“Mitt’s Magical Thinking Foreign Policy”: How Many Wars Is Romney Committing Us To?
Mitt Romney’s hailed foreign policy speech combined magical thinking and mendacity, with promises or threats to maintain, restore, escalate or commence military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran, at minimum. Speaking at the Virginia Military Institute, Romney had to have his audience of cadets wondering how many wars he’d commit them to if elected.
Ironically, in a speech most passionate about making sure there’s no “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, Romney repeatedly hailed VMI graduate George Marshall, the former secretary of state who famously opposed Harry Truman’s recognizing the state of Israel in 1948.
Romney used the tragic killing of Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stephens Sept. 11 to paint a picture of a region made more dangerous by Obama’s alleged weakness and fecklessness. “Americans are asking how this happened. I’ve come here today to offer a larger perspective on these tragic events,” he pompously proclaimed. But as he hailed “the massive protests in Benghazi” by thousands of Libyans outraged by Stevens’ killing, he seemed not to notice that it was exactly those forces Stevens, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had worked to support and strengthen in their Libyan military and diplomatic policy.
Certainly the administration has to answer questions about and be held accountable for the security problems that led to Stevens’ killing, but Romney seemed not to understand that Stevens died trying to empower the Libyan people who supposedly inspired Romney. He spoke of Stevens as though he were some rogue hero rather than a career diplomat committed to implementing a policy directed by Obama. He accused the president of “not partnership but passivity” in dealing with freedom-loving citizens in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East, and once again pulled out the “leading from behind” slur as though it was stated presidential policy rather than an offhand, anonymous quote in a New Yorker story from almost a year ago. He didn’t say that the president goes around apologizing for America, though, so that’s something.
But he did tell one big lie, insisting Obama hadn’t signed a single free trade agreement, when in fact he’s signed three, with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. Romney also committed himself to seeing a “peaceful, prosperous Palestine” living side by side in peace with Israel, even though he had earlier dismissed the possibility of a two-state solution at his famous Boca Raton fundraiser. “I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and I say there’s just no way,” he told his wealthy donors.“[S]o what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem … and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”
CEO Mitt also seemed to think he can order other countries around, insisting he would get our European allies to spend more on defense, complaining that only three of 28 NATO nations spend what they are committed to on the military. Good luck with that. Mitt’s magical thinking was also in evidence as he promised to counter Iran’s military support for Syria’s Assad with … something. “It is essential that we develop influence with those forces in Syria that will one day lead a country that sits at the heart of the Middle East,” he insisted, sounding a little Palinesque.
Just before the speech, a Romney adviser told reporters that the former Massachusetts governor would consider sending combat troops to Libya – a reversal of Obama’s policy as well as his own earlier opposition to direct military involvement there. There were vague hints of more military intervention in Syria. Romney also accused Obama of abandoning Iranian dissidents who protested the 2009 election, but never said what he’d have done to support them. He expressed unhappiness with the exit of American combat troops from Iraq and seemed unsettled about their scheduled departure from Afghanistan, yet he was almost as vague about what he’d do differently as he is when it comes to which tax deductions he’ll eliminate.
Yet it’s possible Romney’s own advisers don’t know any more about his real plans than what he laid out in his speech. The New York Times revealed Monday that several of them say “they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern.” They aren’t sure he’s even reading his foreign policy papers they write, and one told the Times:
Would he take the lead in bombing Iran if the mullahs were getting too close to a bomb, or just back up the Israelis? Would he push for peace with the Palestinians, or just live with the status quo? He’s left himself a lot of wiggle room.
Perhaps fittingly for a guy who has staffed his foreign policy team with Bush retreads, Romney got high praise from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tweeted: “Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney at VMI. He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 8, 2012
“Let’s Bomb Syria”: The Three Amigos Of Death Make The One Suggestion They Always Make
The three amigos of death are back with a hot new Washington Post joint editorial, and you’ll never guess what they’re recommending this time! (War.)
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., are three of the most respected foreign policy experts in all of Washington. They became three of the most respected foreign policy experts in Washington by following a simple, one-step plan: Always demand more war, everywhere.
This time, they would like us to intervene in the deadly civil war raging in Syria, where rebels are fighting the forces of brutal strongman Bashar al-Assad. The administration is in favor of the removal of Assad, and has offered the rebels non-military assistance, but it has been reluctant to actually send arms or troops. McCain, Graham and Lieberman would obviously like to change all that. It is time for “active involvement on the ground in Syria,” you see, and “we can and should directly and openly provide robust assistance to the armed opposition, including weapons, intelligence and training.” That’s well and good, but isn’t something missing?
Ah, wait, there it is, in the second-to-last paragraph:
Second, since the rebels have increasingly established de facto safe zones in parts of Syria, the United States should work with our allies to reinforce those areas, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested last week. This would not require any U.S. troops on the ground but could involve limited use of our airpower and other unique U.S. assets.
There you go. That means bombs! We definitely need bombs.
