“Calling Them Out”: Rand Paul Is Pushing The GOP To Confront Its Terrorism Problem. Too Bad The Other 2016 Candidates Won’t Listen
Any time there’s a genuine difference of opinion concerning a policy issue within a presidential primary it’s worthy of note, even if there’s only one candidate standing apart from the others. Rand Paul may be the one you’d expect would dissent from his peers when it comes to foreign policy, but he nevertheless surprised many when he said on Wednesday that it was his own party that bore responsibility for the rise of ISIS.
When asked on Morning Joe how he’d respond to attacks from foreign policy hawks like Lindsey Graham, Paul responded, “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of these arms were snatched up by ISIS.” He even tied his Republican colleagues to the despised Hillary Clinton: “ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya, they just wanted more of it.”
Whatever you think of the particulars of Paul’s analysis, his charges probably aren’t going to go over too well in a party where the consensus is that everything in Iraq was going swimmingly until Barack Obama came in and mucked it all up. Jeb Bush spoke for the other candidates when he recently said, “ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president.” As it happens, neither of those assertions is even remotely true. But the fact that Paul is making the claims he is means Republicans might have to grapple with the substance of an alternative perspective on ISIS in particular and terrorism in general.
The prevailing view among Republicans is that the most important thing when confronting terrorism is, as with all foreign policy questions, strength. If you are strong, any problem can be solved. Likewise, all failures come from weakness. Barack Obama fails because he is weak (and also because he hates America, but that’s another story).
Rand Paul, even in his unsophisticated way, is saying something fundamentally different: Strength not only isn’t enough, sometimes it can make things worse. Seemingly alone among the Republican candidates, he realizes that there’s such a thing as unintended consequences. You can have all the strength in the world — as, for all intents and purposes, the U.S. military does — and still find events not working out the way you want.
One might think that the experience of the last decade and a half would have taught us all that. In justifying their support for the Iraq War, Republicans will often say that “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein,” as though it were self-evident that conditions improve once you remove a brutal dictator. But it’s not at all clear that that’s true — Saddam is gone, but a couple hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed, a corrupt sectarian government in Baghdad allowed ISIS to take hold, Iran’s strength in the region was enhanced — all things that the architects of the Iraq War either didn’t consider or thought wouldn’t happen.
ISIS itself offers a demonstration of a common unintended consequence terrorism analysts have been talking about for a while, which is that a strategy aimed at decapitating terrorist groups can actually produce more violence. When one leader is killed, his successor feels the need to prove his mettle by expanding the group’s ambitions and increasing its level of brutality. ISIS started out as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; after Zarqawi was killed by an American airstrike, an action hailed at the time as a great victory, the group not only didn’t disappear, it evolved into the ISIS we see today.
Yet to hear most of the Republicans tell it, all we need to solve the problem is strength. They quote action heroes as though there might be some genuine insight from Hollywood B-movies on how to combat terrorism. “Have you seen the movie Taken?” says Marco Rubio. “Liam Neeson. He had a line, and this is what our strategy should be: ‘We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you.'” Or Rick Santorum: “They want to bring back a 7th-century version of jihad. So here’s my suggestion: We load up our bombers, and we bomb them back to the 7th century.” So strong.
Yet when it comes time to say what specifically they would do about ISIS or Syria if they were to become president, the candidates grow suddenly vague. It’s almost as though, the tough talk notwithstanding, they know that getting into too much detail about the policy challenge will inevitably force them to confront the possibility that saying they’ll be strong doesn’t quite answer the question.
Perhaps on a debate stage a few months from now, Rand Paul will manage to get his opponents to address that possibility. Or maybe they’ll be able to just give a look of steely resolve, quote a movie they saw, get an ovation from the crowd, and move on.
By: Paul Waldman, The Week, May 28, 2015
“Chest-Thumping Belligerence, Been There, Done That”: Why Marco Rubio’s Tough Guy Act Is Actually A Display Of Cringing Cowardice
Marco Rubio is laying out his foreign policy platform for 2016, and the take-home message is this: PANIC!!!
Join me in keeping our country safe in the New American Century. Click here now: http://t.co/r8aMy4fU2E pic.twitter.com/g5ri5UuCT0
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 16, 2015
Elsewhere, Rubio is laying claim to the usual panoply of hyper-masculine tough guy imagery: flags, bald eagles, and banners proclaiming “American Strength.”
What he means by strength can be seen in a speech he gave to the Council on Foreign Relations, blaming everything bad that has happened overseas in the past six years on President Obama’s insufficiently aggressive stance towards Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. It would appear that chest-thumping belligerence is how safety is to be obtained.
