Does it take brain cancer to encourage a confession — that the Iraq War was a mistake? — a comment about redemption

© 2018 Peter Free

 

28 May 2018

 

 

Caveat — what follows is harsh

 

Hypocritical deathbed etiquette should not, I think, constrain Truth.

 

 

Brain-cancered John McCain, I guess, is preparing for the Great Beyond

 

Like former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (way too long after the moral and geopolitical atrocity that was the Vietnam War) — the consistently warmongering John McCain now admits that his support of the Iraq War was a mistake:

 

 

Sen. John McCain has made a shocking admission: The Iraq War was a “mistake,” and he’s taking the blame.

 

In his new memoir, McCain who is battling brain cancer, writes that the Iraq War “can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it,” as Politico reports.

 

McCain’s defense of the Iraq War was unwavering, even when it became increasingly clear that the United States’ stated intention of establishing democracy in Iraq was not only unrealistic but would take hundreds of thousands of lives.

 

© 2018 Tara Golshan, John McCain’s shocking concession on the Iraq War: it was a “mistake”, Vox (26 May 2018)

 

 

The moral? — Now in the Croak Room himself . . .

 

Senator McCain has finally grasped what was exceedingly obvious moral and strategic wisdom even before the Iraq War began.

 

How conveniently timed.

 

Senator McCain has always been a master at getting false integrity points for grandstanding bullshit that pretty consistently ran in the reverse direction. One of the few things that he got right was his opposition to American torture. And that, like this looming deathbed announcement, was only because he had experienced torture's miseries, at length, himself.

 

Moral imagination was not, for the most part (like literally all high visibility politicians), on the Senator's list of things to concern himself with.

 

So, after decades of McCain-cheered Imperialism's savaging of civilization, do you think that his "Oh, I made a mistake" confession is a spiritually workable one?

 

Probably most not-war-touched Americans will think so. But I doubt that that hundreds of thousands of dead, as well as those still to suffer in the expanding hellish cauldron that we created and continue to create, will agree.

 

A just Deity might have no difficulty sentencing Senator McCain to an extended bout of soul training. Karma and purgatory, imaginary though they probably are, would prove useful mechanisms. Salvation should not work at so little cost with regard to such a long string of eagerly indulged, morally murderous and strategically obvious wrongs.

 

Am I too harsh?

 

Is Pete being nasty?

 

Perhaps not.

 

Someone has to speak for the lives that were intentionally cheated by American leadership's deadly avarice, anti-terror cowardice and geopolitical stupidity. Senator McCain has been a key and consistently bellicose member of that soul-weak tribe of death-infatuated, imperialistic stooges.

 

In a just universe — a reactive karmic penance would slowly dribble its educational toll.

 

In ours, probably not.