The best part of any McCain/Lieberman/Graham editorial is when they say “we know the risks of [MORE WAR EVERYWHERE]” and then they just never actually say what the risks are because they don’t actually ever care about the risks and downsides of military intervention:
We know there are risks associated with deepening our involvement in the profoundly complex and vicious conflict in Syria. But inaction carries even greater risks for the United States — in lives lost, strategic opportunities squandered and values compromised.
Maybe you agree with the liberal interventionist case for greater U.S. involvement in the fight, as argued by Anne-Marie Slaughter and others. Maybe you think in the wake of the failure of Kofi Annan’s mission, there’s a better case to be made for acting forcefully to remove Assad. Maybe your opinion has changed as the conditions have changed, like a responsible thinking person.
But with McCain, Graham and Lieberman, the actual facts on the ground, the details of this fight, don’t actually matter at all, because McCain, Graham and Lieberman were calling for bombs and arms five months ago — before Kofi Annan’s assignment even commenced — and they’re calling for bombs and arms now and they’ll keep calling for bombs and arms everywhere as long as there are still newspaper editorial sections and Sunday morning political chat shows. If they accidentally stumble upon the correct response to Syria, please stay tuned for when they turn their attention back to Iran! (And the Washington Post editorial page, which has never met an overseas military intervention it didn’t declare urgent with barely concealed glee, will be happy to print whatever they come up with.)
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 6, 2012
“Ultra Hawk”: John Bolton, Too Far Right Even For George W.Bush
If Mitt Romney plans to make even a slight move toward the middle in the general election, campaigning with John Bolton is not a great way to do it. Bolton, a key foreign-policy advisor to Romney, created a stir recently by appearing to rejoice in an op-ed in The Washington Times that talks between Iran and the U.S. and the “P5 plus one”–the U.N. Security Council members and Germany – had “produced no substantive agreement.” Bolton said any talks with Iran were merely “a well-oiled trap” and declared that President Obama had become “increasingly a bystander” in Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon (despite the disclosure that Obama has authorized aggressive cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities).
“Bolton has made it clear that he’s rooting for American diplomacy to fail and has repeatedly called for a rush to war with Iran,” said Michelle Flournoy, the Obama administration’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in a statement issued by the Obama campaign on Tuesday.
What is less understood about Bolton — and what is truly one of the great oddities in the career of any diplomat in U.S. history — is that for more than a decade the former undersecretary of State and U.N. ambassador has stood fast consistently against most diplomatic efforts, to the point of regularly belittling his former colleagues at the State Department. Both as a Yale-trained lawyer and a public official, Bolton has long campaigned against U.S. fealty to international agreements and multilateral treaties, and he was so extreme in these views that he proved to be too far right even for the George W. Bush administration, according to several former senior Bush officials. A favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney, Bolton ran afoul of senior officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and failed in successive bids to be named her deputy and to replace Douglas Feith as No. 3 at the Pentagon. He was given the U.N. job as a consolation prize, at the urging of Cheney’s office, in part to keep him out of Washington, according to the former senior officials.
Even the British, America’s closest ally in the war on terror, found they could not work with Bolton diplomatically. On several occasions, Britain was irked by what U.S. and British sources said were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. In 2003, U.S.-British talks to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program succeeded only after British officials “at the highest level” persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team, my then-Newsweek colleague John Barry and I reported at the time. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Qaddafi’s demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House finally agreed to keep Bolton “out of the loop,” as one source put it. A deal was struck only after Qaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for “policy change”–surrendering his WMD.
Often misidentified as a neoconservative because of his ultra-hawkish views, Bolton told me in an interview in the early 2000s that he is actually a libertarian conservative, albeit not of the Ron Paul variety. Based on that interview and on his writings, in such essays as “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” (Chicago Journal of International Law, 2000), Bolton has made plain that his career-long goal has been to unwind America’s deep ties to the international community, including the U.N. and multilateral treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which he believes is based on an unsound legal concept. Bolton believes that international law in effect doesn’t exist and has no sway over U.S. sovereign prerogatives, especially whether to go to war.
At one point, Bolton even appeared to undermine the president’s own wishes in pursuing his personal agenda of undermining multilateral affiliations. In a landmark speech at the National Defense University in February 2004, Bush had called for a toughened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Bolton, who as undersecretary for arms control was supposed to be in charge of that project, “was absent without leave” when it came to implementing the agenda that the president laid out, failing to prepare for a five-year review conference of the NPT in 2005, a former Bush official who worked with Bolton told me at the time. “Everyone knew the conference was coming and that it would be contentious. But Bolton stopped all diplomacy on this six months ago,” another former official told me then. “The White House and the National Security Council started worrying, wondering what was going on. So a few months ago the NSC had to step in and get things going themselves. ” Bolton also held up a plutonium disposal project that required agreement with the Russians; it was completed after he left office.
Bolton is sometimes described as the author of the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative–a multilateral agreement to interdict suspected WMD shipments on the high seas. But the former senior Bush official who criticized Bolton’s performance on the NPT conference said that in fact Bolton’s successor, Robert Joseph, deserved most of the credit for the PSI. This official adds that it was Joseph, who was in charge of counterproliferation at the NSC, who had to pitch in when Bolton fumbled preparations for the NPT conference as well.
