“Forget The Geneva Conventions And The Bill Of Rights”: Cruz And Trump’s ISIS Plans Sound A Lot Like War Crimes
Carpet-bombing with no regard for civilian casualties. Murdering the possibly-innocent families of terrorists just to make a point. The line between official U.S. policy and action movie fantasy was unfortunately blurred during the Republican debate on Tuesday night, when Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the frontrunners for the nomination—Trump with 33 percent in the polls, Cruz with 16—tried to out-macho one another on foreign policy.
The result was both candidates doubling down on strategies that involve war crimes.
Cruz has often said that he wants to “carpet-bomb ISIS into oblivion,” joking that we’ll find out if “sand can glow in the dark” in the process.
Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “Does that mean leveling the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria, where there are hundreds of thousands of civilians?”
Cruz replied, “What it means is using overwhelming airpower to utterly and completely destroy ISIS.”
By way of example, he pointed to the first Gulf War, when “we carpet-bombed them for 37 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half, mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.”
The architects of that Gulf War effort, which featured the first major use of precision-guided bombs, would probably disagree that it was was “saturation” or “carpet” bombing. And according to the International Criminal Court, war crimes include “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.” Cruz said the objective would be to kill members of ISIS, not civilians, but there’s no such thing as a precise, narrowly-targeted carpet-bombing campaign. The tactic, which began in the Spanish Civil War and flowered fully in World War II, is to drop thousands of munitions on a single area—and flatten in. It is the opposite of precise.
Not long after Cruz’s exchange, Trump was asked a question by Josh Jacob, an earnest, yellow sweater vest-wearing student from Georgia Tech. He wanted to know how Trump justified his assertion that the U.S. should kill the families of terrorists, when that “violates the principle of distinction between combatants and family members.”
He asked, “How would intentionally killing innocent civilians set us apart from ISIS?”
Trump puffed up like a blowfish. “We have to be much tougher and stronger than we’ve been,” he said. He pointed to the San Bernardino attack, arguing that people who knew the terrorist husband and wife no doubt were aware that they were up to no good. “They knew exactly what was going on,” he said.
“When you had the World Trade center go, people were put into planes that were friends, family, girlfriends, and they were put into planes and they were sent back, for the most part, to Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. “They knew what was going on. They went home and wanted to watch their boyfriends on television.”
To Trump, there is no possibility that the families, friends or loved ones of terrorists could be disconnected from terrorism, and so, “I would be very, very firm with families. And, frankly, that will make people think—because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.”
Earlier this month, Trump was even bolder. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he said on Fox & Friends. “You have to take out their families.”
Inconveniently enough for Trump, murder is also classified as a war crime.
But that may not matter to the audience at the debate.
Advocating for breaking international humanitarian laws almost looked reasonable next to Trump’s North Korea-influenced proposal to “close” parts of the Internet frequented by terrorists. (As if the U.S. doesn’t gather all sorts of intelligence from those corners of the digital world.)
And applause predictably broke out when Hillary et al. were criticized for failing to decry “Islamic terror.”
Other ideas, like Rand Paul’s meek suggestion that America might perhaps consider the Bill of Rights from time to time, hardly received any notice.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, December 16, 2015
“The Great Establishment Hope”: Was Marco Rubio Overrated All Along?
That was a rough debate for Marco Rubio. He finally got that long-awaited challenge on his previous support for the “Gang of Eight” immigration-law overhaul, which he handled well enough. But any way you look at it, this puts him to the left of the field on the major animating issue of the campaign. He continually took fire from a surging Ted Cruz and a feisty Rand Paul. He spent much of the night on the defensive.
He acquitted himself adequately enough through all that, sure, but what do we really have to support the idea that this is the guy who can prevent Cruz or Donald Trump from capturing the GOP nod? To unite the factions of the party that recoil at the thought of nominating either Trump or Cruz, Rubio may well have needed a much bigger, better night than the one he had Tuesday.
And what Rubio really didn’t need was another establishmentarian like Chris Christie putting points up on the board. Part of the reason Cruz and Trump and Ben Carson have been so successful has been that the moderate vote is divided among so many candidates; the best thing that could’ve happened for the anti-insurgent effort is for a clear alternative to the Cruz/Trump emerging in the very near future, and that sure didn’t happen Tuesday night.
Let’s get the usual caveats out of the way: We’re still a month out from Iowa. Cruz and Trump might yet destroy each other, which would give Rubio more room to rise. Buoyed by a last-minute ad blitz, Jeb Bush could somehow, in theory, come back from the dead. Or maybe, just maybe, we just get to the convention without a clear winner, and the GOP’s muckety-mucks figure out a way to draft an attractively boring guy like Mitch Daniels to run against Hillary Clinton.
But the trend lines should be pretty obvious at this point: Cruz is surging at a good time, maybe a half-step too early; Trump has a legion of diehard fans and solid polling numbers; Rubio, meanwhile, is lagging behind. And if you don’t think Rubio can stop Cruz or Trump, the pickings get awfully slim.
