“Paying For Bush’s 2003 Invasion Of Iraq”: Decision To Launch An Unwarranted Invasion Is Directly Responsible For The Chaos Today
As President Obama struggles to deal with the crisis in Iraq, it’s useful to remember who gave the world this cauldron of woe in the first place: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Their decision to launch a foolish and unwarranted invasion in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein and destroying any vestige of the Iraqi state, is directly responsible for the chaos we see today, including the rapid advance of the well-armed jihadist militia that calls itself the Islamic State.
Bush has maintained a circumspect silence about the legacy his administration’s adventurism bequeathed us. Cheney, however, has been predictably loud and wrong on the subject of, well, just about everything.
“Obama’s failure to provide for a stay-behind force is what created the havoc we see in Iraq today,” Cheney told CNN last month. “When we left, Iraq was a relatively stable place. We defeated al-Qaeda, we had a coalition government in place.”
Cheney predicted “the history books will show” that Obama bears much responsibility for squandering the peace and stability that the Bush administration left behind. If so, they will have to be books that don’t go back very far.
Let’s review what actually happened. The U.S. invasion toppled a Sunni dictatorship that had ruled brutally over Iraq’s other major groups — the Shiite majority and the ethnic Kurds — for decades. It seems not to have occurred to anyone planning the invasion that long-suppressed resentments and ambitions would inevitably surface.
The leader of that “coalition government” Cheney mentioned, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, turned out not to be a Jeffersonian democrat. Rather, his regime acted quickly and shamelessly to advance a Shiite sectarian agenda — and to marginalize Sunnis and Kurds.
What followed, predictably, was anger and alienation among the disaffected groups. The Kurds focused largely on fortifying their semi-autonomy in the northeast part of the country. Sunni tribal leaders twice cast their lot with violent Sunni jihadist forces that stood in opposition to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad — first with al-Qaeda in Iraq and now with the Islamic State.
Obama opposed the U.S. invasion and occupation from the beginning. He was nominated and elected president largely because of his pledge to end the war. He withdrew all U.S. troops only after Maliki refused to negotiate a viable agreement to leave a residual force in place.
Could Obama have found a way to keep more of our soldiers in Iraq if he really wanted to? Perhaps. But this would have required trusting Maliki, who has proved himself a far more reliable ally to the terrorist-sponsoring government of Iran than to the United States. And anyway, why would U.S. forces be needed to keep the peace in the “relatively stable” democratic Iraq of Cheney’s hazy recollection?
As I write, Maliki has barricaded himself inside Baghdad’s Green Zone and is refusing to leave office, despite that Iraq’s president has named a new prime minister. The United States has joined with respected Iraqi leaders to try to force Maliki out, but he holds enormous power — he is not only prime minister but also heads the Iraqi armed forces and national police.
Rewind the clock. If there had been no U.S. invasion, Iraqis surely would have suffered grievously under Saddam’s sadistic rule. But at least 110,000 Iraqis — and perhaps several times that many — died violently in the war and its aftermath. Is it likely that even the bloodthirsty Saddam would have matched that toll? Is it conceivable that the Islamic State’s ad hoc army would have even been able to cross the Syria-Iraq border, much less seize huge tracts of territory and threaten religious minorities with genocide?
Even after the invasion, if the U.S. occupation force had worked to reform the Iraqi military rather than disband it, there would have been a professional army in place to repel the Islamic State. If Maliki had truly acted as the leader of the “coalition government” that Cheney describes, and not as a glorified sectarian warlord, Sunnis likely would have fought the Islamic State extremists rather than welcome them.
Why is Obama intervening with airstrikes in Iraq and not in Syria, where the carnage is much worse? My answer would be that the United States has a special responsibility to protect innocent civilians in Iraq — because, ultimately, it was our nation’s irresponsibility that put their lives at risk.