After he left the Bush administration, Bolton also became a vocal critic of its turn toward diplomacy, openly criticizing then-Secretary Rice’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea, which ultimately failed. “This is classic State Department zeal for the deal,” Bolton said on Fox News. He also declared, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, that the Bush administration, having purged or sidelined most of its hardliners, was “in a state of total intellectual collapse.”
And now John Bolton is back.
By: Michael Hirsh, National Journal, June 6, 2012
“Pin The Tail On The Donkey”: Mitt Romney Should Put Up Or Shut Up On Syria
It’s time for Mitt Romney to put up or shut up.
It’s irresponsible for Romney to criticize President Obama for not being aggressive enough with Syria and then fail to tell Americans how he would handle the crisis if he became president.
It’s time for Americans to pin the tail on Romney and make him accountable for his bellicose statements.
Romney is all hat and no cattle on national security problems. The last time we elected a governor without foreign policy experience, George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to lead us into a tragic war that cost Americans dearly.
Romney has only two things on his thin foreign policy resume. He has millions of dollars stashed in bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. And he sent American jobs overseas while he ran Bain Capital.
Romney’s demonstrated that he was clueless when the former governor and former liberal identified Russia as our number one geopolitical enemy. The party boys in China must have had a hearty laugh when they heard that. My guess is they chuckled in Moscow, too. The commissars in the Kremlin know better than anyone that Russia has as much control over international politics as Charlie Sheen has over his temper.
Romney is clearly out of touch with Americans on defense spending. Thanks to President Obama, we are out of Iraq and close to an exit in Afghanistan. But the former moderate and current conservative GOP presidential candidate wants to increase defense spending. Americans are tired of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on wasted wars and overpriced weapons systems. Defense contractors love Romney as much as bankers, billionaires, and oil company executives do. The military industrial complex is alive and well in Romneyworld.
National surveys indicate that Americans give Barack Obama good grades as commander in chief of the armed forces. Americans credit the president for his handling of national security problems because he has an impressive record.
Barack Obama was able to do something in two years (kill Osama bin Laden) that President Bush couldn’t get done in eight. The former president sacrificed the lives of more than 4,500 brave young Americans and spent hundreds of billions of dollars to depose Saddam Hussein.
The current commander in chief built an international coalition which drove Muammar Qadhafi out of power without the loss of a single American life. The would-be president might want to think about the current president’s success with Libya before he gets the United States into another drawn out and costly war.
The United States is playing high stakes poker in the world and Mitt Romney would show up at the game without cards and without a clue.
By: Brad Bannon, U.S. News and World Report, May 31, 2012
McCain, Lieberman And Graham: The Three Amigos For “State Sponsored Violence”, Anywhere, Anytime
When John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman join forces, you can be sure of one thing: It will involve state-sponsored violence. Today, they want us to arm Syrian rebels. Though, you know, what they really wanted to call for was actually bombing the hell out of Syria, until there is freedom. They’re just taking it slow.
The Senate’s three most predictable and least credible warmongering “moderates” frequently join forces to publish joint Op-Eds or hold press conferences and the one thing they always, invariably want is for the United States to have just a little bit more war than it currently has, somewhere far away. Sure, we could draw down in Iraq … or we could listen to McCain, Lieberman and Graham and draw back up. We could draw down in Afghanistan … or we could stay the course and keep sending troops there until we win! Americans may be tired of endless war with no coherent goal, but on the other hand, “only decisive force can prevail in [whatever country John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman are talking about now].”
As the Hill recently explained in a story on how John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman were pushing for a resolution basically promising to make war with Iran, “Graham, Lieberman and McCain are considered some of the top foreign policy experts in the upper chamber,” because they always, invariably support military intervention everywhere for any reason, and that is invariably considered a sign of “seriousness” in Washington. If you don’t like waging wars everywhere, forever, you are a weird kooky hippie, and everyone laughs at you. If you believe that bombs and troops have the power to magically solve all problems, you are invited on all the Sunday shows every week to offer your sober analysis of the foreign situation.
You just never know which country these three will decide needs bombing next! One time the three amigos also took a trip to Tripoli to hang out with Moammar Gadhafi. (They invited Susan Collins along, though usually their sleepover parties are strictly “no girls allowed.”) Sadly, by April of last year, they were no longer friends with Gadhafi, and the three had decided that the United States should assassinate him. (That is not really legal but, you know, “war on terror” and “serious, muscular foreign policy” or something.)
One time Lieberman and Graham tried to hang out with a different senator and they all came up with an idea that didn’t involve bombing anyone but that made McCain mad and he yelled at them. Don’t hang out with John Kerry and try to solve climate change! Hang out with me and let’s try to convince everyone to bomb Russia or something!
Sadly, Joe Lieberman will be leaving the U.S. Senate soon, which means John McCain and Lindsey Graham will need to find a new fake-Democrat best friend to add a patina of “bipartisanship” to their endless demands for explosions and shooting and death.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 29, 2012
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