Warren Strobel at McClatchy News:
One thing is clear about John McCain's foreign policy views: Much like his political heroes Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt, he believes that America's power is a force to make the world better.
... Less well known are McCain's promises, if elected, to expand the Army and the Marine Corps to 900,000 soldiers and Marines from a planned strength of about 750,000; to form a U.S.-led League of Democracies to act when the United Nations can't or won't; and to form a new government unit, patterned after the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services, "to fight terrorist subversion" and "take risks that our bureaucracies today rarely consider taking."
...McCain already has indicated that he plans to use national security as a cudgel against the eventual Democratic nominee in the general election campaign.
In Norfolk, Va., on Friday, he talked tough on Iran and said he's best prepared to deal with security threats on his first day in office.
Democratic candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama "want to set a date for withdrawal in Iraq. I believe that would have catastrophic consequences. They (terrorists) would try to follow us home," McCain said.
But McCain hasn't spelled out in detail yet how he'd deal with threats to America's security.
...McCain's foreign-policy team is sprinkled with people, including Scheunemann, who were ardent backers of the 2003 Iraq invasion and who dismissed critics who warned of unintended consequences. They include former CIA Director James Woolsey, an adviser mostly on energy security, and William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard.
McCain himself was an early booster of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress provided bogus prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism.
At a January town hall in New Hampshire, McCain told a questioner that it "would be fine with me" if the United States had a military presence in Iraq for 100 years. He stressed that he meant a peacetime presence like that of U.S. troops in Germany and Japan.
So President McCain is going to rehabilitate the neocons, occupy Iraq forever, and militarily intimidate anybody who doesn't lick Uncle Sam's boots.
Are we scared yet?