Let’s call this what it is: cowardice. Whatever happened to political courage?
I’m speaking of real political courage, not the kind that neoconservatives equate with moar war. The politics of courage, as it is practiced by the Republican Party, is heavily gendered and homophobic — as can be seen in the slurs (e.g., “sissy”) used against those less militarily inclined. Attacking political enemies for lacking “manly” courage is a political commonplace going back hundreds of years.
Sexism, of course, has been a bipartisan affair, but these days Rubio’s party is undoubtedly the worse offender. Since the end of World War II, attacking liberals for their weak, effeminate unwillingness to make the “tough decisions” to kill or imprison lots of people has been a staple of conservative rhetoric. This has been buttressed more recently by Democrats’ association with feminism and gay rights, their corresponding greater number of female candidates, and the opening of a gender gap between the parties.
Such attacks rely on sexist tropes about women (or LGBT people) being incapable of hard, logical analysis due to excessive emotion or softness. Needless to say, those are totally illegitimate grounds for criticism. To the contrary, there is nothing strong, tough, or courageous about constant demands for more use of violence, or executing innocent people, or invading random countries for no reason.
However, if one can clear away the various prejudiced dross, there is a political case to be made for courage. I reject the idea that one can quickly and easily obtain more security by sacrificing liberty — and I also believe that not flying into a hysterical frenzy every time something terrible happens takes real courage.
After 9/11, that kind of courage was notably absent from American political leadership. Instead, there was a grasping panic; impossible, childish demands for physical security (the “one percent doctrine“); and a blind, psychotic thirst for vengeance. The most convenient victim turned out to be Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. That war of aggression did nothing for American security — indeed, it gravely harmed it. And like any act of bullying, it was fundamentally an act of cowardice.
Sometimes courage requires standing up to physical danger, like not losing one’s wits when under fire. It can also be strength in the face of pain and grief. A sensible reaction to terrorist attacks would involve both: a realization that total security is an impossible goal, and that senselessly lashing out at random targets will not heal the damage done by the attackers.
Unfortunately for something like half a million Iraqis, President Bush was a knock-kneed coward. It’s too bad that Rubio mistakes his foreign policy for courage.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 20, 2015
“What A Marvelous Historical Anomaly”: How Dubya Is Winning 2016 For Hillary
What a delightful week, watching Republicans not Democrats sink in the foreign policy quicksand. For most of my adult lifetime—come to think of it, all of it, and pretty much all of my entire lifetime—to the extent that foreign policy has mattered in presidential campaigns, it’s been brandished by Republicans to accuse the Democrats of being soft on whatever the supposed threat was at the time. To think that we might have a presidential campaign in which the Democrats are the ones playing foreign policy offense, forcing the Republicans to profess that they are not war-mongering psychopaths, would be a thing to behold—as well as a measure, eight long years later, of how much damage George W. Bush and his co-belligerents did to the Republican Party.
It surely caught Jeb Bush by total surprise, the shitstorm that kicked up after his first answer about invading Iraq. Yes, he’s rustier than a 1970s Plymouth; yes, he appears not to have been really quite listening to Megyn Kelly; and yes, it’s beginning to dawn on all of us, God help us, that Dubya may have been the smart one.
But all those factors are subordinate to the main one, which is this: History instructs that if you’re a Republican running for president and you’re asked about a war, you probably can’t go wrong by saying you’re for it. A past war, a current war, a future war (perhaps these most of all!), it doesn’t matter. Be pro-war, accuse the Democrats of wanting the United States to suckle at the teat of the UN and the new global order; and if it’s a current war that’s not going swimmingly, blame the Democrats and the anti-war elements at home. These are can’t lose propositions.
Or were. This week, Bush learned otherwise. I know, specifically it had to do with the “knowing what we know now” language, which is what really cranked up the media’s chainsaw. But public anti-war sentiment is even more blunt than that. Here for example is a question from a Quinnipiac poll last summer: “Do you think the result of the Iraq War was worth the loss of American lives and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” This does not say “knowing what we know now,” which would clearly prod the respondent to think, “Oh, yeah, no WMD,” and would be more likely to produce a higher “not worth it” result.
But even keeping the WMD lie out of the conversation, not worth it won by 75-18 percent. Even Republicans said not worth it by 63-27.
