Turn your weaknesses into an asset. This has always been one of Karl Rove’s top campaign strategies, and now that so many of Rove’s workers from the Bush White House are joining the McCain staff, you can see the result. John McCain is loudly portraying his early support of the Surge as one of the main reasons people should vote for him. He reminds us that he was right all along, since everyone knows that the Surge has been a success. He represents the steadfast march towards Victory in Iraq, while Obama, with his strategy to begin withdrawing our troops the minute he becomes president, represents defeat and appeasement of the terrorists. McCain is even repeating his line about being in Iraq for 100 years – with the qualifier that all the killing and injuries will be over much sooner than that.

From a public relations standpoint, the Surge has certainly been a success. American casualties are down to one a day, half of what they were a year ago. The Iraq war has virtually disappeared from newsprint and the airwaves in America. In this respect, McCain can certainly declare we are on the road to Victory.

Victory! What an emotional word, and how irresistible it must be to the average American to hear that Victory is possible in Iraq. It means parades and fireworks and lots of medals for veterans, even if they do have to spend the next 100 years barracked in Iraq. Victory also means that the 4,100 Americans who have died so far in Iraq, and the 25,000 who have suffered serious injury, will have died and suffered for the noble cause of Victory. There will be no meaningless deaths of Americans in Iraq.

Using an emotional tag word like Victory is yet another Karl Rove campaign tactic. He always made sure his campaigns were about narratives of national greatness, and he relied on plenty of emotional pull from patriotism. In this way, the opposition candidate could be portrayed as non-patriotic and un-American, and his supporters as enemies of America.

These Rovian strategies – which are now fully embedded in Republican Party campaigning, and which have a long history trailing back to Lee Atwater, the Nixon southern strategy, and even Joseph McCarthy – are increasingly defining the John McCain campaign. And they are working. While McCain is behind in the overall polling question (which is primarily a function of the economy and the price of gasoline), he is ahead of Obama on the question of who is better able to handle terrorism and the Iraq war. His greatest weakness has been converted into his biggest strength.

The odd thing is, Victory was never possible in Iraq, it isn’t now, and it won’t be in the future. The United States has no enemy in Iraq. Saddam Hussein never posed a threat to the U.S., and the al-Qaeda terrorists, according to the reckoning of the U.S. military, have never counted for more than 2% of the insurgents killed or captured. The fighting that has been going on has been between the Sunnis and Shi’ites, with a mixture of al-Qaeda jihadists and criminals confusing the picture.

The role the U.S. has been playing in Iraq is that of policeman. Theoretically, the U.S. could declare a military victory if it openly sided with the Shi’ites and if they succeeded in extending their control over Baghdad and the rest of the country. The U.S. is in some respects partial to the Shi’ites, in that it backs the al-Maliki government, which is Shi’ite dominated. But al-Maliki is a fickle ally. He hobnobs with Iranian government leaders, and Iran is the last remaining untamed, unrepentant member of Bush’s Axis of Evil. Just this past week al-Maliki told Bush that under no circumstances would Iraq allow attacks on Iran to emanate from U.S. bases in Iraq, and the U.S. wouldn’t even be allowed to use Iraqi airspace for such an attack. These may be absolutely meaningless words because al-Maliki cannot back them up with action, but Iraq has certainly come a long way from the days of Saddam when the U.S. managed the no-fly zones that were off limits to Iraqi warplanes.

The other problem with siding with the Shi’ites is that the U.S. has also been supporting the Sunnis. Some 80,000 Sunni insurgents have laid down their arms (or in this case, IEDs) and have been bought off by the U.S. with weapons, the right to patrol Sunni provinces, and a $3,000 a year salary per man.

The U.S. policing role goes so far as to involve marines and soldiers manning checkpoints in places like Baghdad and Fallujah, where U.S. army engineers have erected miles and miles of concrete walls to isolate the Sunnis and the Shi’ites in their respective neighborhoods.

Victory, therefore, can only mean performing the policeman role with effectiveness, preventing Sunnis and Shi’ites from killing each other where possible, keeping the Kurds satisfied without giving them full independence, and minimizing the number of attacks on the U.S. military personnel performing this policing role.

Exactly how this fits into the long term strategic interests of the United States hasn’t been spelled out by John McCain, except that he anticipates we will play policeman in Iraq for the next century. He never talks about Iraq in terms of energy policy, and maybe that is because even the success of the mighty Surge has done nothing to keep the price of oil down. He doesn’t even admit that we are playing policeman, since he would rather traffic in the emotion-laden images of Victory and Success, and to downgrade our role in Iraq to that of gendarme would be to concede there are no enemies there for the U.S. to defeat.

The good news for John McCain is that Barack Obama hasn’t called him out on these inconsistencies. Obama even toyed this past week with modifying his withdrawal strategy after he meets with the U.S. generals in Iraq this summer. This not only played right into the hands of McCain, who has ridiculed Obama for not visiting Iraq in over two years, it also reminded people of George W. Bush, who long ago handed over Iraq policy to General Petraeus.

Playing policeman in Iraq fits right into the imperial aspects of U.S. foreign policy. It is the sort of role that the foreign policy elite in this country never question, because so far no candidates (other than Ron Paul and Mike Gravel) have dared suggest that these practices are counterproductive to U.S. interests. McCain carries on as if it is perfectly normal for the U.S. to squander about a trillion dollars a year on a U.S. military that has garrisons in hundreds of locations around the globe. Obama says the U.S. should only send troops abroad when vital national interest is at stake, but this generality remains undefined, and he certainly has not yet suggested that there is anything imperialistic about U.S. foreign policy.

John McCain, therefore, gets to define the debating ground. It’s all about Victory on his side, and weakness, defeatism, and appeasement on the Democratic side – exactly like all the elections of the past 50 years. Even if Obama wins the election, his foreign policy will be weighed down with the albatross of surrender and the smell of defeat, because he hasn’t challenged the Republicans, or the foreign policy establishment, on the fundamental principles governing American activities abroad.