The “Appeasement” Parrots Of The GOP
With the country still struggling to pull itself out of an economic recession, foreign policy has not rated the highest among issues discussed by the Republican presidential candidates. But among those foreign policy issues that have been debated, one has dominated the agenda: Iran. And other than Ron Paul, the candidates have arrived at the same verdict on President Obama’s Iran policy: It is appeasement.
Speaking at a forum last month, the candidates lined up to launch the charge at Obama. “For every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, he [Obama] has had nothing but appeasement,” said former Sen. Rick Santorum. “Internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy,” said former Gov. Mitt Romney. In September, standing alongside hard-line supporters of Israel’s settlements, Texas Gov. Rick Perry similarly condemned the administration’s “Middle East policy of appeasement” — at almost precisely the same moment that Obama was delivering a speech defending Israel at the United Nations and demanding that Iran meet its nuclear treaty. In late December, Newt Gingrich said on an Iowa radio program, “You have an Obama administration who’s dedicated to appeasing our enemies and dedicated to giving away our secrets.”
It’s not a particularly surprising line of attack. “Appeasement,” with its obvious reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938, is probably the single most overworked accusation in the conservative foreign policy lexicon, a free-floating, no-evidence-required assertion of weakness and surrender. The charge has become so unmoored from any actual historical context that many who use it are not even aware of its provenance. During the 2008 presidential campaign, “Hardball’s” Chris Matthews famously humiliated right-wing shout radio jock Kevin James by repeatedly asking what had actually happened at Munich, to which a red-faced James could only repeatedly scream, “Appeasement!”
One can disagree with the Obama administration’s two-track approach of engagement with and pressure on Iran. But to describe that approach as “appeasement” is to declare oneself desperately in need of a dictionary. The Obama administration has overseen the adoption of some of the most stringent multilateral sanctions ever on Iran. It has undertaken unprecedented defense cooperation with regional allies, including the placing of a NATO missile defense radar system in Turkey, to Iran’s continued outrage. And the administration successfully facilitated the appointment of a special U.N. human rights monitor for Iran to track the regime’s continued abuses.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent jaunt through Latin America, intended to combat the perception that Iran is increasingly isolated, was a bust, long on photo ops and statements of solidarity from the likes of Hugo Chavez, but short on actual measures that might help Iran out. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Iranians’ efforts to protect their savings from rampant, sanctions-induced inflation by offloading rials for more stable currencies had gotten so bad that Iranian authorities cracked down on the practice.
There is a legitimate argument to be had over whether the punishing measures taken by the international community will actually push the Iranian government toward a compromise on its nuclear program, which it insists is for peaceful purposes, but about which the International Atomic Energy Agency continues to have troubling unanswered questions. At the very least, though, one would think that enacting such measures would inoculate the administration from the charge of being weak on Iran. But no, some of Obama’s conservative critics have gone so far as to redefine appeasement as simply the act of talking to one’s adversaries, as columnist Charles Krauthammer did when he insisted that the administration’s efforts at negotiations with Iran “did nothing but confer legitimacy on the regime.”
In reality, talks with Iran have served as a force multiplier for other efforts to put pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. As one Israeli defense official told me for an article last year, the Israelis themselves were very skeptical that talks with Iran would have any benefit, but now recognize that the effort “contributed to building international consensus” around the problem. Negotiations have actually done the opposite of conferring legitimacy on the regime — they made clear to the world, and to the Iranian people, that the Iranian government, not the U.S., was the central obstacle to a resolution, thereby facilitating further sanctions. On Monday, Nicholas Burns, the under-secretary of state for political affairs during the George W. Bush administration, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that “Iran is probably more isolated today than the day that President Obama took office.”
Conservative mendacity aside, it’s worth looking at what former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the patron saint of the anti-appeasement crowd, had to say about it. “The word ‘appeasement’ is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy,” Churchill told an audience in 1950. “Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong.” Returning to the theme later that year, he noted that “Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances.”
It should come as no surprise that the views of Churchill the man are quite a bit more nuanced than those of Churchill the Neocon Dashboard Saint, but what might this mean with regard to Iran? It means remembering that, despite the significant self-inflicted setbacks created by our invasion of Iraq, the U.S. is still dealing from a position of considerable strength against a weaker power in Iran. The U.S. has by far the largest military in the world, with an annual defense budget of over $700 billion, while Iran spends around $9 billion per year.
This certainly doesn’t mean that the U.S. should acquiesce to an Iranian nuclear weapon, but it does suggest that the U.S. and its partners should at least consider making explicit what was implicit in the proposed 2009 deal on fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor: a recognition of Iran’s right to domestic enrichment in exchange for the complete satisfaction of the IAEA’s concerns, and a commitment to ongoing verification. At the very least, talks should continue to be pursued in the hope of establishing some line of regular communication between the U.S. and Iran as a way to calm tensions, which are running high over Iran’s provocative threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, and the assassination of another Iranian nuclear scientist.
