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“This Is Not A Game”: The Difference A “Different Decider” Makes

We may be headed for disaster in Iran, but at least this time we may be able to have a sane debate about it.

As the bleating of the Republican war caucus gets louder and louder, it’s beginning to sound a lot like 2002, when the Bush administration was treating us to daily news about the terrifying threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, ready to incinerate us all in weeks if we didn’t launch a war. Some of the same people who made the case then are making the case now that we need to start bombing Iran. As you’re watching them, it’s hard not to shake your head and say, “Are these people insane? Do they actually believe that it’s a good idea for America to start another war in the Middle East? My god, are we getting on this train to disaster again?!?”

But before we all get too frustrated, it’s important to remember one thing: now matter how loud people like Liz Cheney may shout (and somebody please remind me why anyone should give a crap what she thinks), no matter how much infantile chest-beating we get from the Republican candidates (sample Mitt Romney quote: “I will station multiple aircraft carriers and warships at Iran’s door”), this will be a very different debate from the one we had back then. The reason is simple: We’ve got a different Decider.

It was extremely satisfying to see President Obama, at his press conference yesterday, treat the grunts of those lusting for war with Iran with something approaching the contempt they deserve:

Now, what’s said on the campaign trail — those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities. They’re not Commander-in-Chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war. I’m reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle, and the impacts that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy.

This is not a game. There’s nothing casual about it. And when I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, but when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat the things that we’ve been doing over the last three years, it indicates to me that that’s more about politics than actually trying to solve a difficult problem.

Now, the one thing that we have not done is we haven’t launched a war. If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be. Everything else is just talk.

There are lots of reasons to be worried about this problem, from the horrifying possibility that a President Romney would feel obliged to follow up on the absurd things he’s saying now, to the unpredictability of Israeli actions, to the potentially awful consequences of an Israeli strike that occurs with or without Washington’s approval. But whatever else happens, in this country we aren’t going to see those calling for sanity get marginalized the way they were in 2002 and 2003. In any debate, particularly one on foreign policy or matters of war, the media will define the debate by where the president and the administration stand. He’s the one with the biggest megaphone. Ten years ago, that megaphone was booming, “They’re going to kill us! Be afraid! Warwarwar!” and that became the axis around which the debate turned, enabling the people who turned out to be right to be dismissed as loons whose ideas didn’t need to be part of serious discussions about Iraq. Today that megaphone is saying—and appropriately so—”Just calm the f–k down.”

For now, anyway.

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 7, 2012

March 8, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, Foreign Policy | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Fundamental Dishonesty”: When Do Reporters Start Calling Mitt Romney A Liar?

Two days ago, Barack Obama went before AIPAC (which is commonly known as “the Israel Lobby” but would be better understood as the Likud lobby, since it advocates not Israel’s interests per se but the perspective of the right wing of Israeli politics, but that’s a topic for another day), and said, among other things, the following:

“I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power: A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort that imposes crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency. Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

This didn’t surprise anyone, because it’s the same thing Obama has been saying for a while, in scripted and unscripted remarks alike, in both speeches and interviews. Yet later that day, Mitt Romney went out and said the following:

“This is a president who has failed to put in place crippling sanctions against Iran. He’s also failed to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand, and that it’s unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

So here’s my question: Just what will it take for reporters to start writing about the question of whether Mitt Romney is, deep within his heart, a liar?

Because he does this kind of thing frequently, very frequently. Sometimes the lies he tells are about himself (often when he’s trying to explain away things he has said or done in the past if today they displease his party’s base, as he’s now doing with his prior support for an individual mandate for health insurance), but most often it’s Barack Obama he lies about. And I use the word “lie” very purposefully. There are lots of things Romney says about Obama that are distortions, just plain ridiculous, or unfalsifiable but obviously false, as when he often climbs into Obama’s head to tell you what Obama really desires, like turning America into a militarily weak, economically crippled shadow of Europe (not the actual Europe, but Europe as conservatives imagine it to be, which is something like Poland circa 1978). But there are other occasions, like this one, where Romney simply lies, plainly and obviously. In this case, there are only two possibilities for Romney’s statement: Either he knew what Obama has said on this topic and decided he’d just lie about it, or he didn’t know what Obama has said, but decided he’d just make up something about what Obama said regardless of whether it was true. In either case, he was lying.

