Rhetorical Analysis Qualitative

For my Op-Ed piece I chose to read “We Need a Strategy for the Middle East,” by John McCain. The article was published on October 24th, 2017 and basically outlines the current situation in the Middle East and John McCain’s opinion on how we should proceed. For the majority of the article, McCain goes through and explains every conflict going on in the Middle East. To start he informs the reader of recent attacks on our Kurdish allies by Iranian backed Iraqi militia forces, some armed with US weapons and training. This problems specifically troubles McCain because he sees the Kurds as our most valuable ally in the Middle East. McCain continues to highlight the fact that the Assad Regime has retaken most of Syria with Russia's help and that the …show more content…
When everything is laid out in front of you like it was in McCain’s writing it really shows how many issues there are that we need to deal with. The stance that McCain takes in this piece is predictably conservative, however he is not overly critical of the Obama Administration and only takes shots at the president a couple times throughout the article. Overall, I would say that this Op-Ed does have a conservative bias because it is written by John McCain and he hints that the best move would be to send more troops into the Middle East, which is a very conservative viewpoint. In addition, McCain does criticize Obama’s decision to pull troops out of the Middle East and blames his administration for leaving such a mess. This being said, I do think that McCain was very fair in his assessment of the situation. The piece simply states facts and towards the end McCain gives his opinion and some suggestions on how to solve the problem. I found it surprising that there weren't more shots at the liberals as it seems that McCain thinks that the withdrawal of troops is what caused all the turmoil in the Middle