John McCain has a long history of engaging in grandstanding-as-policymaking. He does this in both domestic policy and foreign policy debates. On most issues, he does not so much have informed opinions as moralistic and ideological reactions that are shaped and channeled according to what will gain him the greatest attention. Like most other “centrists” praised for their independence and bold truth-telling, he has a knack for aligning himself with whatever happens to be the fashionable cause of the moment so long as it does not conflict with two basic imperatives: 1) question the national security state as rarely as possible; 2) criticize an administration’s foreign policy if it is insufficiently militaristic, but otherwise act as a reliable supporter of the executive. On Libya, McCain has been able to combine his eagerness to grandstand and moralize with his habit of backing military solutions to political crises. Thus he celebrated the Libyan rebels as his “heroes” and as Libyan patriots.

Jack Hunter points out that McCain’s flat denial of any connection between the rebels and Al Qaeda or jihadist militancy is simply not true, which makes him either ignorant (always possible) or shows that he is openly cheering on a force that includes people who were until very recently attempting to kill Americans. Arguably, many Arab and Afghan patriots become jihadists because of their patriotism, just as happened with some Chechens, but acknowledging this would require that McCain accept that jihadists are frequently driven by political grievances, that terrorism is provoked by occupation and invasion, and that the sort of activist, militaristic policies that McCain favors is a boon to filling the ranks of jihadists.

It is possible to see Libyan rebels, including the jihadists, as patriots, but this is an idea that runs contrary to so many of McCain’s other long-held ideological tenets that I doubt he could keep those ideas in his mind at the same time. In fact, McCain’s praise of the Libyan rebels as patriots is purely situational and dependent on the fact that they are currently the alternative to Gaddafi in a war that McCain has been pushing to have since February. Obviously, he would never dream of saying that same thing about, say, the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr or supporters of Hizbullah. Those people are fanatics and terrorists!

If Libyan rebels are patriots, what did that make the Iraqi insurgents? What does that make the Afghan Taliban? Of course, the latter are classified as the enemy, and the Libyan rebels have been endorsed by at least two Western governments as the legitimate Libyan government, and for all intents and purposes Washington has been treating them as Reagan treated the mujahideen. Thus people that McCain would otherwise be happy to see locked away indefinitely in Guantanamo or worse are now among his new congeries of heroes. McCain’s heroes are rather like his policy positions: he embraces those that are useful to his present need, and the substance of what they represent, like the substance of the policies he endorses, is quite beside the point.

Something else that McCain has a habit of doing is endorsing foreign national causes with enormous zeal. Back in the late 1990s, the best way to be an anti-Russian hawk was to embrace the Chechen cause, and so McCain became a vocal spokesmen on behalf of Chechen self-determination, despite the fact that the Chechen cause was becoming more and more closely aligned with jihadist fanatics and terrorist atrocities by the end of the decade. More recently, he has become a comically outspoken supporter of the cause of Georgia, and everyone who pays attention to such things remembers his crazed “we are all Georgians now” routine during the August 2008 war. The point of these exercises isn’t just to stake out dangerous and confrontational policy positions, though that is part of it, but also to grab media attention by jumping out in front and identifying with the popular cause of the moment.