The “Who is he, really?” question is one that consumes campaign coverage, but in Romney’s case the question has been about phoniness, not dishonesty, and the two are very different things. What that means is that when Romney makes a statement like this one, reporters don’t run to their laptops to write stories that begin, “Raising new questions about his candor, today Mitt Romney falsely accused President Obama…” The result is that he gets a pass: there’s no punishment for lying, because reporters hear the lie and decide that there are other, more important things to write about.

To get a sense of what it’s like when reporters are on the lookout for lies, remember what Al Gore went through in 2000. To take just one story, when Gore jokingly told a union audience that as a baby his parents would rock him to sleep to the strains of “Look for the Union Label,” everyone in attendance laughed, but reporters shouted “To the Internet!” and discovered that the song wasn’t written until Gore was an adult. They then wrote entire stories about the remark, with those “Raising new questions…” ledes, barely entertaining the possibility that Gore was joking. Why not? Because it was Al Gore, and they all knew he was a liar, so obviously if he said something that wasn’t literally true it could only have been an intentional falsehood.

That is not yet the presumption when it comes to Mitt Romney. There’s another factor at play as well, which is that reporters, for reasons I’ve never completely understood, consider it a greater sin to lie about yourself, particularly about your personal life, than to lie about your opponent or about policy (I wrote about the different kinds of lies and how the press treats them differently here). Because Romney is lying about his opponent and about a policy matter, reporters just aren’t as interested. But at some point, these things begin to pile up, and they really ought to start asking whether this dishonesty is something fundamental in Romney’s character that might be worth exploring.

 

By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 6, 2012

March 7, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, Foreign Policy | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Rick Santorum Has the “Heart and Faith” Necessary For Imperialism

Despite sponsoring foreign-policy legislation while in the United States Senate and preparing to run for the presidency, Rick Santorum has embarrassed himself time and again during the GOP primary when making statements about the rest of the world. The most recent example is his cartoonishly simplistic understanding of the British Empire’s decline from its 20th-century peak.

Here’s what he told a crowd Monday in Iowa, as reported by The Huffington Post’sElise Foley:

“If you look at every European country that has had world domination, a world presence, from the French to the British — 100 years ago, the  sun didn’t set on the British Empire,” Santorum said at an appearance in Sioux City, Iowa. “If you look at that empire today — why? Because  they lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their  mission, who they were and what values they wanted to spread around the  world. Not just for the betterment of the world, but safety and security and the benefit of their country.” “We have taken up that cause,” Santorum added. But now, he said, “We have a president who doesn’t believe in America.”

This proved too much for Daniel Larison:

Yes, it couldn’t have had anything to do with two exhausting global  conflicts that cost the lives of millions of British subjects, or the  financial ruin of Britain that followed these conflicts.  The British  just “lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their  mission.”  Obviously, the only thing needed to maintain “world  domination” is self-confidence and resolve.

The mockery is deserved, and piling on is necessary, for it’s getting wearisome to take seriously someone who claims to venerate America’s founding values, bristles at the notion that foreign occupations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan suggest an imperial mindset, and yet asserts that Great Britain failed the world when it stopped trying to rule a fifth of its inhabitants. One wonders how long he thinks the British should’ve asserted their will in India, Ireland, and its North African colonies, among other places, and why he thinks maintenance of these colonies always enhanced rather than detracted from the safety and prosperity of the home islands.

