The presidency is no place to resolve the emotional baggage of your youth

We've already seen what happens when we have a president who has massive issues with his father. George W. Bush has demonstrated a combination of extreme need for his father's approval and love, combined with a strong resentment of his father for clearly favoring his younger brother Jeb and a need to show that he can be more successful than his father. Bush has played out his family baggage on the world stage in every facet of his presidency, from spurning the old man's advisors to invading a country that did nothing to us, because in his eyes, the old man didn't have the balls to see the Iraq conflict of 1991 through to the end. It was one thing when George W. Bush, a lifetime screwup, was drilling dry holes in Texas or running businesses fueled by the money of his father's friends, into the ground. But then he was given the entire country to play with, and true to form, he's run it into the ground -- and destroyed another country, Iraq, as a bonus.

Do we really think that another president who has unresolved issues from his youth is going to be able to fix this mess?

The conventional wisdom about John McCain is that he comes from a long line of distinguished military men, and with a strong sense of duty and patriotism, decided to continue this noble tradition. The truth, however, makes him sound more like the current occupant of the White House -- a legacy admission with a distinct ambivalence about carrying on a family tradition:

Following in his fathers' wake, McCain sets course for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, the class of 1958.

Sen. McCain: It was always a certainty that I was going to go to the Naval Academy as my father and grandfather had before me. Not that I didn't' want to go to the Naval Academy, but my sort of resentment that it was a preordained kind of an operation.

At first he enjoys the physical challenge of basic training.

But McCain refuses to submit to the rigid discipline and often humiliating hazing rituals. He spends the next four years fighting the system.

Sen. McCain: I viewed it as a competition, to see how much I could get away with, and at the same time remain at the school, a very careful balancing act [laughs].

While most midshipmen are towing the line, McCain spends much of his four years crossing it. Partying is becoming his trademark.

Frank Gamboa, Naval Academy Classmate: If you went to a party with John, you were going to party right until the absolute last man coming racing back to the Naval Academy just before the end of curfew [laugher]. So if you didn't want to live on the edge, then you never went to a party with John McCain.

Sen. McCain: We had incredible enjoyable times with each other, and of course our constant search for female companionship consumed a great deal of our time as well. Not to mention the time we spent trying to illegally consume alcoholic beverages So, it was fun.

With bad grades and a rash of discipline demerits, McCain comes perilously close to flunking out of the academy.

But McCain hangs on, barely. In May 1958, with President Eisenhower himself passing out diplomas, McCain graduates, fifth from the bottom of his class.

Sen. McCain: President Eisenhower had asked to see the anchorman, the person who had finished at the bottom of the class. I remember at the time regretting a bit that I hadn't done a little worse so that I would have gotten to go up and shake hands with the president.

That McCain wasn't the rigid-backed tightass of his legend is largely because of his reputation as a war hero after enduring five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. But while we can argue about whether this makes him a hero or a victim, we cannot ignore that Vietnam is still the prism through which he views his role in the world. George W. Bush saw Iraq as either a way to vindicate himself to his father, or a way to prove that his penis was bigger than that of his father. John McCain sees Iraq, and gaining the presidency so he can preside over the Iraq War, as his way of finally winning the Vietnam War and putting his own demons to rest.

Mark Benjamin, at Salon:

In a major national security speech delivered last week, John McCain invoked his experience in Vietnam to explain his support for a significant U.S. troop presence in Iraq for as long as it takes to prevent a wider catastrophe in the region. "I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are," the former POW said in an address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. "But I know, too, that we must pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later."

But the truth is that it's always about Vietnam for John McCain. He has invoked avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam with a sort of religious fervor in every important debate about dispatching U.S. troops since he first entered Congress in 1983. As he put it in an Aug. 18, 1999, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he studies "every prospective conflict for the shadow of Vietnam." In fact, a look at his record shows that he subjects every major foreign-policy decision to a Vietnam-derived test similar to the famed Powell doctrine, a test summed up by the McCain quote, "We're in it, now we must win it."

So entrenched are those lessons that McCain sounds, at times, like he wishes they could be applied retroactively. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said at a speech on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 5, 2003. And for that reason, it might be advisable to take him at his word when he says he'll stay in Iraq for 100 years. Whether Vietnam is the prism through which he judges national security decisions, or the rationale he uses to explain whatever position he decides to take -- and even if the lessons he says he's learned from Vietnam often seem contradictory -- he has applied his Vietnam test to Iraq and come up with the decision to stay.

It isn't as though McCain has viewed every military conflict through this "must-win" prism. He voted against Ronald Reagan's plan to keep American troops in Lebanon in 1983. He had concerns about the first Gulf War. But whether it's because of the sacrifice to his honor that sucking up to George W. Bush for the last eight years, or because of his primal need to win the Vietnam War, he has developed a blind spot where Iraq is concerned.

It's time we put a stop to allowing these men to resolve their issues with their families by putting the blood of other people's children on the line.