Obama’s cautious approach — ask questions first, shoot later — may or may not work. But thanks to Bush and Cheney, we know that doing things the other way around leads to disaster.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 11, 2014
“Where She Always Was”: Everyone Suddenly Remembers That Hillary Clinton Is A Foreign Policy Hawk
There are few things the political press loves more than an intra-party squabble, so it wasn’t surprising that when Hillary Clinton gave an interview to The Atlantic about foreign policy that offered something less than fulsome support for everything Barack Obama has done, it got characterized as a stinging rebuke. The Post’s Chris Cillizza described her “slamming” Obama. The New York Times said the “veneer of unity…shattered.” “Hillary slams Obama for ‘stupid’ foreign policy,” said an absurdly misleading New York Post headline (she never called anything Obama did “stupid”).
If you actually read the interview, you’ll see that Clinton actually didn’t “slam” Obama (even Jeffrey Goldberg, who conducted the interview, overstates the disagreement in his report on it). She was careful not to explicitly criticize the administration, even when she was articulating positions that differed from what Barack Obama might believe. But there were clear indications that Clinton will be staking out a more hawkish foreign policy than the president she served as Secretary of State, on issues like Iran and Syria.
That isn’t because of some cynical calculation, or because she wants to “distance” herself from a president whose popularity is currently mediocre at best. It’s because that’s what she sincerely believes. If people didn’t have such short memories, they wouldn’t be surprised by it. Hillary Clinton has always been a liberal on social and economic issues, but much more of a moderate (or even a conservative) when it comes to foreign policy.
From the moment Clinton began forging her own distinct political identity in her run for Senate in 2000, it was clear she was a hawk on foreign affairs and defense, placing herself in the right-leaning half of the Democratic party. She wasn’t looking to slash military spending or avoid foreign interventions. Look at how the National Journal ranked her on foreign affairs during her time in the Senate (the NJ rankings are idiosyncratic, but they have the benefit of examining foreign affairs distinct from other issues):
- 2001: 28th most liberal senator
- 2002: 28th most liberal
- 2003: 15th most liberal
- 2004: 42nd most liberal
- 2005: 30th most liberal
- 2006: 36th most liberal
- 2007: 19th most liberal
- 2008: 40th most liberal
When Clinton ran for president in 2008, the primary issue distinction between her and Barack Obama was that she had supported the Iraq War, while he had opposed it. There was no issue that made more of a difference in the primaries. Even as Secretary of State, while carrying out the President’s policies, in private she counseled more aggressive moves. As Michael Crowley wrote in January, “As Secretary of State, Clinton backed a bold escalation of the Afghanistan war. She pressed Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, and later endorsed air strikes against the Assad regime. She backed intervention in Libya, and her State Department helped enable Obama’s expansion of lethal drone strikes. In fact, Clinton may have been the administration’s most reliable advocate for military action.”
As we move toward the campaign, it’s likely that liberals are going to start finding reasons to be displeased with Clinton on foreign policy. In the Atlantic interview, for instance, they discuss the Gaza situation at some length, and she practically sounds like a spokesperson for the Netanyahu government, putting all the blame for the conflict and all the casualties squarely on Hamas, while refusing repeated opportunities to say Israel has done anything wrong at all.
Over the next two years there will probably be more situations in which Clinton winds up to the right of the median Democratic voter. That would be more of a political problem if she had a strong primary opponent positioned to her left who could provide a vehicle for whatever dissatisfaction the Democratic base might be feeling. But at the moment, there is no such opponent. Her dominance of the field may give her more latitude on foreign affairs — not to move to the right, but to be where she always was. Neither Democrats nor anyone else can say they didn’t see it coming.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 12, 2014
“Why The GOP Should Tank The Midterms”: The “Party Of No” GOP Does Not Want To Actually Govern
Several statistical models used to forecast the midterm elections give the Republican Party a better-than-even shot at seizing the Senate.
This should terrify Republicans.
Look into Speaker John Boehner’s exasperated eyes and think about how much he has suffered the last two years trying to contain his tea–crazy Republican caucus. Now double it. Then add an extra dose of Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. And then take away the ability to blame Harry Reid for the failure to get any Republican bills passed in the Senate.
Add it all up, and what you get is not a glorious triumph of a unified army on an unstoppable march to the White House, but an expansion of the GOP civil war into a two-front bicameral battle.