“Believing in America” should entail an embrace of the values on which it was founded: the idea that all humans are endowed with self-evident, inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But in Santorum’s twisted formulation, belief in America requires an embrace of its military footprint in multiple foreign nations, something he apparently regards as our “cause.” In other words, the problem isn’t just that Santorum has a naive, simplistic and woefully inadequate understanding of how empires rise and fall, it’s that he regards global domination as this nation’s proper object — as if we’re called to be a hegemon on a hill rather than a city.

 

By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 3, 2012

January 4, 2012 Posted by | Foreign Policy, GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

John McCain And The Neo-Con’s: Those Who Deserve “Scorn And Disdain”

With the U.S. war in Iraq coming to its overdue end, it’s worth noting those who got the policy wrong — and continue to ignore the error of their ways.

This week, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), arguably Congress’ biggest cheerleader of this tragedy, delivered a lengthy tirade condemning President Obama for ending the conflict and bringing U.S. troops home, arguing, among other things, “All I will say is that, for three years, the president has been harvesting the successes of the very strategy that he consistently dismissed as a failure.”

That’s actually backwards. Obama didn’t dismiss the Status of Forces Agreement reached between the Bush administration and Iraqi officials in 2008; the Status of Forces Agreement reflected exactly what Obama was proposing at the time. Officials in both countries completely rejected the course McCain recommended at the time, and as we now know, that was the right move. It’s curious that McCain would forget this relevant detail.*

In any case, the bitter Republican senator added, “I believe history will judge this president’s leadership with the scorn and disdain it deserves.”

It’s not exactly surprising that good news and the end of a war would leave McCain in such a sour mood. In August, when Obama helped topple the Gadhafi regime in Libya, McCain thanked the British and French, but ignored the role of U.S. troops, and whined about Obama’s “failure” to run the mission the way McCain wanted.

But when it comes to Iraq in particular, it’s rather amazing McCain feels comfortable addressing the subject at all. I’m reminded of a Frank Rich column from a while back, noting McCain’s record of being consistently wrong about what’s alleged to be his signature issue.

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

The smart move for McCain would be to quietly slink away, hoping desperately that Americans forget how spectacularly wrong he was about a bloody, brutal war. The fact that this guy instead has the temerity to pop off publicly about how outraged he is that U.S. troops are coming home is nothing short of pathetic.

Someone in this debate deserves scorn and disdain, but it’s not the president.

 

By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 18, 2011

December 21, 2011 Posted by | Foreign Policy, Neo-Cons | , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Iraq War Is Over… Lesson For Progressives: “Yes We Can”

Sometime in the next 15 days, the last American troops will leave Iraq — and the War that began almost nine years ago will finally come to an end.

Today, President Obama addresses some of those returning troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  The big difference between those troops and many others who have returned from the War in Iraq, is that none of them will be deployed on yet another tour to Mosul or Kirkuk or Baghdad — or any of the other Iraqi cities that became so familiar to Americans over the last decade.

The end of the War in Iraq is a major event in American history, since in many ways, that War was the defining historic event for an entire generation of Americans.

There are those who would minimize the importance of the final withdrawal of our troops from Iraq by pointing to the unfinished business of the War in Afghanistan, or the use of civilian contractors.  Those are important issues, but they should not diminish the extraordinary significance of the fact that the Iraq War has come to an end.

Most importantly, Progressives — and all of those who fought for a decade to prevent and then to end the Iraq War — should take a moment to celebrate the fact that they have won a critical, historic battle.

There is a lot of cynicism in America — a sense that it doesn’t matter what you do — that ordinary people can’t really have an impact on the big decisions and big institutions of our society.  The end of the War in Iraq shows that the cynics are wrong.

What began in 2002 as an effort to avert the war in Iraq, grew to a chorus of millions who changed the political landscape and who kept fighting until all of our troops came home.  That movement elected a president who promised to end the war — a president who this week has kept that promise.

In September 2002 — a year after 9/11 — President George Bush began what he and his aides called a “marketing program” to convince Americans that our country should invade Iraq.  That campaign ultimately included some of the most egregious lies ever told by an American president.

