Arizona Sen. John McCain has made his opinion known regarding the uprisings spreading across the Arab world. While making several television appearances on CBS, McCain commended the rebels for standing up and demanding shifts in power. McCain also expressed sentiments that the Arab world needed backing from outside countries to really achieve their goals. Simultaneously, McCain expressed that the U.S. shouldn’t be one of the primary countries to help Libya, specifically, in a post-Gadhafi era. McCain suggested the brunt of the responsibility, or burden depending on how you look at it, should fall onto European countries.
The U.S. and its allies have had considerable success over the passing days due to increased air strikes by NATO. McCain also had comments on this matter via a statement he and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham released. The two expressed that the successes of the air strike were long overdue, and were largely absent because of the United States’ unwillingness to employ the “full weight of our airpower.”
So in other words, the U.S. should be fully involved in the liberation, but as soon as it happens, get out. Use our strongest ability to free the people and give them an opportunity for democracy and freedom, but then bail. Is it me, or does this sound like a bad idea?
If you invest your time and money into cleaning up an overgrown lawn, wouldn’t you want to be the one responsible for the maintenance from there forward? You wouldn’t just pour all your sweat into it, and then hand the job over to the neighborhood boy.
It seems as though McCain is shape-shifting his opinion just to be critical. If President Barack Obama doesn’t want to over-commit resources to the matter, McCain says he ought to bulk up and put the U.S. deeper into the conflict. If President Obama wants to commit resources to ensure that all progress made is maintained in the aftermath, McCain says he’s wrong and ought to step back. There’s no doing right by McCain when you’re not in his party.
The U.S. has yet another chance to botch the end game in the affairs and future of an Arab country and its people’s freedom. Getting the bad guy out of power is almost never an issue for the U.S.; it’s in the following through afterward that we constantly screw up. The mission is never “accomplished” until everything is set right and the is country given two legs to stand on. It’s all fine and dandy to create regime change, but if you don’t make sure a strong regime replaces it, you’re left with a waste of time money and, most importantly, human lives.
If McCain wants to continue his childish antics of simply standing for the opposite of his counterparts, then fine. In the end it won’t directly hurt him. He’ll still be re-elected, continue to call himself a maverick and champion how he reaches across the aisle. All the while, the matters in Libya will remain hostile and the people will reside on unstable and wavering ground.
— Storm Byrd is the Perspectives editor for the Daily Wildcat. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.