Christie? The guy who spent the last debate at the kids’ table? Sure, I guess, if he can capture New Hampshire and roll into the Southern states with a big win under his belt. But let’s not forget that the Fort Lee traffic jam will continue to haunt him, that he’s squishy on plenty of big issues that are important to the base, that his embrace of President Obama is still ready-made footage for an attack ad, that he’s deeply unpopular in the state he governs and that his temperament hasn’t exactly endeared him to voters outside the Northeast.
But without Christie or Rubio, who is there? Poor old Jeb? Is anyone still holding out hope for a John Kasich surge?
Yes, Rubio has soaked up the Beltway buzz, but no one seems to know what primaries he could actually, you know, win. Right now Rubio is stuck in a distant third in Iowa, some 16 points or so behind Trump in New Hampshire, and fourth in South Carolina. Sure, you say, polls change. As the pollsters themselves remind us, those surveys we get so breathless over are just “snapshots in time.”
Yet with Jeb dead in the water, Kasich unable to gain traction and Christie struggling at the back of the pack, Rubio had what looked like a perfect political moment. Polls indicate he’s the most electable Republican in a race against Clinton, and pundits and the GOP establishment waited for his seemingly inevitable surge.
And waited. And waited.
Now, instead of talk of a boom for Rubio, we increasingly have Republicans wondering how the guy is getting so consistently out-hustled on the ground. “[U]nderneath the buzz, GOP activists in New Hampshire are grumbling that Rubio has fewer staff members and endorsements than most of his main rivals and has made fewer campaign appearances in the state, where voters are accustomed to face-to-face contact with presidential contenders,” The Boston Globe wrote this month. Iowa Republicans, meanwhile, are likewise annoyed that he doesn’t have much of a presence there.
Rubio’s apparent reluctance to really work the trail is all a bit mystifying. He says he’s missing Senate votes because he’s busy campaigning, and then people in New Hampshire and Iowa get miffed that he’s nowhere to be found. You don’t need a lot of money to barnstorm, which is why it’s usually the preferred tactic of candidates like Rubio, who has lagged behind Cruz and Bush in the fundraising race.
TV ads are expensive, so candidates light on cash, the thinking goes, need to really be working voters on the ground. Rubio’s staff, meanwhile, has indicated that they reach enough voters through Fox News and the debates to make up for whatever deficiencies on the trail. So far, his stable but not-great primary polling doesn’t provide a lot of evidence to back up that theory.
As he showed again Tuesday night, Rubio may be the most eloquent speaker in the party—especially on foreign policy. He’s also cut a number of good ads and has a rightly respected communications team. But there’s no reason to think he can continue to run his campaign out of a cable-news greenroom.
It’s possible Rubio still takes off, but the GOP has never nominated a guy who lost both Iowa and New Hampshire, and the latter, where he’s still struggling, is probably a must-win for him. It’s a weird year, sure, but why should we think, in a primary season that’s been dominated by talk of restricting immigration, the guy whose biggest legislative push was for a bipartisan “amnesty” bill will capture the nomination?
So what if the Great Establishment Hope, the insurgent-killer so many of us were waiting for, never emerges? It’s kind of hard to process the Republican nomination coming down to a choice between the Senate’s least-popular showboat and a New York billionaire who’s basically been a liberal all his life. Perhaps that’s why we keep coming back to Rubio and Jeb and maybe now Christie.
But right now it looks like only Cruz and Trump have clear-ish paths to the nomination. Cruz takes Iowa, Trump wins New Hampshire, and then those two duke it out for the Southern states.
Maybe it’s because the other guys just kept committing a series of own goals. Or maybe, when we look back at 2016, we will see it as the year when the GOP transformed into something more akin to the populist, nationalist, anti-immigrant parties we’re seeing in Europe – i.e. the kind of party for which Trump or Cruz would be the obvious standard bearer. Either way, this is starting to look like a two-way race between Trump and Cruz, which means Rubio and company are quickly running out of time to show they can win this thing.
By: Will Rahn, The Daily Beast, December 16, 2015
“The Republican Presidential Primary Is About Only One Issue”: Who Can Best Reflect Voters’ Anxiety Back To Them
Not long ago, immigration was supposed to be the key issue of the Republican presidential primary, where even though the differences between the candidates are small, they all have to show voters that they’re better on the issue than their opponents. And “better” isn’t about having a superior policy solution, it’s about reflecting the voters’ feelings back to them in the most compelling way.
But then there was a terrorist attack in California, and everything changed. Immigration is no longer so important on the campaign trail; instead, the discussion is all about who’s tougher on terrorism. But while it looks like Republicans are talking about something completely different, the truth is that it’s the same discussion and the same emotions, just with a different group of foreigners as the main target.
The Republican primary is really about one thing — a complex, multifaceted thing, but one thing all the same. It finds its expression in any number of issues, but it always comes down to a feeling that Republican voters have. It ranges between unease and anger, but it’s always about the sense that things just aren’t right. Sure, they hate Barack Obama, but he’s more symptom than cause.
Think about that prototypical Republican voter, a middle-aged white guy with old-fashioned values. He sees immigrants moving into his area, speaking a language he doesn’t understand. He sees foreign terrorists on the news. He sees his country growing less religious, he sees gay people getting married and transgender people celebrated for their courage, he sees popular culture created by a bunch of damn hippies infecting the minds of his children. The world gets more confusing all the time, and he doesn’t like the direction things are going.