Recently asked by Politico to explain what he would pursue with a GOP Senate, Boehner said, “Nobody’s given it that much thought.” Probably because thinking about it would give him a panic attack no amount of merlot could cure. What can he and his Senate counterpart possibly propose to position the party for a general election in 2016 that won’t be mocked and blocked by the Tea Party?
Consider Boehner’s most recent humiliation over legislation to address the child migrant influx.
While the politically rational Boehner tried to keep the immediate crisis separate from the messy politics of immigration reform, Sen. Cruz whipped up the House rank and file to refuse support for any bill that did not terminate the president’s executive order providing waivers to some undocumented immigrants already in America who arrived as children. Lacking the votes, Boehner junked his narrow proposal and bowed to the anti-immigration forces.
As a result, just one month after Boehner had decided that Republicans were better off avoiding any immigration reform votes, he had to schedule an incredibly controversial one. Now nearly every House Republican is on record in favor of deporting people who grew up in America and who have no significant connection to their birth country, further worsening Republican efforts to reach out to the Latino community in advance of the next presidential election.
If the Tea Party gets its mitts on the Senate too, the humiliations will only become more frequent and more public.
Now obviously, under normal circumstances, taking over the Senate while retaining the House would be a good thing. Republicans would control the national agenda, deny Obama a free hand in further shaping the judiciary, and be one step away from fully controlling Washington after the 2016 presidential election. They could pass whatever legislation they wanted, and put Obama in the unpleasant position of, having spent years complaining of GOP obstructionism, now having to constantly veto things himself, or swallow what Republicans feed him.
But this is not a normal circumstance.
There is a fundamental breakdown of trust between the party leadership and the conservative rank and file. Attempts by the leadership to tone down rhetoric, calibrate policy positions away from the ideological fringes, and avoid all-or-nothing legislative battles are irrationally decried as surrender. Such pragmatism would be crucial at the moment Republicans are in full control of Congress and carry a heightened responsibility to help govern, but they will be in no position to deliver. If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that the “party of no” GOP does not want to actually govern.
Republicans may want to take solace in the fact that Boehner has been able to contain the worst impulses of the party’s right flank. He was able to ram through bills to provide hurricane disaster relief, expand domestic violence protections to LBGT survivors, stave off cuts to Medicare reimbursements for doctors, and avoid the insolvency of the highway trust fund, all over the objections of conservative ideologues. And while he let Cruz’s followers shut down the government in 2013, he made sure it didn’t last long and that there would not be a repeat performance in an election year (though perhaps one shouldn’t be overconfident until Congress actually passes legislation to fund the government by the next Sept. 30 deadline).
That track record suggests a Republican-controlled House and Senate wouldn’t completely jump the rails. But even when Boehner wins, he wins ugly. And if the GOP wins the Senate, these fissures will constantly be laid bare in the upper chamber too, preventing the leadership from presenting a consistent and welcoming face to the general electorate, and putting Republican presidential contenders in one awkward position after another.
A titanic budget battle, with the usual mix of unreasonable demands and threat of government shutdown, will be irresistible to the Tea Party once Republicans run all of Congress. But an outside-the-Beltway candidate like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, inclined to run as someone who can end the federal government’s chronic dysfunction, will be hard-pressed to choose between criticizing Washington or praising the priorities of the Washington Republicans. If another natural disaster hits — especially in a key primary state or swing state — and conservatives again fight against emergency aid, presidential candidates who have a vote in Congress will be forced to choose between the compassion of the average voter and frugality of the debt-obsessed right-winger.
Those are the sorts of headaches that await Republicans if they win the Senate. And what exactly would they gain? Yes, they would be better able to stop Obama from further shaping the judiciary. But so long as they keep the House, they don’t need the Senate to bottle up Obama’s legislative agenda. Nor do they need to win the Senate outright in 2014 to win both the White House and the Senate in 2016. The few benefits do not outweigh the costs stemming from expanded governing responsibilities.
Republicans who want to win big in 2016 should ask themselves: Do we really want to export the House circus to the Senate next year? Or do we want to take a little extra time to sort out our own issues, and give our next presidential nominee more latitude to define the party’s agenda for the future?
