Today's Article
U.S. forces should
only be employed 'as
a last resort and only
if there is a clear risk
to national security by
the intended target,'
states the theory.
The American Spark
Does McCain Forget The 'Powell Doctrine'?

By Cliff Montgomery - July 16th, 2008

The Democratic and Republican presidential nominees engaged in a bitter rhetorical battle on Tuesday over
the Bush Administration's fruitless nation-building of Iraq.

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) correctly declared it to be nothing but a senseless muddle which must end as
soon as possible. But Senator John McCain (R-AZ) seemed content on echoing the false reasoning which put
American troops into that country for no good reason, by continuing the pretense that the invasion and
occupation of Iraq is a legitimate war with an actual mission.

"Iraq is not going to be a perfect place, and we don't have unlimited resources to try and make it one," Sen.
Obama stated yesterday in a speech.

The Illinois senator further pointed out that if America is finally going to get serious in tracking down and
eliminating the core leadership of al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies, it must concentrate manpower and
resources where our enemies are actually located, in Afghanistan and along its porous border with Pakistan.

But McCain, the former "independent-minded" Republican who sounds more like George W. Bush every day,
quickly sputtered two cherished Bush fallacies of logic to keep ordinary Americans good and confused.

Sen. McCain claimed that Sen. Obama "will tell you we can't win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact,
he has it exactly backwards."

Here are the two logical fallacies McCain deftly employed in that single ridiculous pretension.

1.) Denial - By saying that America could "lose in Iraq," he is denying that the reasons for the invasion of that
country were long ago proven treasonous falsehoods. Someone should tell McCain that his assumption here
only works for real wars, based on actual evidence--not for acts of fruitless nation-building based the lies and
cynical deceit of career politicians.

If there is no legitimate reasons for a war Mr. McCain, then by definition there can be nothing for our country to
win--and nothing to lose but lives, money and American military might.

2.) In McCain's second sentence, he employs the fallacy of the Complex Question, or Compound Argument. It
essentially treats two utterly different subjects as if they are a single subject, and falsely pretends that a person
can't be for one topic without also being for the other--even if the two subjects have long ago been proven to
be quite different from one another, as is the case here.

But why all this confusing talk from Republican leaders now? Do they forget their own war doctrine--at least,
the war doctrine they maintained
when someone other than a neo-conservative was in the White House?

It was called the "Powell Doctrine," in honor of General Colin Powell, former Army Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff and former Secretary of State, who developed the theory as he helped plan the 1991 Gulf War.

As a major in Vietnam, Powell saw first-hand the folly of invading and occupying another country for no clear
reason. Powell's Vietnam service often is stated as the impetus for his doctrine--a philosophy which
Republicans constantly proclaimed during the Clinton years.

Essentially, the doctrine states that U.S. military action should only be employed "as a last resort and only if
there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target," states a MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour webpage
on the subject.

American forces must be greater in both power and number than the enemy force, the doctrine states. There
also "must be strong support for the campaign by the general public, and there must be a clear exit strategy
from the conflict in which the military is engaged," adds the MacNeil-Lehrer webpage.

Perhaps former Gen. Powell has himself said it best:

"We must not, for example, send military forces into a crisis with an unclear mission they cannot
accomplish--such as we did when we sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1983. We inserted those proud
warriors into the middle of a five-faction civil war complete with terrorists, hostage-takers, and a dozen spies in
every camp, and said, 'Gentlemen, be a buffer.'

"We owe it to the men and women who go in harm's way to make sure that this is always the case and that
their lives are not squandered for unclear purposes," Powell declared in his landmark speech,
U.S. Forces: The
Challenges Ahead
.  

That's what neo-conservatives like George W. Bush and John McCain said then. That's not what they say now.



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