McCain: no surrender! For John McCain, critical inquiry stops at the water's edge.

• Author: Welch, Matt

AT THE September 5 Republican presidential debate in Durham, New Hampshire, Arizona Sen. John McCain put forth the Reader's Digest version of his candidacy's rationale: It's the War Against Islamic Extremism, stupid.

"I've spent my life on national security issues," he said. "I know the conflict. I know war. I have seen war. I know how the military works. I know how the government works. I understand national security."

Moments later, he spied an opportunity to show off this superior knowledge and understanding when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had the temerity to inject the word apparently into the phrase "the surge is working." This was five days before Gen. David Petraeus' much-anticipated progress report to Congress.

"Governor, the surge is working," McCain snapped. "The surge is working, sir. It is working."

"That's just what I said," Ronmey protested.

"No, not 'apparently'--it's working," McCain shot back. "It's working because we've got a great general. We've got a good strategy." The next week, McCain set off on a 19-city "No Surrender Tour" to buck up support for the U.S. mission in Iraq.

John McCain's year-long slide in the polls finally reached rock bottom and began to slope upward right around the time he uttered these words. He is running for president on a vow: that at a time of generation-spanning war, only he has the battle-tested gravitas necessary to lead the country. He demonstrates this not by any signs of actually having a plan but by yelling "WE'RE WINNING!" and "WE CAN'T LOSE!" a little louder each day.

This dissonance between serious reputation and simplistic rhetoric isn't just an artifact of trying to wrest a primary nomination from a hawkish party. When it comes to war, McCain is genuinely--and dangerously--uninterested in shades of gray. From Iraq to Vietnam and all the way back to the Philippine Insurrection, the U.S. interventions under the most historical dispute are the ones that interest him the least. He's particularly uninterested in pondering whether they should have been fought in the first place.

In August, McCain and longtime adviser/co-author Mark Salter brought out a book, Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them (Twelve Books). It details the history-making actions of 20 men and women ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Harry Truman. Remarkably, given the subject matter and tide, the classic make-or-break decisions of controversial wars are barely addressed.

So...