“I know how to win wars,” Sen. John McCain said during a recent campaign speech. The immediate question that came to my mind was, “What wars have you won?”

With all due respect for his suffering as a POW in the Vietnam War and his longtime service as a Republican senator from Arizona, McCain has never won a war.

Nevertheless, such a statement from the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States deserves to be attended to and wondered about by the people and the news media.

It wouldn’t hurt for scholars and educators to wonder about it either, especially teachers of political science, American history and the histories of Western Civilization, Asia and the Middle East, etc.

This is America, 2008, not ancient Rome, and McCain is not Julius Caesar; but yet this is the standard that he unfurls as a serious reason to elect him president and follow him, as the new commander-in-chief, up the hill to victory and a better, safer America, because he knows “how to win wars.”

McCain’s claim not only says a good deal about his thinking and his judgment, it sheds an even brighter light on the thinking and judgment of the American people at this time in our history, at least that half that agrees with him when it comes to the issue of war and peace.

These people are just as serious in their agreement with McCain as McCain himself is in his belief that he knows how to win wars. If it were not for their predisposal to cheer such a straight-talking brag, he would never have made it. He may not be an intellectual on the level of a John F. Kennedy, but he’s not a country pumpkin that just fell off the watermelon truck when it comes to politics either, or he wouldn’t be the Republican candidate for president of the United States. Give him his due; he’s come a long way from the days when he was a POW to being one step away from the most powerful office in the world.

To make it, he will need as much help as he can get. All those millions who still believe that the Vietnam War was necessary and that we could have won it, if the government had let us, will back him 100 percent, no doubt. He’s offering them a chance to have it proved, that any American war is a good one and can be won if we just stick with it, regardless of how much blood and treasure and suffering is required, even if it means declaring more wars, under the argument that they are more important wars and necessary to help us win these wars and provide security for our country.

He will certainly get the backing of all the Christian fundamentalists who are almost biting at the bit for Armageddon to get here; and all those who find no fault with us conquering the world, one nation at a time, for the sake of the Lord, freedom and Democracy, and to carry out the natural law of the survival of the fittest, and to protect our national interests, praise God. To underestimate McCain would be to underestimate the stupidity of about half of America.

Not that the other half is that much brighter, but at least it has come to believe that the Iraq War was not a good idea and that it’s time to end it and tread forward a little more lightly in the world. At least that’s a start in the right direction. The problem is that you have the other half of America wanting to go in the other direction. But that’s the ballgame and the way our Democracy works, like a tug of war, literally these days. War, or not so much war? You decide.

And so we have McCain coming out and saying, “I know how to win wars.” Time will tell whether it was one of the dumbest statements ever made by a presidential candidate or one of the smartest. Surely it will go down in history and be taught to future generations of schoolchildren as one of the most wondrous and curious claims to ever come out of the mouth of a presidential candidate since this country was founded.

From his speeches, it appears that he is making his claim as a winner of wars based on the “surge,” which he believes worked and turned the war around, thereby proving that he knows how to win wars because he supported the surge even before President George W. Bush did, according to him, while his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, was against the surge and has been against the Iraq War from the beginning.

As to whether the surge actually turned the war around, allowing for a reduction in a soldier’s deployment time from 15 months to 12 months and a gradual drawdown of troops in the not-too-distant future, as Bush promises, it may not turn out to be the slam-dunk that McCain thinks, so much as playing politics in the same old-fashioned way that got us into Iraq in the first place.

The one insurmountable fact that will remain regardless of who is elected president is that no nation of people will ever stop fighting for their homeland until the invading force no longer occupies their homeland, regardless of how many surges are thrown at them or how many troops.

We’ve been at war in Iraq since 2003 and we’ve been at war in Afghanistan since 2001. During this same period we’ve been engaged in another war for the history books, the War on Terror, which we’ve used as an all-encompassing pass to invade any country that we please and jail and torture any individual that we catch in the net that we’re using to fish for terrorists.

It has not yet dawned on the American majority that terrorism is not really a nation of people but a tactic that has been used since the beginning of warfare and will always be used for as long as small groups and large armies collide. Calling them unlawful combatants is ridiculous. Especially when we allow ourselves to engage in illegal war at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians having to give up their lives as collateral damage, not to mention our own losses in terms of death, blood and treasure; and the fact that we have created most of these “unlawful combatants” through our military actions in their homelands.

It is against this foolish backdrop on the part of the American people as a whole that allowed McCain to go down in history as the first presidential candidate ever to make the claim that he knows how to win wars. This is the way that politics is played. The candidate that is able to capture the mood and beliefs of the majority wins.

What America really needs is for a presidential candidate to come on the scene boasting that they know how to win peace, and then coming straight out and explaining how they mean to do it — such as withdrawing immediately from Iraq and Afghanistan and leaving all sovereign nations, including Iran, alone and free to conduct themselves in the manner they see fit.

We can no longer afford to see ourselves as the teacher and other nations as students under our thumb, to be trained with big carrots and big sticks. Who died and made us boss? You want peace? Learn how to make peace and live in peace. Respect your neighbors across the ocean and around the world, the way you would like to be respected.

Perhaps, because of the political climate of America — which is to say the mood and inclination of the majority — this was not the time for a truly enlightened peace candidate to emerge; but at least the Democrats have offered up a candidate that has a better chance of getting us out of Iraq than McCain.

There is that hope that if Obama wins and is able to get us out of Iraq fairly quickly, he might come to realize that it would be just as easy to pull the other boot out of the quagmire of Afghanistan and leave it to those people to decide the type of government that they are willing to live under, based on the fact that we didn’t take them to raise and it is their inalienable right and duty to work out their own destiny.

Maybe, if given time and the political climate for war begins to cool, it may someday dawn on Obama that America needs to change its mindset regarding war and peace, and accept the fact that the days of settling differences between nations through violence, big sticks and big carrots are a thing of the past and must be discarded and replaced by more enlightened methods such as mutual respect, equality and working together for the good of all nations and the human family.

Whether America votes for more war or less war in the 2008 presidential election, there will still come a day of reckoning, eventually, if we can keep living, when the people will have had a bellyful of it and will want, as a simple matter of survival, an enlightened person with a wide and intelligent vision of peace and how to bring it about as president of the United States.

Such a person has not made themselves known yet, but then neither has the majority of Americans shown themselves to be open to such a wild concept as peace through peace instead of peace through punishment, violence and war. Old habits are hard to break and changing our thinking is not so easy as changing our oil.

But a change from war to peace will have to come eventually, if we are to be counted among the survivors of the fittest. There will come a day when fitness will not be measured in terms of power and military might but by the compassion of our hearts and the quality of our character and our ability to not only believe that peace is possible but an absolute necessity in order for the human race and other major life forms to continue to exist on into the 21st Century.

Naman Crowe, a Vietnam veteran, began his award-winning journalism career in 1971. He has written for numerous publications. He can be reached at namancrowe@yahoo.com.