Why can’t McCain see war parallels?

Published 11:50 am Friday, January 18, 2008

In 2001, John McCain wrote a foreword to David Halberstam’s book “The Best and the Brightest,” dealing with the causes and issues of the Vietnam war. In it he wrote, “It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die … for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.”

While I completely agree with these comments with regard to the Vietnam war, I cannot understand why a man of McCain’s intelligence cannot see that the very same observations apply to Bush’s Iraq fiasco, which McCain stubbornly supports. The answer is not 9/11, as history has judged that Iraq had little, if anything, to do with that terrorist act.

Don Campbell