The Fatalist

By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
Published: April 12, 2007

Lexington, Va.

In August 2003, John McCain returned from a trip to Iraq and began a campaign to increase the number of troops fighting the insurgency. In the fall of 2005, McCain returned from another trip to Iraq and said it was time to shift strategies — time to protect Iraqi neighborhoods and not run around chasing bad guys.

McCain watched the Bush administration reject his ideas while prospects for victory slipped away. As months stretched to years, he grew angrier at Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for their active arrogance. He grew frustrated with parts of the Pentagon and the State Department for their lack of any sense of urgency. He became exasperated by his friend President Bush, for his elemental failures at statecraft.

But most of all he grew sadder, in a deep way you probably have to be him to understand. He didn’t think he’d see his country slide toward defeat again in his lifetime, and sometimes the melancholy seeps out of him.

“For four years we’ve been screwing this up,” he said yesterday. “Too often we’ve misled the American people with talk of Dead Enders and Mission Accomplished.”

Now the administration has belatedly adopted his recommendations, and he is in the midst of a presidential campaign. In some ways, this campaign is like the one he ran eight years ago. There have been reports of a bloated staff, but in fact the same people who were around him then are around him now: Mark Salter, John Weaver, Rick Davis and a rotating crew of former P.O.W.’s like Orson Swindle who are his conscience and his boon companions.

McCain still has the same likes and dislikes, the same romantic interest in history books and novels, and the same tendency to tell stories from Hanoi Hilton days in a matter-of-fact style you and I might use for a college anecdote.

But other things are different. In 2000, the McCain campaign was an exhilarating ride upward, and then, in South Carolina, a quick, furious descent, as McCain responded with self-destructive anger to the dishonorable tactics he perceived Bush was using against him.

This time McCain has been gradually sliding in the polls, and he has responded not by panicking or by changing, but by surrendering himself to the fates. He’s had a wonderful life, he feels, and if he is not president, it will be no tragedy. At first I thought he was making pre-emptive excuses for a possible defeat, but after observing him closely I concluded this is a fatalism that Navy fliers must often adopt as they go into combat.

And there’s a stubbornness to him now, too, which was not evident on the Straight Talk Express. The atmosphere is much harsher toward him, and you can see the hardness he must have used to resist his Vietnamese jailers.

And most of all there is the war, which looms epic in his mind, making the political jabs that consume campaign days seem trivial. He comes back to the stories all day long: the 19-year-old who already has three Purple Hearts, the kid who was shot through the eye and who got up and walked to the ambulance.

In the shadow of their fighting, he says, he has an obligation to seek victory as long as there is any chance of it. He has a duty, he says, to support the strategy he still believes in, and perhaps ward off the worse cataclysm that would come from chaos and early withdrawal. Far from avoiding this potentially killer issue, he’s embraced it.

He gave a speech at the Virginia Military Institute yesterday that was an extended argument for giving the surge a chance. The problem with his approach is he doesn’t grapple with the psychology and culture of the Iraqis, upon which all else depends. His focus is largely military. But no one can doubt the substance and seriousness of his views.

He’s been consistent and steady these past few years, while others have flickered. He’s been offended by Democrats who laughed and celebrated during the passage of withdrawal legislation. Yesterday he criticized them in a way that was harsh but thoroughly considered.

But in the long run, his embrace of Iraq may not hurt him as much as now appears. In 10 months, this election won’t be about the surge, it will be about the hydra-headed crisis roiling the Middle East. The candidate who is the most substantive, most mature and most consistent will begin to look more attractive and more necessary.