Georgia, launched his foolish endeavor against South Ossetia. Why? Is NATO prepared to come to the defense of either country, especially if it recklessly decides to take action indirectly or directly against Russian forces? No. Not a single NATO country in Western Europe will ever accept mutual defense of these peripheral nations. What might work is the association and later admission of both countries into the European union in order to aid in the building of their nascent economies and the deepening of democratic tendencies in both nations. Russia might accept the latter, while it has stated categorically that it will never accept the former. Pursuing NATO membership, as Obama and McCain both advocated, would lead to a new cold war between Russia and the United States.

McCain constantly harped upon his experience; yet, he came up with comments that, at best, can be described as questionable. He claimed that Reagan's refusal to negotiate with Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, as well as Reagan's unabashed support for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program that, McCain claimed, had brought the Soviet Union to its knees. This canard, constantly cited by Reaganites who apparently can't remove their own ideological blinders to analyze the crisis in the Soviet Union during the 80s, even if they read every official document released during the later Gorbachev and Yeltsin years. What Gorbachev realized was that the Soviet economy had become untenable. The rot was growing and would eventually have undermined the ability of the Soviet Union to keep pace with a rearming America. Even in the absence of the neutron bomb, the intermediate range missiles that Reagan foisted on West Germany during the early 80s, or the silly SDI program, which, to date, has been a phenomenal waste of money and still cannot shoot down a conventional missile when the launch time and trajectory are known in advance to an accuracy greater than 50%, the Soviet Union would have collapsed. Gorbachev knew this and launched perestroika and glasnost as a last ditch effort to hold together the Soviet Union. The Cold War ended when Gorbachev refused to support the rigid regime of Erich Honecker in East Berlin. Honecker was finished, the Wall came down and the Cold War concluded.

Perhaps it is a uniquely American trait to regard the entire world beholden to what an American government does or does not do. When America speaks, so the logic goes, the rest of the world ignores the United States at its peril. Well, that's true to a certain extent. The failure to monitor and deal with the subprime mortgage crisis promptly has clearly placed the world economy at risk. What the American government does or does not do will have profound consequence to not only the United States, but to the world as a whole. Yet, the American aggression against Iraq has not led to an explosion of democracy in the Middle East. Rather, it has led to a prodigious decline in American respect and prestige throughout the world. Despite Mr. McCain's boast: he can no more will victory in Iraq than he can demand respect without changing the idiocy of 53 years of Republican cold-war thinking.

Trapped in his own ideological blinders, McCain apparently can not grasp how deeply America's credibility has fallen. He promises that he will solve all of the problems America faces and deal with challenges at home and abroad. He claims direct knowledge of issues, regions of the world and leaders, both near and afar. Yet, none of this seems powerful enough to clue him in as to how appalling America's standing is. He promises a government that will never again resort to torture in order to extract whatever questionable intelligence it might receive from detainees held in Guantanomo, imprisoned on overseas bases or sent via rendition to torture friendly regimes in the Middle East. Neither he nor Senator Obama could ever contemplate the dispatch of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al to an international war crimes tribunal.

Call this a debate, a prize fight or a street brawl - whatever you will. It can't escape the judgement that the world deserves better than to listen to the pathetic patter of Senator McCain who can't seem to reconcile platitudes with his own contradictory stands. He will help veterans, but he fights a bill in Congress to ameliorate veterans' care. He wants to help America get out of its current financial crisis, but then rallies Congressional Republicans into opposing legislation supported by the White House, House and Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans all in the aim of deregulating the economy even more and reducing the capital gains tax.

Go back home, Senator McCain, to whichever house you wish to reside in. Go back now before you embarrass us worse than you already have. Your selection of an utterly incoherent governor whose rambling responses might be understandable were she lost in the Alaskan wilderness, but whose every misstep is proof positive that she has risen to her own level of incompetence is only one major stain on your claim to be able to lead. That you would deign to grandstand in Washington and indirectly help torpedo necessary legislation that may well be the only bipartisan means to stave off the complete collapse of the American economy is unconscionable. That you would claim success for its passage before it bombed on Monday is even more absurd.

Spare us any further town halls, "debates" or candidate fora. Sing, if you must, about bombing Iran. We, the rest of the world, would be better off if you confined your vocal prowess to a karaoke bar.