In a fascinating cover story in this week’s New Republic (subscription only), John Judis wrestles with the issue and winds up mostly making the case for McCain the neoconservative. It’s a convincing story, and terrifically well told. In Judis’s recounting, McCain came out of his experiences in Vietnam believing that the United States ought only to get involved in overseas conflicts when its national interests were clearly at stake and when it possessed overwhelming military force, a realist position. Judis believes McCain then underwent a slow evolution through the 1990s — watching with horror as American troops failed to prevent massacres in Bosnia in the late 1990s — and pushing Clinton to send troops on a humanitarian mission to Kosovo, a war in which he acknowledged no great American national interest was at stake.
By 1999, in Judis’s telling, the transformation was complete. McCain was hiring prominent neoconservatives to work on his staff, was supporting the now-discredited Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi, and soon became very prominent early advocate of regime change in Iraq and Iran positions which he defends staunchly to this day. In an interview that is recounted towards the end of the piece, Judis presses McCain to differentiate himself from the neoconservatives, or to concede that the war in Iraq was a mistake in conception and not just execution. McCain passes up the opportunity; of the neoconservatives he says “generally I agree with them and respect them enormously.”
The rest of the article here.
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