By: Bill Scher, The Week, August 11, 2014
“What Matters Most Is What We Do”: If Having a Foreign Policy Doctrine Is So Important, Why Won’t Hillary Clinton Spell Hers Out?
Jeffrey Golberg has an interview with Hillary Clinton which is being billed as a rebuke of, or maybe a distancing from, her old boss, Barack Obama. While you’ll probably think that an overstatement when you read the transcript, she does express a desire for a foreign policy “doctrine” of her own, even if she doesn’t actually deliver it. While there are a few unsettling things in the interview (her comments on Israel could have come from Bibi Netanyahu himself), the doctrine question is worth paying attention to.
As I’ve argued before , President Obama doesn’t have a foreign policy doctrine, and that’s by design. He explicitly rejected the idea that it was necessary to have some kind of bumper-sticker-ready idea guiding all his foreign policy decisions, a single phrase or sentence that sums up everything he’d be doing in foreign affairs. Even though doctrines don’t have a particularly good track record of late, in this interview, Clinton says that a doctrine is necessary (though she doesn’t use that word). The trouble is, she won’t actually say what hers would be, other than to say she’d have one:
But she also suggested that she finds his approach to foreign policy overly cautious, and she made the case that America needs a leader who believes that the country, despite its various missteps, is an indispensable force for good. At one point, I mentioned the slogan President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit” (an expression often rendered as “Don’t do stupid stuff” in less-than-private encounters).
This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
She softened the blow by noting that Obama was “trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy,” but she repeatedly suggested that the U.S. sometimes appears to be withdrawing from the world stage.
During a discussion about the dangers of jihadism (a topic that has her “hepped-up,” she told me moments after she greeted me at her office in New York) and of the sort of resurgent nationalism seen in Russia today, I noted that Americans are quite wary right now of international commitment-making. She responded by arguing that there is a happy medium between bellicose posturing (of the sort she associated with the George W. Bush administration) and its opposite, a focus on withdrawal.
“You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” she said. “One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.”…
She said that the resilience, and expansion, of Islamist terrorism means that the U.S. must develop an “overarching” strategy to confront it, and she equated this struggle to the one the U.S. waged against Soviet-led communism.
Why, precisely, do “great nations need organizing principles”? Is it because during the next crisis, no one in the White House or the State Department will know what to do if they don’t have that organizing principle tacked up to their bulletin board, perhaps on a poster? I’m all for having an overarching strategy to confront Islamist terrorism, but we’ve been thinking about that for 13 years (or more, depending on how far back you want to go), and terrorism still exists. If Clinton has figured it out, she ought to share what she knows with the rest of us.
This isn’t strategizing, it’s meta-strategizing, strategizing about whether and why to have a strategy, rather than formulating the strategy itself. Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy doctrine might be the very soul of wisdom or it might be the height of foolishness, but we won’t be able to judge until she tells us what it is. And it’s worth noting that Bill Clinton had no discernable foreign policy doctrine (almost any president would agree with what passed for one during his term).
The appeal and the danger of doctrines is that they simplify decision-making, assuring you that there’s only one reasonable choice in complex situations and unintended consequences aren’t something to worry your head over. What would the Bush doctrine tell us to do right now about the Islamic State? Go git ’em! But that would mean pulling the United States back into Iraq at a large scale all over again, with all kinds of negative results sure to follow. On the other hand, if we don’t do enough the result could be a victory for IS, which would be a horrific outcome for the people who will find themselves under its boot. On the other hand, the more we fight them (as opposed to helping others do so), the more interested they’re likely to become in striking at the United States. On the other hand…well, you get the idea. Whatever doctrine you applied to this situation, chances are it would obscure important considerations and give you unwarranted confidence that everything will turn out fine.
When asked pointedly what her “organizing principle” is, Clinton responded, “Peace, progress, and prosperity,” then elaborated as though the question were about domestic policy. The particular views she expresses in the interview are more hawkish than the Obama administration, but people whose memories go back more than a few years will recall that Clinton has always been a hawk on military and foreign affairs. If she decides to distance herself from Obama, it will almost certainly be in that direction, because that’s who she is and what she’s always believed.
