As I leafed through the pages of The McCain Doctrines, several thoughts occurred to me.

There’s an old-fashioned belief that military veterans make for good presidents, though the historical evidence to support that is fairly thin. George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt were exceptions, not the rule. Most ranged from US Grant’s weak presidency to Eisenhower’s average one. Lincoln’s 77 days of utilitarian military service was hardly useful to his development of a worldview, while Jefferson, Madison, FDR, or others considered to be our greatest presidents graduated from no military front line service.

The history’s even thinner for military veterans whose heroism was not in battle but in captivity, where John McCain’s refusal to accept favoritism as an admiral’s son and his rudeness towards his captors gained him pain and torture. One can admire his egalitarian attitude and courage of 35 years ago, but as battle-tested strategy or for perspective about the potential gains and limits of warfare, that yields nothing for a potential president beyond a simple lesson: endure.

Which seems to sum up his current approach to Iraq: endure. Till it ends. The outcome of that former conflict hardly fit the definition of a victory for either side, other than the relief one side gained when foreign troops left its soil for the first time in many decades.

The great stumbling block in the GOP foreign policy now adopted by McCain continues to be an obsessive compulsion to refight Vietnam. ‘If only we had’ is a backwards looking approach to an entirely different war that encompasses far more than the civil war between political ideologies that drove the Vietnamese and its superpower provocateurs. Iraq’s theological splits, its tribal and family distinctions, its highly valued source of economic treasure (oil), its culture and history differ greatly from Vietnam’s. The only real commonality is that both nations are comprised of humans which means they’ll share some human instincts. Like the nationalistic one that foreign troops leave their soil so they can achieve some measure of self-determination. And the one that McCain gained: endure, till it’s over.

That’s not to say there weren’t real lessons to be gained from Vietnam. Define the goals at the outset clearly so success can be properly measured. Determine if the proper manpower and military resources exist to achieve that success. Apply them at those levels. Rally the country to the cause and maintain that public support. And keep the public involved via shared sweat and/or sacrifice.

At every step of this war, those lessons have been ignored or abandoned, or adopted too late to regain enough lost ground. And chief among those is the failure - even now - to define exactly what victory is.

Getting rid of Saddam? Done. Eliminating WMDs? Done previously by Bush the elder and Clinton and UN inspectors. But with every gained triumph, the goalposts have been moved back to someplace else, something mysterious and enlarged and evasive. Either our political leaders don’t really have a clear goal in mind or they continue to refuse to spell it out because they don’t believe Americans will accept it as a laudable goal worth the cost.

Is it any wonder that the GOP has to flop about offering fresh rationales for continuing a conflict if (a) they’re improvising till something feels right about an outcome that might happen if we stick around and stumble over it, or (b) they refuse to tell us the truth no matter what?

McCain’s experience, to endure - or if you prefer, to persevere - is all he’s offering if we elect him. That’s not a real strategy, there’s no visible goalpost beyond the rather lame one he’s offered: till US troops are no longer dying there.

That can be achieved by bringing them home.

What never gets mentioned, in considering the past of Vietnam or the present of Iraq, is the non-American perspective. What did most Vietnamese want and what were they willing to endure? Our society no longer wanted to persevere well before it lost 58,000 troops. Theirs endured the loss of a million or two million people and they still wanted freedom from the colonialism of the French and American forces.

The desire for self-determination and nationalism never was defeated in Vietnam despite the extraordinary losses they endured. Can that lesson be applied to Iraq? Only by those who learned it.

Perseverance in selecting some lessons and ignoring others is not a winning strategy. Real wisdom requires the capacity to accept the uncomfortable lessons along with the easy ones.

Senator McCain gained medals and respect for his courage thirty five years ago, which was fitting and proper. But he has not earned the presidency on the basis of anything he gained that can be applied to a resolution of the Iraq War. He is aware that Bush’s call to the nation to ‘go shopping’ after 9-11 was not the right signal to send the country and shared sacrifice requires more than a president giving up golf. But beyond a notion of what doesn’t work, he still can’t define what the real goals are and how to achieve them, except to persevere.

American lives and Iraqi lives are worth far more than that, be it clueless or deliberately dishonest. And no political or military strategist has ever found a way to regain public support that has already been lost. History can teach us a lot, but it can’t provide an example of something that’s never occurred before. And unfortunately for all, John McCain and most of the GOP remain stuck on recreating past history instead of learning how the old can be applied to the present day.

In Iraq and in the war against modern terrorist organizations, the past must be considered and the future planned for with foresight and innovation. And today must be faced as it is, not as it could be ‘if only.’