A Wall Street Journal poll in late October found 71 percent of Republican primary voters agreeing that “A lot of what is happening today makes me feel uneasy and out of place in my own country” (45 percent agreed strongly). And when Donald Trump says he wants “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” it sounds pretty darn sensible to our voter, whether he’s supporting Trump or not. Because somebody’s got to figure out what the hell is going on, and not just with the Muslims.
The political news of the week is the rise of Ted Cruz, who now leads in Iowa and has moved into second place nationally. There’s no telling yet how long it will last, especially since candidates popular with evangelical voters who do well in Iowa haven’t gotten their party’s nomination lately. But Cruz’s rise is also a story about what isn’t happening, namely the success so many people have predicted for Marco Rubio. And one reason may be that Rubio’s youthful optimism isn’t connecting with that jumble of negative emotions, the fear and the anger and the unease, that Republicans are feeling right now.
A big part of conservatives’ dissatisfaction comes from their perception that the national Republican Party has been letting the country slip away. Their representatives have won political victories, but they didn’t do anything with control of Congress. They haven’t fought Obama hard enough, and they’ve either been defeated or compromised on everything that’s important. Our long downward slide has continued unabated. So the fact that Cruz is universally detested in Washington is a strong point in his favor. Ask him what he’s accomplished and he’ll tell you about how often he has “stood up” against both the White House and his own party’s leadership. That may not sound like an accomplishment to many people, but to lots of primary voters, it is.
Rubio can say he’s fought against the Washington establishment, too, but he’s going to have a hard time convincing too many primary voters, particularly when they’re contrasting him with Cruz. And imagine that we go a couple of months without another terrorist attack. The issue will fade in importance, as all issues can, and it’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that immigration would once again become the main vehicle through which voters’ feelings of unease are expressed. Should that happen, Cruz will attack Rubio mercilessly for trying to achieve comprehensive immigration reform early in his Senate term; it was Rubio’s temporary support of that effort that alienated him from many Tea Partiers.
Perhaps I’m wrong about this, and Rubio’s message that he represents a new generation of optimistic leadership will resonate with primary voters (although Cruz is only five months older than Rubio, he doesn’t talk about his youth in the same way as the baby-faced Floridian). But at the moment, while Rubio can rail at President Obama with the best of them, he isn’t channeling that sense of unease in the same way that Cruz and Donald Trump are.
The party out of power always feels like things aren’t right—after all, it’s infuriating to have to watch a president you despise on television every day, setting policy and making decisions you disagree with. But most of the time, that’s a problem that can be solved with the right electoral outcome. What worries many Republican voters right now, on the other hand, is something much bigger. They want someone who understands what they’re feeling—who gets the fear, the dismay, the unease, and even the anger. Even if none of the candidates are actually going to be able to do much about it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, December 15, 2015
“Republicans Created Trump, They Must Stand Up To Him”: They Must Reckon With What Their Party Has Become
Donald Trump made one of the most stunning political statements in recent memory yesterday when he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Campaign spokespeople quickly clarified that Trump was referring not only to a blanket ban on Muslim immigrants, but also to preventing Muslims from coming to the U.S. as tourists and possibly even preventing American citizens who are traveling or living abroad from returning home. (He generously made an exception for Muslim members of the military.)
Trump continues to be the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary. It’s time for party officials to reckon with what they have created.
Trump is the product of a party that has for decades thrived on stirring up fears of a scary “other” — from the Southern Strategy to Willie Horton to the persistent rumors that President Obama is a secret Muslim or Kenyan or both. The Republican establishment has for years tolerated its candidates rubbing shoulders with the most extreme elements of its base, whether it’s the white nationalists who have spoken at CPAC or the parade of extremists at each year’s Values Voter Summit.
But there are certain things leading Republicans have largely been careful not to say out loud. Until now.
Trump, building off the Right’s campaign to paint undocumented immigrants as dangerous invaders, launched his campaign by announcing that Mexican immigrants were rapists, drug dealers and other criminals. Then, when the news cycle shifted, he shifted his bigotry. He has spent the last several weeks repeating the objectively untrue claim that “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans in New Jersey took to the streets to celebrate the 9/11 attacks. He suggested shutting down some mosques and refused to rule out the possibility of a national database of American Muslims.
Trump’s relentless stream of bigotry isn’t turning away the far-right base of the GOP. Instead, he remains at the top of Republican presidential polls.
It’s not enough for Trump’s rivals and the party’s leadership to say they disagree with his absurd plan to bar Muslims from the country. They must reckon with what their party has become and, if they don’t like it, speak out forcefully on behalf of the American values of freedom, liberty and pluralism. It’s not enough for them to reject one outrageous plan. They must speak out against bigotry and prejudice. And they must make clear that even if Trump were to become the party’s nominee, he would be on his own.
The Republican Party created Trump. Now it’s time for them to take responsibility and, if they don’t like what Trump is saying, take a strong stand for what is right.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, The Blog, The Huffington Post, December 8, 2015
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