If you’re going to criticize her for that, it shouldn’t be because of any alleged lack of loyalty. Having served in a president’s administration doesn’t make you obliged to defend everything he did forevermore, particularly if you held a different view at the time. The question is whether she’s right on the merits of whatever question is at hand.
Finally, on a relatively minor note, the “we don’t tell our own story very well” is something people have been saying for years, and it’s hooey. What matters most isn’t the “story” our government tells the world—”Hey, did you know America stands for freedom? Well it does!”—what matters most is what we do. You know who’s pleased right now with the story America is telling? The Yazidis and the Kurds in Iraq, because we’re helping them. There are some other peoples who aren’t too psyched about America’s story. I hope that by now Hillary Clinton understands that success in foreign affairs isn’t about storytelling.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 11, 2014
“The Speaker In Wonderland”: Boehner Sees Basic Current Events In The Reflection Of A Fun-House Mirror
The headline, at first blush, doesn’t seem amusing. House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) latest op-ed – a 700-word piece for Politico – begins, “Do Your Job, Mr. President.”
It gets funnier, though, once the piece gets going. Boehner (or whoever writes these pieces for him) falsely claims, for example, to have “sent more than 40 jobs bills to the U.S. Senate.” He also claims the president “rewrote the law” by helping Dream Act kids, which isn’t at all what happened.
But the crux of the piece is about tax policy. “Our tax code, like our immigration system, is badly broken,” Boehner argues. “Because we have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, American companies have an incentive to relocate their headquarters overseas to lower their tax bill.”
That’s not quite right. We have a relatively high corporate tax rate, which corporations don’t actually pay thanks to holes in the tax code. President Obama has proposed cutting the rate while closing existing loopholes as part of a broader tax-reform package.
Republicans have refused, which made this part of Boehner’s op-ed plainly ridiculous, even for him.
…President Obama is hinting that he may act unilaterally in an attempt to supposedly reduce or prevent these so-called “tax inversions.” Such a move sounds politically appealing, but anything truly effective would exceed his executive authority. The president cannot simply re-write the tax code himself.
The right choice is harder. President Obama must get his allies on Capitol Hill to do their job. Senate Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden, pay lip service to tax reform, but they have utterly failed to act.
It sometimes seems as if Boehner lives in an entirely different reality – one in which the Speaker sees basic current events in the reflection of a fun-house mirror.
Let’s briefly review reality in the hopes of refreshing Boehner’s memory.
As we last discussed in February, House Republicans originally gave tax reform the special H.R. 1 designation – a symbolic bill number intended to convey its significance – with the intention of unveiling House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s (R-Mich.) plan in the fall of 2013. Camp had spent three years of his life on a tax-reform overhaul, and House GOP leaders saw it as an important priority.
And then they changed their minds. In November 2013, Republicans no longer wanted to tackle the difficult task of overhauling the tax code, choosing instead to complain about “Obamacare” full-time. Shifting their attention to policy work, the party decided, would have been an unwelcome distraction.
By March 2014, House GOP leaders decided to give up on the idea altogether. Sure, GOP lawmakers could try to accomplish something on the issue, but the effort would almost certainly divide Republicans, and there was no guarantee they’d get a bill done, anyway. Worse, if they succeeded, it might offer an election-year win for President Obama, the very idea of which was a non-starter.
Asked in the spring about the substance of a tax-reform bill, Boehner said, quite literally, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
And now the House Speaker, who hasn’t even considered bringing the issue to the House floor, is whining in an op-ed that Democrats “pay lip service to tax reform, but they have utterly failed to act.”
This kind of chutzpah is kind of scary. Boehner seems to think we’re fools, unable to remember what he said and did just a few months ago, and unable to access Google long enough to check.
I can appreciate the Speaker’s frustration – he’s proven himself incapable of governing, and when he tries, his own members betray him – but that’s no excuse for shameless dishonesty.
“Do Your Job, Mr. President”? This from the Speaker who wants tax reform but won’t even try to pass it through his own Republican-led chamber? Which of these two leaders is failing to do his “job”?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 11, 2014
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