Dear Sen. McCain:

Answer this one question for me: when is the last time you met a war you didn’t want to fight or a Middle Eastern conflict (we’ll include Afghanistan in the “Middle East” for this purpose since the issue is the same) you didn’t want America to meddle in? Consider this disastrous history of American intervention:

• The American war in Iraq that you supported was a total disaster that resulted in the destabilization of Iraq and Syria and the larger Middle East and the rise of ISIS.
• American support for anti-Assad rebels that you were in favor of resulted in further weakening Assad and further strengthening ISIS.
• American support for the anti-Soviet but Islamic extremist mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s led directly to the rise of the Taliban that helped launch 9/11 and that we are now still fighting in Afghanistan.
• American support of the anti-Mubarak forces in Egypt (which you favored) during the Arab Spring led directly to the coming-to-power of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, which, thankfully, was deposed by a military coup.
• The American invasion of Libya to depose Qaddafi (which you supported) completely destabilized Libya and led to the rise of extremists there.
• The American overthrow of the democratically elected leftist government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the 1950s and installment of the unpopular Shah in his place led directly to the Islamic Revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his progeny, a problem we are still dealing with today.
• Long-standing, uncritical American military and financial support for Israel, of which you are in favor, has resulted in Arabs and Muslims justifiably hating America and was cited as one of Osama Bin Laden’s main reasons for the 9/11 attacks.
• Long-standing, uncritical American military and financial support for the #1 promoter of extremist Islamic beliefs in the world, viz., Saudi Arabia, of which you are in favor, has made it easier for that nation to fund and export its hard-line approach to Islam throughout the world.

I could go on like this, and extend this to other parts of the world as well, but you have been wrong again and again and again, and America has made mistake after mistake in intervening in conflicts that resulted in making the world less safe for democracy and less safe for American citizens. In the process, we have wasted many trillions of dollars that could have been used to fix the collapsing American healthcare and education systems many times over.

I say these things not as some dyed-in-the-wool liberal but as someone who has a mix of political positions, with many of them ones that would be considered “conservative.” (And, by the way, spending trillions on wasteful foreign wars is not even close to “conservative.”) The reality is that for every one terrorist we stamp out with military force, we create ten new terrorists drawn from the children and ordinary citizens of these bombed and bombarded nations that learn to feel a lifelong antipathy for America and the West as a result of our meddling. We need to fight the hateful ideologies of the Salafi and Wahhabi branches of Islam, but the way to do that is not to bomb them out of existence. You cannot bomb out ideas. That approach just creates martyrs.

The way to win hearts and influence minds is to lead by example, to be a shining beacon for the world, to focus on domestic security, to move toward a sane immigration policy (as President Trump has suggested) where we admit people based on their skills and education rather than family ties (since skilled and educated people don’t generally radicalize, commit crimes and live off public benefits), and to encourage those who are willing to work with us in the Middle East and beyond to solve their own problems rather than to force-feed heavy-handed solutions upon them that wind up backfiring spectacularly over and over again.