Only half the US prisoners in North Vietnam were released. Few from Laos and Cambodia. The US knew they were there. To avoid political embarrassment they were abandoned. McCain led the cover-up.
…In his person, and his public pronouncements, McCain was the perfect representative of the nascent imperial class: born in the Panama Canal zone, the son of an Admiral, he was almost fated to become what he did indeed become – the archetypal Praetorian, the veritable embodiment of America’s post-World War II empire. A paladin of the cold war while it lasted, and a tireless advocate of post-cold war hegemonism, his favorite phrase was “boots on the ground,” and he championed this as a policy option for virtually every foreign policy problem confronted by US policymakers…
Indeed, McCain was on the other side of the barricades from Antiwar.com from our founding during the run up to the Kosovo war, right up to the present day, In 1999, he rose to prominence – after the “Keating Five” scandal – as the one dissident in a quasi-“isolationist” (i.e. anti-war) GOP. His recommendation? “Boots on the ground!” This position was lapped up big-time by the pro-Clinton media, which had him on every Sunday talk show and then some.
Prior to this, McCain had been cautious about supporting US intervention overseas, e.g. he opposed Reagan sending troops to Lebanon. However, the Bosnian civil war, in the course of which the US sent 20,000 troops to Central Europe to enforce the nonexistent “peace,” was a turning point for him… Read the rest of this entry »
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