The View’s Meghan McCain said Thursday that President Trump and Sen. Rand Paul will have “blood on their hands” for supporting the withdrawal of some U.S. troops from Syria and what that might mean for the Kurds.
Criticizing Paul, who is scheduled to appear on The View Friday when McCain is absent, McCain said, “I want you to ask him, ‘There’s blood on his hand, on anyone’s hands starting with his and President Trump’s, who is letting this happen because these people are being slaughtered after standing with our troops in the Middle East for an extremely long time fighting against terrorist cells and we’re not entering into a foreign war.'” Two days prior on The View, McCain wondered on Tuesday how Paul could “sleep at night.”
McCain is her own woman, but has never been shy about espousing the same hawkish foreign policy views held by her late father, Sen. John McCain, including aligning herself with prominent neoconservatives.
Before his passing and even upon his death last year, many anti-war types both left and right were eager to say that prominent Iraq War supporter John McCain had “blood on his hands” due to his foreign policy positions.
I thought it was disrespectful to say that at the time and even said so publicly. But if we’re using Meghan McCain’s gauge of what constitutes blood on the hands of politicians, her father was a top contender.
Tens of thousands of people died during the Iraq War, including 5,000 American soldiers. If looking at civilian deaths of non-American Iraqis, similar to McCain’s concern about non-American Kurds, that number reaches into the hundreds of thousands beginning from the U.S. invasion in 2003. Between 2003-2011, the overall civilian death number was 114,000, including 1,021 Iraqi children, many as the result of American weapons including bombs.
In his 2008 run for the White House, John McCain suggested America might occupy Iraq for 100 years and even sang songs about bombing Iran.
McCain was constantly on a war footing in his policies toward Iran, a country three times as large as Iraq that would likely lead to far more deaths than what it took to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That glaring prospect never seemed to deter the senator.
McCain had such a reputation as an unrepentant hawk that in 2013 the left-leaning Mother Jones created a map of “All the Countries John McCain Has Wanted to Attack.” There were 13.
If he got his wish, there would have been plenty more blood on his hands. Despite the disastrous results of the Iraq War, John McCain never quit advocating for similar regime changes in multiple countries, and obviously didn’t mind if it took the United States over a century to see all these wars through.
Blasting Trump and Paul, Meghan McCain lamented Tuesday, “I’m sorry … have we not learned the lessons of 9/11?”
Some never did.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
