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McCain’s Sound and Fury

The good news is that few, if any, of McCain's preferred policies are likely to be adopted.

Jonathan Broder reports on what McCain is likely to do in his expected role as the next chairman of the Armed Services Committee:

“We may be able to ‘contain,’ but to actually defeat ISIS is going to require more boots on the ground, more vigorous strikes, more special forces, further arming the Kurdish peshmerga forces and creating a no-fly zone and buffer zone in Syria,” said McCain, who also called on Obama to remove Assad from power.

As the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain is likely to pound this message like a verbal staple gun in hearings, along with a separate demand that the administration provide Ukraine with weapons and other lethal equipment to blunt Russian aggression. But for now, opinion polls show the American public is opposed to deeper U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Syria, and with the exception of Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and a handful of other Republican hawks, McCain doesn’t have the support of most of his GOP colleagues on this issue or the Ukraine crisis. As a result, there is likely to be more sound and fury coming from McCain on Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, but little of legislative significance [bold mine-DL].

So the good news is that few, if any, of McCain’s preferred policies are likely to be adopted, but the bad news is that McCain will have an even higher-profile platform from which to pronounce his views about U.S. foreign policy. We can expect constant agitation from him on throwing more weapons at the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. As it is, McCain is treated with an absurd degree of deference on account of his supposed “expertise” on these issues. Now that he is on track to become a chairman of a major Senate committee responsible for military and defense matters his views will be given even more respect and attention. He won’t deserve either of these things, but he will get them by virtue of the position he will hold. Together with Bob Corker, the incoming Foreign Relations Committee chairman, we can look forward to many years of harmful and reckless Republican leadership on foreign policy and military issues.

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