“McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions,from a potent covert operations unit to a ‘League of Democracies’ that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in ‘rogue state rollback’ against his version of the ‘axis of evil.’ In all, it’s a new apparatus”
[McCain] is someone who in his soul believes in the use of American military power, and as he said in his rollback speech, not just to deal with emergent threats to the United States, but even to enforce the prevalence of what he called American values—that’s a codeword for democracy—so that countries whose internal functioning—let’s say Russia today, under Putin and Medvedev—that countries like Russia that don’t seem as democratic as we like would then become ostracized or sanctioned or subject to various kinds of hostile, both political and military, sanctions.
….he has suggested point blank that we’re in a long-term, almost unending struggle with al-Qaeda and various other forms of Islamism. And as a result, he wants to create a whole new set of institutions to deal with those. One of those institutions would be what he calls the League of Democracies, which is basically a way of short-circuiting the UN, where Russia and China, in particular, but also various non-aligned countries often stand up to the United States.
Also, he wants to create a new much more aggressive covert operations team.
He says he wants to model it on the old Office of Strategic Services, the World War II era OSS, and to create this out of the CIA but include into it psychological warfare specialists, covert operations people, people who specialize in advertising and propaganda, and a whole bunch of other kind of—a wide range of these kind of covert operators, who would then form a new agency that would be designed to fight the war on terrorism overseas and to deal with rogue states and other troubling actors that we—or McCain decides he happens not to like at that moment.
At the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed, McCain seemed to have felt unburdened, like now American power can express itself.
And that’s when he attached himself to the neoconservative vision that America, as the sole superpower, could throw its weight around, could remake the world in its own image and that there would be no effective opposition to it [i]”
Take just two of McCain’s visions as they were expressed above:
· the neoconservative vision that “America, as the sole superpower, could throw its weight around, could remake the world in its own image and that there would be no effective opposition to it”
· “he wants to create a new much more aggressive covert operations team [and] to create this out of the CIA but include into it psychological warfare specialists, covert operations people, people who specialize in advertising and propaganda, and a whole bunch of other kind of—a wide range of these kind of covert operators”.
Imagine these aspirations in combination with a presidency that has never been less accountable, more secretive or more powerful [ii].
As if this price was not enough, there is more.
The president will also be the supreme commander of an executive branch practically only responsible and accountable unto the president, and which has unprecedented capacities for covert military, intelligence and information operations – at home and abroad.
And there is even MORE!
The authorization to fight the war on terror, and some creative legal interpretation of the constitution, has given the president the means of justifying the use of these capacities – at home and abroad.
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