Sen. John McCain has a knack for getting his picture taken with the strangest characters. Though his support for US interventionism is steadfast, does he even know what he is getting himself into when he travels overseas?
In the above photograph, we see Sen. McCain, along with his neocon sidekick Sen. Lindsey Graham, cavorting with his good friend Abdelhakim Belhadj. When McCain was cheerleading for the US attack on Libya, Belhadj was among those he promoted as offering the promise of a democratic Libyan future. But Belhadj was at the time a founder of the “Libya Dawn,” which was a group of Islamic militia forces tied to al-Qaeda in Libya. Did Senator McCain overlook his Libyan friend’s ties with al-Qaeda in his zeal to see Gaddafi overthrown or did he simply not know about it?
But that’s not even half of it! We now learn that Senator McCain’s friend Abdelhakim Belhadj has been promoted from an al-Qaeda operative to his current position as the head of ISIS in Libya!
Last year alone, McCain “distinguished” himself by being photographed with both Islamist extremists in Syria and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. His hat trick should really call into question his claimed expertise in foreign policy matters.
So is it just the incompetence of the Senator and/or his staff that keeps leading him to such embarrassing photo-ops? Perhaps the Senator is just that easy to hoodwink with a few well-rehearsed lines about love of democracy, apple pie, tolerance, and puppy dogs?
Even the most charitable interpretation of McCain’s habitual photo-gaffes would bolster the non-interventionist argument. If even the “experts” like John McCain can be so easily fooled into supporting genuinely bad actors, does that not argue most strongly that picking and choosing sides in overseas conflicts is simply an exercise in futility?
To date McCain has not explained his strange friendship with Abdelhakim Belhadj. Will any among the obsequious political talk show hosts in our free and diverse mainstream media have the temerity to question him about the bad crowd he habitually finds himself amidst?
