McCain did another in his series of blogger calls today (he missed last week’s and blamed it on “incompetent staffers”). He opened with a brief discussion of Pakistan, where he said he would “make no excuses” for the actions of Pervez Musharraf, but also noted–lamented–that there was “a lot of complication” and that little could be done to change things in the near-term, and that he didn’t believe statements condemning Musharraf would be productive. He added that he “still advocate[s] democracy, I still advocate the belief that these countries will gradually emerge with our help into democracies…” He also spoke to the recent progress in Iraq, saying that “Ramadi three years ago was a free fire zone” and telling of how he’d recently run into a soldier who told him that there had just been a 5K run in the former insurgent stronghold. “Maybe some of the improvements in the overall situation have frankly note been as widely covered” as they ought to be McCain said. The first question was whether federal law should “supersede the will of the people” on the issue of medical marijuana. McCain was outright dismissive of the “will of the people” in this case, saying he sees no evidence that marijuana is medically necessary, and that “there may be times when the will of the people–like in Iraq, where the will of the people is that we withdraw immediately or very very soon. I don’t share that view of the will of the people.” McCain added that he is not changing his position on medical marijuana. Captain Ed asked about Admiral Fallon’s recent comments that there is no plan to bomb Iran and that the rhetoric needs to be ratcheted down, to which McCain began his response, “with all due respect to Admiral Fallon.” He then stated flatly, as the WWS did yesterday, that the United States military has contingency plans “for ever possibly contingency in the world, and if we don’t than someone’s not doing their duty.” He also stated that “I really have to agree with the president and most national security experts that if Iran gets nuclear weapons they will spread throughout the region…and they will make those weapons available to terrorist organizations.” McCain also addressed the diplowimp crisis at the State Department, saying “I thought that’s what public service was all about” in response to the recent town hall meeting in Foggy Bottom where foreign service officer Jack Croddy declared an assignment to Baghdad the equivalent of “a death sentence.” “There’s something wrong in the State Department,” he said, “when there’s such an apparently negative backlash against a call to serve in what is I believe the central point in America’s national security challenges today and that’s serving in Iraq.” I asked McCain about the size of the military, to which he responded that he’d long advocated expanding both the Army and Marine Corps but that “We need more Special forces, seals, civil affairs people, people versed in interrogation techniques . . . It is not just money.” McCain has long shown a bias against big-ticket defense programs, so I followed up with a question about the grounding of the F-15 fleet and whether McCain thought that would provide further impetus for increasing the buy of F-22s. McCain didn’t take the bait, saying only that “the F22 is a fine airplane . . . [but we] have to look at what kinds of wars we are going to be in.” He then went on to talk about the dangers of the military industrial complex, and said that like Eisenhower, he would force a major reevaluation of how American tax dollars are spent on military hardware. Finally, with regard to progress in Iraq, McCain said of the Democrats that they are “more interested in their political fortunes than most anything else.” That’s straight talk. More at EyeOn08, and Captain’s Quarters.