Finally, as we face a new round of calls for preventive war against Iran, from many of the same people who advocated preventive war against Iraq, it’s very much worth remembering that the Iraq war provided a greater strategic benefit to Iran than any “appeasement” conceivably could. Some of those gains have been lost in recent years, partly as a result of the Arab Spring, partly as a result of the Obama administration’s hard diplomatic work, and partly because of Iran’s own incompetence and belligerence. Clearly, Iran continues to represent a challenge to the U.S. and its interests on a number of fronts, but it’s important to keep that challenge in perspective, and not allow ourselves to be marched into another ruinous military adventure with unforeseeable consequences through the ridiculous idea that anything short of war is “appeasement.”
By: Matt Duss, Policy Analyst , Center for American Progress, Published in Salon, January 20, 2012
“Deep Doo-Doo”: Newt Gingrich’s Surprise Win In South Carolina Panics Republicans
Reactions to Newt Gingrich’s stunning and impressive victory in the South Carolina primary form a symphony. First, of course, we hear the cheers of South Carolina Republicans who have chosen their champion. From Ronald Reagan in 1980 through John McCain in 2008, the winner of this primary has always gone on to be the Republican nominee.
Then, of course, we can hear the buttons popping from Newt Gingrich’s shirt as his ego swells to Macy’s parade size. If you listen carefully, you can hear the soft sobs of Mitt Romney and his consultants, crying in their chocolate milk.
But above it all we can hear the weeping, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth of the Republican establishment as Gingrich’s victory sends them into full-blown panic. I’m not talking about mere fear, nor normal nervousness. Not even the feeling you get when the captain says, “We’ve lost power in one of our four engines.” No, this is worse. Worse even than when your doctor says, “I don’t like the looks of that shadow on the X-ray.”
This is terror. Chest-clutching, breath-sucking, soul-shaking panic. This is your teenage daughter telling you, “I think I’m in trouble.” This is a Turkish border guard pulling you into a holding room when you’ve got a baggie of coke in your pocket. This is what George H.W. Bush famously called “deep doo-doo.”
The Republican Party has never seen anything like it. Republicans are hierarchical, orderly, disciplined—everything the Democrats are not. They nearly always nominate the guy who was runner-up last time: Ford beat Reagan, and Reagan got the next nod. Reagan beat George H.W. Bush, so Bush Sr. got the next turn. And then Bush beat Dole, who in turn was rewarded with the 1996 GOP nod. Then they got all wild and crazy and nominated the son of a former president, but then quickly reverted to form and nominated the guy he defeated, John McCain. And who did McCain beat? Mitt Romney.
As the anointed one, Romney had all the advantages, especially the most important: money. But as the Beatles taught us, money can’t buy you love. Romney and the super PAC that supports him outspent Gingrich and the pro-Gingrich super PAC in South Carolina by a 2–1 margin ($4 million to $2.16 million.)
Gingrich won the South Carolina primary not because of advertising, but rather because of his debate performances. Eighty-eight percent of South Carolina Republicans said the debates were important to making up their minds, and in the two key debates, Gingrich hit every GOP erogenous zone. He scolded Fox News’s Juan Williams when Williams asked him about the dog-whistle language Gingrich uses to stir up racial stereotypes. Williams, the author of Eyes on the Prize, a respected history of the civil-rights movement, knows of what he speaks. But Gingrich knows his party’s base, and the base loves both the coded language and attacking anyone who calls them on it.
But it was Thursday night’s CNN debate that sealed the deal. Going into the debate, Gingrich and Romney were tied in the polls. And each had an important and obvious question they were going to be asked: for Gingrich, it was his ex-wife’s explosive allegation that he had asked for an “open marriage.” For Romney, it was whether he would release his tax returns. Think about it: which question would you rather answer? Mitt had the easier challenge by a mile. Yet Gingrich got a standing ovation by bitterly denouncing moderator John King in particular and the media in general. Romney got booed for his weak, waffling non-answer.
Between now and the Jan. 31 Florida primary, we will hear a furious, frenzied response from the Republican establishment. Team Romney has already spent $7 million on TV ads there—Team Gingrich just $800. Not $800,000. Just 800 bucks. Look for popular former governor Jeb Bush to endorse Romney in the Sunshine State, leading a parade of establishmentarians.
Will Romney’s money and endorsements be able to overwhelm Gingrich’s electrifying debate performances? They weren’t in South Carolina. But Romney has an ace in the hole. The one person who has consistently derailed Newt Gingrich’s political career is Newt Gingrich.