Bush told Americans that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  His Secretary of State warned that we could not wait for a “smoking gun” to prove these allegations, because it might prove to be a “mushroom cloud.”

Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, argued that Iraq was the central front in the “War on Terror” — even though there was never one shred of evidence that Iraq supported the 9/11 terrorists or had anything whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda. Bush and Cheney actually said — with a straight face — that “If we weren’t fighting them in Iraq, we could be fighting them in the United States.”

Much of the nation — newly traumatized by the 9/11 attacks — supported the president.  And of course, who could imagine that a president would simply fabricate the rationale for a war?

Just a month after Bush launched his campaign to get support for war with Iraq, State Senator Barack Obama was invited to speak to a rally in Chicago’s Federal Building Plaza.  There he stated firmly and unequivocally his opposition to the invasion of Iraq.  At the time, that position was unpopular — particularly for a politician with ambitions for higher office.   But the organizers of the rally did not have to coax Obama to take his tough stand.  Obama was eager to be part of the nascent movement that opposed the potential War in Iraq.

When he ran for United States Senate two years later, Obama continued his strong opposition to the Iraq War.  And there can be little doubt that he became the Democratic nominee for President in 2008 in large measure because of his consistent, principled opposition to the War.

In his campaign for president, Barack Obama promised to end the War in Iraq.  Now he has kept that promise.

When he took office there were nearly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.  Within the next two weeks there will be none.

The Republicans that started the War — Neo-cons like Dick Cheney, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — as well as the major Republican Presidential candidates — have all spoken out against the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.  They have made clear that they would never have signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government that set up a time-table for withdrawal, had they not intended to change it. Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain, has been particularly outspoken in his opposition. McCain, after all, once said that he had no objection to American troops remaining in Iraq for a hundred years.

It is virtually certain that had John McCain become president, our War in Iraq would have continued for years to come.  After all, one of the major Neo-Con goals for the war was a permanent base of operations in Iraq.

But President Obama and the movement against the Iraq War have decisively won the battle for public opinion. Last month’s ABC/Washington Post poll found that 78% of Americans support Obama’s decision to leave Iraq at the end of the year.

In the end, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz believes the War will have cost America over $3 trillion — including the cost of rehabilitation and care for the tens of thousands of soldiers who were wounded in Iraq.

Whatever the final figure, most Americans have a profound belief that it is time to use the funds we save by ending the Iraq War to rebuild America and the American economy.

Every dollar that went to fight the Iraq War was a dollar that did not go to repair a highway, build a mass transit system, educate a child or invest in new sources of energy.

Everyday Americans, and economists of every stripe, understand clearly that one of the principal forces that converted the budget surpluses of the Clinton Administration into the largest deficit in American history was Bush’s decision to launch extravagantly expensive wars at the same time he cut taxes for the wealthy.

And everyday people understand that the end of the War in Iraq — and ultimately the end of our engagement in Afghanistan — will, contrary to Republican doctrine, strengthen America.

The War in Iraq was used by terrorists worldwide to stoke hatred for our country and to recruit young people to their ranks.  It sapped our country of trillions of dollars, stretched our military to the breaking point, caused popular support for America to plummet around the globe and dealt a powerful blow to America’s moral authority.

Most Americans realize that the decision to launch the War in Iraq was one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in modern American history.

But there is also a deep well of respect and support for the million men and women — both military and civilian — whose sacrifice allowed a hopeful outcome to be salvaged from a disastrous series of decisions by the Bush Administration.

Progressives must be resolute in preventing Republicans from using cuts in the benefits or care for returning warriors to pay for their tax breaks for millionaires.

And Progressives should do something else as well. While we recognize there is much to be done — let’s take a moment to celebrate an historic success.  The end of the Iraq War demonstrates that “Yes We Can!” is more than a campaign slogan.  It reminds us once again that everyday people can successfully organize to change history.

 

By: Robert Creamer, Published in The Huffingto Post, December 14, 2011

December 14, 2011 Posted by | Foreign Policy | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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