Josh Marshall is right to attack McCain's attempt to bamboozle the Corporate Media (and voters) into believing there is no difference between Obama and McCain on Iraq.

We have two candidates with starkly different positions. Barack Obama is for an orderly and considered withdrawal of all US combat forces in Iraq, a process he says he will begin immediately upon taking office. John McCain supports a permanent garrisoning of US troops on military bases in Iraq -- a long-term 'presence' which he hopes will require a constantly-diminishing amount of actual combat and thus an ever-diminishing toll in American lives.

This is, I believe, a fair and even generous description of each candidate's essential position. And the recital makes the key point clear: McCain's position is squarely on the wrong side of public opinion -- in fact, to an overwhelming degree.

Yes, McCain is overwhelmingly on the wrong side of the Iraq issue. And yes, that is forcing McCain to try to bamboozle the media and the voters.

But the question Marshall doesn't ask is: why is McCain so inalterably committed to a permanent occupation of Iraq?

This isn't an idle question. A bamboozlement campaign can succeed if voters don't grasp the motive behind the bamboozlement.

When Marshall stopped Bush's Social Security bamboozlement campaign dead in its tracks, he helped voters understand the simple reasons why Bush was so determined to privatize Social Security. The first reason was greed: Wall Street wanted to play with everyone's retirement money. The second reason was ideology: Republicans wanted to destroy the most successful program created by liberal Democrats, because the success of Social Security remained a permanent obstacle to the core conservative Republican "idea," as expressed by Ronald Reagan: Government Is The Problem, Not The Solution.

McCain's motives for wanting to occupy Iraq forever are equally simple: Oil and Empire.

Anyone who hasn't figured out by now that the primary reason for invading Iraq was oil is a fool. Dennis Kucinich tried to point this out before the war, but Saint Timmeh attacked him and the rest of the Corporate Media censored him. But now, even Alan Greenspan, Ted Koppel, and Scott McClellan now admit it! And in June, we got the final proof in the form of no-bid contracts for Exxon-Mobil and other western oil giants.

The motive of Empire is closely related to Oil, and has been for decades. Obviously most of our military ships and all of our military planes and tanks depend on oil; we cannot invade other countries without it. But our entire Economy also depends on Oil that is affordable, as we see in each day's bad economic news. Unless we control one of the world's major oil spigots - and hence the price of oil - our economy will be subject to those who do.

Beyond Oil, our Empire depends on a network of strategic alliances that favor us over our chief superpower rival, China. Our chief allies in the Middle East are Israel and Saudi Arabia, but their regional hegemony is threatened by the rise of Iran as an economic and military power. To keep Iran perpetually in fear of a surprise U.S. attack, our Empire requires large military bases in the region, especially in Iraq.

So this is McCain's dirty little secret: he wants to keep our troops in Iraq forever because of Oil and Empire.

In fact, McCain's goals aren't a secret to anyone who has researched his ideology. McCain admits he is ill-informed about economic issues, but he admits no inferiority on strategic military thinking, on which he was weaned as the son and grandson of admirals. As John Judis wrote,

McCain also acquired from his father a particular view of American power. The elder McCain admired the British Empire and conceived of the United States playing an analogous role in world affairs. In 1965, he commanded the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, which blocked a previously ousted government--one that the Johnson administration believed was too friendly with Fidel Castro--from regaining power. The invasion was unpopular in both the United States and the Dominican Republic; but, afterwards, McCain's father said, "People may not love you for being strong when you have to be, but they respect you for it and learn to behave themselves when you are."

McCain's unhappy experience in Vietnam made him question U.S. imperialism, but our quick victory over Iraq in the first Gulf War converted him back to imperialism:

Haunted by the American defeat in Vietnam, McCain had been reluctant to see troops deployed abroad. But his brother Joe says that the American victory in the first Gulf war restored the senator's confidence in U.S. power, allowing him to again contemplate military interventions. "Once the chess pieces were back on the board, then he thought he would play chess," Joe McCain says. 

And then he became a puppet of the Neocons:

McCain began reading The Weekly Standard and conferring with its editors, particularly Bill Kristol. Kristol is predictably modest about his influence on the Arizona senator, although he acknowledges, "I talked to McCain on the phone and compared notes." But when McCain wanted to hire a new legislative aide, his chief of staff, Mark Salter--himself a former aide to neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick--consulted with Kristol, who recommended a young protege named Daniel McKivergan. Marshall Wittmann, one of Kristol's closest friends, became a key adviser during McCain's presidential campaign. Randy Scheunemann, who had drafted the Iraq Liberation Act and was on the board of Kristol's Project for a New American Century, became McCain's foreign policy adviser. One person who has worked closely with Kristol says of Kristol and McCain, "They are exceptionally, exceptionally close." 

In the runup to the invasion of Iraq, McCain became the biggest booster of Ahmed Chalabi, who suckered the U.S. into Iraq by peddling lies to Judith Miller and the Pentagon Post.

One of his key backers has been John McCain, who was one of the first patrons of Chalabi’s grand-sounding International Committee for a Free Iraq when it was founded in 1991. McCain was Chalabi’s favored candidate in the 2000 election since Chalabi knew that he would be able to free up the $97 million in military aid plus millions pushed through in Congress and earmarked for Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, but held up by the Clinton State Department.

And when Americans figured out the invasion was based on lies and our troops needed to come home, McCain became the biggest booster of the Neocon "surge."

As Marshall points out in the specific context of Iraq, McCain's broader views on Oil and Empire are completely at odds with the views of the American people, so he has to keep them a dirty secret.

But bloggers don't have to, so we should expose McCain's dirty little secret throughout this campaign.