John McCain has set himself a pretty hard task. It will not be easy to get elected as the next Republican President of the US following the crimes and incompetence of George Bush. But the former ‘war hero’ turned rightwing ‘truth teller’ just might bring it off. Once Clinton and Obama have torn up each other’s reputations, McCain could slip under the radar. He has built a carefully crafted image as a candidate who represents all the core Republican beliefs (militarism, cutting taxes and expenditures, family values, tough on crime) while being somehow different from Bush (more honest) and in favour of ‘change’. These days everyone needs to be in favour of change.
McCain has traded on his reputation as a war hero to position himself as a patriot who spent five and a half years in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ after his plane was shot down on 26 October 1967 while dropping its load of deadly bombs on Vietnamese ‘infrastructure’. While thousands refused to serve in Vietnam (evading the draft), McCain was a willing volunteer. It is only thanks to Main Van On, a 50-year-old Hanoi resident, that McCain is on the scene at all. He dived into Trac Bach Lake in Hanoi to rescue the drowning flyer. Needless to say, US bomber pilots were not popular in Hanoi, where thousands died under a hail of US bombs. There is no doubt that McCain was brutally treated as a prisoner. To his credit, he has not romanticized his experiences. According to the author Ted Rall, McCain has admitted to being a war criminal (‘I bombed innocent women and children,’ he said on the TV show 60 Minutes in 1997) and to having co-operated with his captors to get medical treatment. Yet somehow this morally ambiguous experience has morphed into John McCain, war hero. His campaign bus is adorned with ‘No Surrender’ stickers and he never bothers to correct the avalanche of rightwing media that celebrates his heroism. Electing someone because they are ‘a war hero’, while ignoring the validity of the war, is a good way to ensure a lot more wars in the near future.
