By actual count, Sen. John McCain has favored five of the last two American wars. You heard me.

For the GOP presidential nominee, it’s evidently not enough to have U.S. troops stalemated in Iraq and losing ground in Afghanistan. If McCain had his way, we’d be at war with nations stretching from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas. It’s legitimate to wonder where he thinks the Pentagon would find the soldiers.

Definitely not at the “think tanks” where the neoconservative loons who dreamed up this grandiose scheme of world domination hang out, that’s for sure.

Dubious readers should examine a world map. Since 9/11, McCain, who has rarely seen a bombing target he hasn’t liked, has vigorously advocated attacking not only Iraq – a conflict he championed a year before President Bush caught the fever – but also Syria, Iran and North Korea. He has proposed to deal with the Middle East’s 1,300-year-old Sunni-Shiite schism by giving both sides an ultimatum to “stop the bulls**t.”

Now comes his excellent vice-presidential nominee, Alaska’s 1984 Miss Congeniality, to suggest war with Russia in an interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson – a nation whose remote Siberian arctic is dimly visible from the Aleutian Islands. Palin imagines this qualifies her as a foreign-policy thinker. (Yes, she actually said that. Palin has also claimed that a refueling stop in Ireland qualifies as a European visit, and peering across the desert at the Kuwaiti border constitutes a mission to Iraq. So she may think she can see Russia from her tanning bed in the governor’s mansion.) Meanwhile, it’d be interesting to know whether she has heard of Napoleon Bonaparte or Adolf Hitler, who actually tried invading Russia.

Readers who suspect exaggeration are mistaken. Sarcasm, yes; overstatement, alas, no. In the waning years of the American Empire, grandiose bluster about waging war against the theological concept of evil masquerades as “tough.”

Seduced by bombastic slogans like “Global War on Terror,” “shock and awe” and “full-spectrum dominance,” much of the public holds an instinctive belief in the myth of American invincibility that makes sensible election-year discussion of foreign policy impossible. Anything hinting at geopolitical realism draws accusations of cowardice and defeatism from hairy-chested patriots. Don’t I know the world is full of evildoers?

Yes, and I also know that history is replete with the collapse of empires that became overextended militarily and overwhelmed by debt.

Andrew Bacevich defines the problem in his astringent new book “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism” (Metropolitan Books). A West Point graduate and retired U.S. Army colonel, Bacevich teaches international relations at Boston University. Although he is reluctant to talk about it in the context of his book, his son, 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, died serving in Iraq last year.

Bacevich argues compellingly that America’s most dangerous problems begin at home. By “exceptionalism,” he means the myth that the United States won both world wars almost single-handedly due to the innate superiority of our economic system, the American warrior spirit and – people like Palin insist – because we’re uniquely favored by God.

It takes nothing from the heroes of Normandy and Iwo Jima to observe that the gods are always on the emperor’s side. Until they aren’t anymore.

Bacevich basically thinks America has grown fat, dumb and lazy. “The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism,” he writes “has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.”

Borrowing a phrase from historian Charles Maier, he writes that since World War II, the United States has become an “empire of consumption,” instead of production, rendering “Americans ... no longer masters of their own fate.” Where FDR enjoined citizens to make sacrifices, Bush urged them to go shopping and visit Disneyland.

Hence we find ourselves reacting to the insane criminal conspiracy that is Al Qaeda by launching a grandiose, ultimately doomed effort to remake the Middle East by force. Even Gen. David Petraeus’ masterful handling of “the surge” – more a combination of diplomacy, police work and bribery than warfare – has been misinterpreted by McCain as a military triumph enabling the U.S. not to exit Iraq but to go blundering ever wider and deeper into the folly conservatives once derided as “nation building.”

Bacevich endorses neither presidential candidate. Given the decayed state of the Republic, he recently told Bill Moyers, “People run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents.”

Under new leadership, however, there’s some chance of a gradual return to reality. Elect McCain and we’re due for a hard landing.

n Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.

You must be logged in to comment.