By: Paul Begala, The Daily Beast, January 21, 2012
Newt Gingrich: He Does Scorn And Disgust Better Than Anyone
How did a hypocritical, erratic leader—a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent—win in South Carolina? It’s all about Newt’s disdain.
Speaking to a packed house at Mutt’s BBQ in South Carolina’s Pickens County on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich encapsulated the conviction underlying his campaign. “[W]e frankly disdain the internationalist, secular socialists who would like to change our country,” he said, to applause and hoots of thrilled agreement.
Last night was a resounding victory for disdain. Gingrich may be a sexual hypocrite, an erratic leader, and a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent, but he is an absolute maestro of contempt, and that is what South Carolina wanted.
Look at what turned his electoral fortunes around. It had little to do with his attack on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. I didn’t meet anyone in South Carolina, including Gingrich supporters, who had anything negative to say about Romney’s business record. Instead, the race turned in Gingrich’s favor during the debate on Monday, when Juan Williams asked him whether it might be “insulting” to black Americans to say they should demand jobs and not food stamps, and that poor kids should be put to work as janitors. Gingrich, puffed up with righteousness, went on the offensive. To the crowd, he seemed to be putting Williams in his place. No doubt their hearts pulsed as they imagined him doing the same to Obama.
“Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich retorted. When Williams pressed him on his references to Obama as the “food-stamp president,” the audience booed. Gingrich’s sneering, forceful response about not bowing to the forces of political correctness earned him a standing ovation. After that, his rallies started getting mobbed and his poll numbers soared. Gingrich trounced Romney on Saturday because of how effectively he channeled the Republican base’s apparent conviction that whining racial minorities are enjoying unearned privileges in the benighted Obama age.
Gingrich’s victory is a humiliating defeat for the self-appointed leaders of the Christian right who made a last-minute effort to coalesce behind Rick Santorum. But it’s a victory for the movement as a whole, which forgave Gingrich his marital trespasses because of how effectively he channels its grievances and resentments.
He faithfully champions the notion, central to the religious right, that conservative Christians constitute an oppressed minority. “One of the key issues is the growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites,” he said in his victory speech, revising a frequent theme from his campaign. Conservative evangelicals rallied around the thrice-married moralist: according to a CBS News exit poll, he won 44 percent of the born-again vote, compared with 21 percent each for Romney and Santorum. Fifty percent of voters said that having a candidate who shared their religious beliefs mattered either “somewhat” or a “great deal”—suggesting a disinclination to vote for a Mormon—and they preferred Gingrich overwhelmingly. Unlike in 2008, Christian conservatives proved themselves able to deny the victory to a moderate Republican they distrusted. In doing so, they showed what it is they value most, and it’s not family values. It’s scorn and disgust, which Gingrich does better than anyone.
By: Michele Goldberg, The Daily Beast, January 21, 2012
Newt Gingrich Exploits Politics Of Class And Culture
Conservatives may denounce class warfare, yet by shrewdly combining the politics of class with the politics of culture, Newt Gingrich won his first election in 14 years, humbled Mitt Romney and upended the Republican Party.
He also exposed profound frailties in Romney as a candidate, throwing him badly off-balance on questions related to his personal wealth, business career and income taxes. Unless Romney finds a comfortable and genuine way of talking about his money, he will present President Obama’s team a weakness that they’ll exploit mercilessly. The country is thinking more skeptically about wealth and privilege in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Romney has not adjusted.
Gingrich skillfully set up his opponent to step on the landmine of class by transforming Romney from his self-cast role as a successful businessman into a heartless financier more interested in profits than in job creation.
The conventional view is that Gingrich’s critique of Bain Capital, Romney’s old company, didn’t work because Republicans dislike assaults on “free enterprise,” a phrase Romney still hopes to use as a self-protective mantra. But while Gingrich softened his attacks on Bain, he did so only after creating the context in which Romney was forced to answer query after query about his financial status, and he repeatedly fumbled questions about releasing his tax returns. Romney finally announced Sunday he’d make public his 2010 return and a 2011 estimate this week.
All this allowed Gingrich to draw a class line across South Carolina. Exit polls showed Romney carrying only one income group, voters earning more than $200,000 a year. Voters earning less than $100,000 a year went strongly for Gingrich.
Yet conservative class politics is always inflected by culture and ideology, the potent mix that Pat Buchanan brought to Richard Nixon’s attention four decades ago. South Carolina’s two debates offered Gingrich a showcase for his war on those elites whom the conservative rank-and-file despise.
There was also the matter of race. Gingrich is no racist, but neither is he naive about the meaning of words. When Fox News’ Juan Williams, an African-American journalist, directly challenged Gingrich about the racial overtones of Gingrich’s staple reference to Obama as “the food-stamp president,” the former House speaker verbally pummeled him, to raucous cheers. As if to remind everyone of the power of coded language, a supporter later praised Gingrich for putting Williams “in his place.”
