When considering the strengths and weaknesses of Sen. John McCain’s presumed Republican presidential candidacy, there are two quotes that merit serious consideration.

The first comes from McCain himself: “We are succeeding in Iraq. I don’t care what anybody says.”

McCain’s straight talk came a day after four American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb, rockets rained over the American-protected Green Zone, and attacks left 61 Iraqis dead nationwide.

The second quote, “It is impossible to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it,” is a classic truism from muckraker Upton Sinclair.

McCain has only ever known war. His campaign’s recent biography tour, or what the campaign calls a “Service to America” tour, highlights his one-dimensional nature. In his stumping, McCain limits himself to a military diet of honor, enduring, overcoming and righteousness. The tour culminated in Prescott, Ariz where McCain asked for a respectful general election.

His campaign is limited to military service. For Republicans right now, that means Iraq—and by extension, Iran.

McCain’s obsession with Iraq illustrates stubbornness and bad judgment, not some kind of crazed warmongering many leading Democrats would have you believe. It’s a malaise affecting the entire Republican party.

McCain’s oversimplified assertion that a tolerant democracy is emerging in Iraq casts a long shadow on the tradition of Arizona politics. Its John Ford legacy of Western frontier independence and unorthodox individualism—one intertwined with McCain’s rise to political prominence–is being suffocated by the albatross of the Iraq war.

McCain’s Senate seat is that of Barry Goldwater. The Goldwater ascendancy in 1964 marked the end of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and moderate Republicanism. Republicans had a hard time thereafter defending the federal government as a good thing.

Carl Hayden, Goldwater’s Democratic predecessor, was a pragmatist of the first order, dealing with the nuts and bolts issues that were necessary for the settling of the American West. He was heavily involved in, if not deserving complete credit for, federal programs on irrigation, power, and the national highway program.

Hayden understood the federal government could yield beneficial results. McCain understood this once, too.

McCain also owes much of his maverick appeal to Arizona liberal Morris K. Udall, an Arizona congressman for 40 years and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.

McCain’s stance on the environment has origins in his partnership with Udall, who was an environmentalist before it was the electorally trendy thing to do. Udall was a leader in campaign finance reform, a cause McCain has also taken up (much to the well-publicized chagrin of his conservative friends).

The Arizona legacy is a core component of McCain’s character. It provides credibility for his independent and maverick political upbringing. It is a biography of pubic service his campaign chose not to showcase in recent weeks.

He may have broken with President Bush’s unilateralism in a speech in Los Angeles, but McCain is a warrior who wants to fight the wrong war. He continues to insist Iraq is the epicenter of Islamic jihadism, not the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan where it festers on the periphery of American public awareness (and thus campaign hot-button topics).

McCain likes to portray the Iraqi central government as a bulwark against Iran. A stable Iraq is necessary to stabilize the region, their thinking goes. McCain and his allies refuse to admit that Iraqi stability will come on Iranian terms.

Surely Iraqi’s are by and large independent from Iran. The two nations have a history of animosity and distrust. But there can be no mistaking that Shiite Iraqi political parties are taking their orders from Iran. This became apparent after the failed siege of Basra last week.

President Bush called the assault into Basra by the central government a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq.” The Pentagon boasted how Iraqi army was doing all the fighting, and how the Iraqi’s standing up was a byproduct of the surge’s success.

But the assault was really just glorified partisan cleansing. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki never consulted with the “democratically elected” parliament before launching, and then personally overseeing, the intervention in Basra. Thus there were democratic protests in Shiite communities in Baghdad and across Southern Iraq.

The ulterior motives are revealed in a study of Maliki’s political coalition. He draws his support from Shiite groups that wanted to marginalize rival Shiite parties before upcoming elections in October.

Rather than the ‘Battle of Basra version 2008’ as a defining moment for a free Iraq, Maliki had the rug pulled out from under him when his coalition sued for a ceasefire. This was a six-day Shiite civil war, and had nothing to do with political reconciliation. It was opposite. And American interests—democracy and liberalism– are the real losers.

The ceasefire was arranged in Iran and aided by the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, dubbed a terrorist organization by recent Republican-led legislation. His insistence on Iraq as the end all be all for American power abroad renders McCain’s objectives hypocritical and out of touch with reality.

This could become clearer when Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, testify on Capitol Hill this week.

McCain’s rise to popularity is owed as much to the pragmatism of the American West as it is a byproduct of McCain’s military service and sacrifice. To overlook one in favor of another is a mistake. But for McCain to allow his military service to usurp and diminish the public service legacy of which he is heir-apparent is a disservice to McCain’s heroism.

He would betray the legacy of Arizona pragmatists. Or maybe his stubborn optimism about Iraqi democracy already has.