It has created a new and perhaps not un- but let’s say little-precedented default foreign policy position in the American electorate: Now, the cowboys have to prove their solution to every problem isn’t to invade it or bomb it. This may have been true for the 1976 election, during the Vietnam hangover. But even if so, concerns about Vietnam were a distant second to unease about Richard Nixon’s rape of the Constitution and Gerry Ford’s pardon of him for doing it. Today, though, this question of reflexive Iraq hawkery is enough of a no-no that some people think Bush might already be sunk and should just quit now.
And this is why we saw Marco Rubio also reverse himself last week (although he would deny that) on the Iraq War. He used to defend the war, but now, with the new Kelly Standard in play, he decided he’d better come out and say: “Not only would I not have been in favor of it, President [George W.] Bush wouldn’t have been in favor of it and he said so.”
Rubio, of course, has neo-conned himself to the gills, and there will be plenty of time for him during this primary season to come out swinging on Iran, once he figures out that Iran and ISIS are not allies. But that even he “clarified” his position in the anti-war direction says something.
Now I should note: It may not play out the way I’m describing during the primary campaign. Yes, as we saw above, rank-and-file Republicans said the Iraq War wasn’t worth it by 63-27. But in the context of a primary season, that 27 can be as loud as or louder than the 63. It’s probably the 27 who are more likely to vote or attend caucuses, which means the minority would have inordinate influence over the shape of the candidates’ rhetoric.
But in a general-election context, the GOP nominee will probably have to tack back pretty quickly toward the anti-war position. This will give Hillary Clinton a great opportunity. For one thing, it’ll weaken the salience of the whole “she can’t defend the country cuz she’s a girl” line of attack, which will come, however subtly. It will allow Clinton to define the terms of what constitutes a sensible foreign policy, and the Republican man will likely have to agree with her.
And most of all it will be a lot better for the world than if the situation were reversed. Contrary to liberals’ deepest suspicions about her, she is not a neo-conservative; she is not going to have regime change in Iran on her mind, which any of the Republicans as president would, except for Rand Paul.
Poor Republicans! Crime is down; they can’t scream law and order. And now war is unpopular, so they can’t say the Democrats are soft on whomever. Their economic theories are increasingly discredited. I guess that leaves the old standby: race-baiting. But we may have reached a point where that doesn’t work anymore either. Should be an interesting race.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 18, 2015
“The Conservative Imagination”: Why Republicans Cannot Have A National Security “Doctrine”
In case you missed it, Marco Rubio delivered a Great Big Foreign Policy Speech yesterday, at the hallowed venue of the Council on Foreign Relations. It was such a big deal that Charlie Rose introduced him. And it even unveiled a proposed “doctrine” for national security, which I am sure the Floridian hopes will soon be known as the Rubio Doctrine.
But as Peter Beinart notes at The Atlantic, the Rubio Doctrine is basically just a collection of banal principles almost anyone could agree with:
The Rubio doctrine, which the Florida senator announced on Wednesday, “consists of three pillars.” Pillar number one is “American strength”: America must “adequately fund our military.” Pillar number two is “the protection of the American economy”: America must pursue “free trade.” Pillar number three is “clarity regarding America’s core values”: America must “support the spread of economic and political freedom by reinforcing our alliances, resisting efforts by large powers to subjugate their smaller neighbors” and “advanc[ing] the rights of the vulnerable.”
These, Rubio told moderator Charlie Rose, “are timeless truths.” But that’s precisely the problem. Historically, foreign-policy doctrines have been the opposite of “timeless.” They represent efforts to further American interests and ideals by offering a specific response to a specific geopolitical reality. Every president wants the United States to be strong, prosperous, and moral. Doctrines are supposed to outline a strategy for achieving those goals. They are not the goals themselves.
The most significant part of Beinart’s critique is this acerbic explanation of why Rubio has to keep his “doctrine” at 40,000 feet above the specific challenges of our era:
Rubio and most of the other GOP candidates want the United States to go on offense overseas after the perceived retrenchment of the Obama years. But Americans have little appetite for additional wars, and the threat that Republicans focus on most—“radical Islam”—lumps together states and organizations that are not only disparate, but bitterly hostile to each other. Truman’s “containment” doctrine and Reagan’s doctrine of “rollback” each had problems. But at least they were aimed at a specific enemy. Rubio can’t lay out a doctrine like that today because the two enemies he and other Republicans talk about most—Iran and ISIS—are only linked in the conservative imagination. On the ground, they’re at war.