Then came the rebuke to CNN’s John King, who asked about the claim from Gingrich’s second wife that her former husband had requested an “open marriage.” By exploding at King and the contemporary journalism, Gingrich turned a dangerous allegation into a rallying point. Past sexual conduct mattered far less to conservatives than a chance to admonish the supposedly liberal media. Gingrich won evangelicals by 2-1, suggesting, perhaps, a rather elastic definition of “family values” — or a touching faith in Gingrich’s repentance.
With unremitting attacks on Romney as a “Massachusetts moderate,” Gingrich created yet another link between his opponent and elite Yankees loathed by the Southern right. He reaped landslide margins among conservative groups, marginalizing the buttoned-down, less electric Rick Santorum.
There were also hints in exit polling that hostility to Romney’s Mormon’s faith may have added to his troubles, without help from Gingrich. About a quarter of South Carolina’s voters said a candidate’s religious beliefs mattered a “great deal” to them, and Romney secured a scant 10 percent of their ballots.
If there is solace for Romney, it is in the experience of an earlier front-runner. In late March 1992, the day before the Connecticut primary, I found myself standing with a colleague next to Bill Clinton in a coffee shop in Groton. Clinton surprised us by suggesting he would lose the next day to Jerry Brown, now California’s governor. Voters were in an ornery mood, he said, and many of them wanted to declare: “I don’t want this to be over.”
Clinton was right. He lost Connecticut. Yet two weeks later, he swept a series of primaries, including a decisive contest in New York.
Florida, which votes next on Jan. 31, is Romney’s New York. But there is a difference. Clinton was a master campaigner with what has quaintly been called the common touch. Romney has so far proved himself to be more a master of discomfort and unease, especially with his own wealth. Unless he learns how to navigate the country’s new etiquette about financial privilege, Romney will continue to be plagued by the now twice-resurrected Gingrich — and, if he survives Gingrich’s challenge, by a freshly minted populist named Barack Obama.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 22, 2012
Why Newt Gingrich’s “Open Marriage” Request Matters
Here’s the problem with yet another men-behaving-badly story that came out Thursday, the one in which former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne Gingrich, told ABC and the Washington Post that he asked her for permission to have an affair, or as she put it, an “open marriage.” When she refused, he divorced her and hasn’t spoken to her since. And this was after he asked his first wife for a divorce when she was suffering from uterine cancer, in order to marry his second wife. Gingrich said at last night’s debate that the “open marriage” story is false, but given his history of affairs and divorces, Marianne Gingrich’s allegations strike me as credible. Who knows what the truth really is between two people, but if I had to pick, I’d believe Marianne Gingrich’s version over Newt’s version. Her allegations fits with the track record he’s got: you just never know what’s going to come out of his mouth—including asking for an “open marriage.”
Anyway, here’s the problem: most voters don’t think divorce is a deal-breaker when it comes to voting for a candidate. We all know people whose lives have fallen apart and whose marriages have collapsed, for any number of understandable reasons. And frankly, most of us really don’t care about candidates’ personal lives or dating habits. But what voters do object to in an elected official is an attitude of “the rules don’t apply to me.” That’s why we don’t like politicians who don’t pay their taxes, or who hire illegal workers, or who use official funds for personal expenses. It explains the lingering resentment many people had for late Sen. Ted Kennedy after Chappaquidick, for example. And while many misbehaving politicians eventually get caught and punished for their deeds, it’s that arrogance that started it all that gets people so mad.
This also explains why so many people are uncomfortable with the latest revelations about Newt Gingrich’s past. Clearly he doesn’t think the rules apply to him at all. Being a rule-breaker may be a good thing—in terms of innovative solutions, policy proposals, and even campaign decisions that defy conventional wisdom—and Gingrich is certainly that way. But when it comes to questions of character and integrity and doing the right thing, the rules are there for a reason. Too many people in Washington these days put themselves ahead of all else. The number of times Gingrich uses the word “I” is remarkable, and there’s a reason he’s constantly comparing himself to great figures in history. He’s got a grandiosity, an arrogance about him, that is striking. His ego is huge.
If it’s true, there’s a sentence in the Post story that says volumes: “He said the problem with me was I wanted him all to myself,” Marianne Gingrich said. “I said, ‘That’s what marriage is.'” On so many levels, Newt Gingrich doesn’t think the rules apply to him. He’s big, too important, too historic a figure in his own mind, to live by the rules the rest of us do. In that sense, Newt Gingrich will never be one of us.
By: Mary Kate Cary, U. S. News and World Report, January 20, 2012
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