So now, below is a bit linking a ThinkProgress piece in which it appears as if John McCain, giving a speach on the heinousness of war, copped someone else’s words.

Not true. As ThinkProgress later acknowledged, it appears as if someone (Adm. Timothy Ziemer) actually pinched McCain’s speech, initially delivered in 2001, recycled last week.

So ThinkProgress was wrong, and so was I.

The speech in question, however, is an interesting one. Fairly eloquent; in it McCain talks of how he hates war:

I detest war.  It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war.

Again; eloquent. The subtext here - and spelled out later in the speech - that despite all this, there are things worth going to war over; there are values to be defended, threats to be addressed.

And that’s as it should be. War cannot always be avoided, should not always be avoided.

At the same time, though, it is and has been pretty clear for some time that John McCain’s foreign policy, in fact, would not be much of a departure - if a departure at all - from the current administration’s line. From “bomb bomb Iran” to the recent “Iran is allied with al Qaeda” nonsense, McCain has in fact demonstrated a rather chilling willingness - one might even say an interest - in waging war, ultimately another pre-emptive war, on Iran.

If in fact that’s the case, if in fact McCain actually desires war with Iran - he’d probably couch it differently, saying that there may be “no choice” but to go to war with Iran, but that’s simply not true - then I can’t help but think that no matter how eloquent his claim to hate war, that he doesn’t actually mean what he said.

We know now that even at a time when the current administration was claiming, publicly, to be doing everything in its power to avoid war in Iraq, it was in fact putting the country on an irreversible path to war; the administration wanted war, at a time it was claiming it wanted peace.

McCain, too, talks about making the world a “better, more peaceful place.” But he - like our current president - seeks peace through war. And I’m sorry; that’s just a non-sequiter, and a bloody one at that.

If you truly want peace then your conditions for peace cannot be that other nations do everything we demand, or else. If war is to be avoided then it should be avoided even when it it seems the easy option, when in fact it seems the preferable option; it should only be waged when it is truly the last option. And in Iraq, that simply was not the case. McCain talks like it may be the case with Iran.

But then the right-wingers wouldn’t vote for him in that were truly the case, would they?