That’s a bit of a problem, eh? I’m guessing if Rubio were challenged on this point, he might answer the way Will Rogers once did shortly before World War I when he was asked exactly how he proposed to drain the Atlantic Ocean, which was his “solution” to the problem of German U-Boat attacks: “That is a detail, and I am not a detail man.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly 15, 2015
“Jeb Bush Is Terrible At Foreign Policy”: Running As A Bush On Foreign Policy In 2016 Is Folly
There are many reasons George W. Bush was unpopular when he left office. A big one was the Great Recession, which crested and crashed down on the world in his last few months in office. Then there was Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 New Orleans debacle that helped kneecap Bush’s second term in office not long after it started. But the most enduring stain on Bush’s tenure is the Iraq War.
Not only is Iraq still a mess — worse, America’s mess — but the effects of toppling Saddam Hussein are being felt in everything from Iran’s expanding influence in the region to Islamic State’s rise. So it’s odd that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, making his case for following his older brother and father into the White House, would double-down on the Iraq War.
Even knowing that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, Jeb Bush told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Sunday, he would have still invaded Iraq in 2003, “and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
First, let’s dispatch with that pathetic blame-sharing nonsense. Hillary Clinton — if, for some reason, voters had elected her right after her husband — would not have invaded Iraq, and neither would President Al Gore. Both probably would have invaded Afghanistan, because, after all, that country’s Taliban government was sheltering the terrorist group that had just murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, destroyed a cluster of skyscrapers, and damaged the Pentagon.
But Iraq was a textbook war of choice. There was some faulty intelligence, but it was being pushed and exaggerated by a Bush White House that wanted to invade Iraq already. I don’t think that’s even in dispute anymore.
Nobody named Clinton has ever invaded Iraq — in fact, since Somalia’s “Black Hawk Down” incident, Democrats bomb countries; they generally don’t send in ground troops. Two presidents named Bush have invaded Iraq. Voters remember that.
And just how unpopular is the Iraq War now? Last summer, some major news organizations asked voters.
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll from June 2014, 71 percent of respondents said the Iraq war “wasn’t worth it,” including 44 percent of Republicans. A CBS News/New York Times poll from the same month similarly found that 75 percent of respondents said the war was not worth the costs, including 63 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of independents. Another June 2014 poll, from Quinnipiac, was a bit more favorable, with only 61 percent saying that “going to war with Iraq” was “the wrong thing.” In all those polls, the Iraq War disapproval numbers have continued to inch upwards.
The biggest obstacle to a President Jeb Bush was always going to be his last name — a polite way of saying his brother. He knows that. He even jokes about it.
But because of family loyalty or pride, or the advisers he has hired from his brother’s administration, or core convictions, Jeb Bush isn’t willing to throw his brother under the bus. From a tactical standpoint, it must be helpful having a father and brother who have collectively won three presidential elections, but acknowledging in public that George W. Bush is your most influential adviser on Middle East affairs? That’s something different.
Jeb Bush seems determined to win this or lose this as a card-carrying member of the Bush dynasty.
Is that a deal-breaker? Well, people who care about foreign policy often lament that voters don’t. But that’s not going to help John Ellis Bush. Because while most voters probably do vote on pocketbook issues, Republican voters are fired up about foreign policy, especially the sort of engaged partisans who vote in primaries.
And they’re revved up about foreign policy because that’s what Republican lawmakers and politicians and pundits have been attacking President Obama on since the economy improved enough, ObamaCare started showing positive dividends, and Osama bin Laden’s death under Obama’s command became a part of American history.
“Attacking President Obama’s record on Israel and Iran is now one of the biggest applause lines for presidential candidates,” note Josh Kraushaar and Alex Roarty at National Journal, in a write-up on a poll about how Republicans believe 2016 will be a foreign policy election.
Jeb Bush is going to have to step up his game if he wants to ride the GOP’s foreign policy wave. His big coming out party on the subject wasn’t promising — even with his A-list of Bush-linked advisers, he “delivered a nervous, uncertain speech on national security,” reported Tim Mak and Jackie Kucinich at The Daily Beast, “full of errors and confusion.”
That’s something Jeb Bush can fix. After all, none of the Republican governors, former governors, senators, former CEOs, or celebrated pediatric neurosurgeons running against him have much experience with war or international diplomacy or other key elements of foreign policy, either.
But running as a Bush on foreign policy in 2016 is folly. Even if the Dick Cheney wing of the Republican Party pushes him through the primaries, it’s poison in a general election. Jeb Bush has a tough choice to make: Does he want to try to resuscitate his brother’s foreign policy reputation, or does he want a shot at the White House?
By: Peter Weber, The Week, May 11, 2015
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