“Jeb Bush Wants To Bring Back The Bush Doctrine”: Americans May Have Short Memories, But Not That Short
Jeb Bush will be making a speech on foreign policy today, and if the excerpts that his campaign released to reporters beforehand are any indication, it will embody all the thoughtfulness, nuance and sophistication that have characterized Republican foreign policy thinking in recent years. If you were thinking that Bush might be the grown-up in this field — or offer something much different from the approach that was so disastrous for his brother — well, think again. It’s looking a lot like the return of the Bush Doctrine, just with a different Bush.
As Peter Beinart writes in the new issue of the Atlantic, Republicans have embraced “the legend of the surge,” which starts off as a specific belief about what happened in Iraq and why, and then expands outward to justify a return to George W. Bush’s simplistic hawkish approach to any foreign policy challenge. To put it briefly, the change in strategy around the surge, and the “Sunni awakening” that occurred at the same time, were supposed to create the conditions in which a political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites could take place. But that never happened, and the corruption and sectarianism of Nouri al-Maliki’s government laid the groundwork for the country’s continued civil war and eventually the rise of the Islamic State.
But Republicans tell a different story, one that not only wipes away all the calamitous and naive decisions of the Bush administration but also can be used to justify a renewal of the Bush Doctrine anywhere. Here’s how Jeb will put it today:
So why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even the residual force that commanders and the joint chiefs knew was necessary?
That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill – and that Iran has exploited to the full as well.
ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat.
And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge . . . then joined in claiming credit for its success . . . then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away.
So: Everything was going great in Iraq and victory had been achieved, until Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw it all away. Nothing is the fault of Republicans, or of the people who supported and launched the Iraq war, the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. George W. Bush made no mistakes that might have any lessons for us, and the answer to every foreign policy challenge is to be more bellicose and more eager to use military force.
And what should we do now? If you said that the key is “strength” and “leadership,” then give yourself a gold star:
The threat of global jihad, and of the Islamic State in particular, requires all the strength, unity, and confidence that only American leadership can provide.
Radical Islam is a threat we are entirely capable of overcoming, and I will be unyielding in that cause should I be elected President of the United States.
We should pursue the clear and unequivocal objective of throwing back the barbarians of ISIS, and helping the millions in the region who want to live in peace.
Instead of simply reacting to each new move the terrorists choose to make, we will use every advantage we have – to take the offensive, to keep it, and to prevail.
In all of this, the United States must engage with friends and allies, and lead again in that vital region.
I challenge you to read that passage and tell me a single specific thing Bush plans to do.
And then there’s Bush’s embrace of what has to be the single most inane objection Republicans have to Obama’s conduct in foreign affairs: “Despite elaborate efforts by the administration to avoid even calling it by name,” he’ll say, “one of the very gravest threats we face today comes from radical Islamic terrorists.” I’m not sure what “elaborate efforts” Bush is talking about, but it’s true that President Obama prefers not to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” because he thinks that could serve to alienate Muslims around the world by reinforcing the radicals’ argument that Islam itself is at war with the West. Obama might be right or wrong about that, but it’s a relatively minor point. Yet to hear Republicans tell it, it is literally impossible to contain terrorism if the president doesn’t repeat this phrase on a regular basis. They say this so often and with such fervor that one has to assume they actually believe that the words “radical Islamic terrorism” constitute some sort of magical incantation, one that would turn our enemies’ guns to dust and cause the terrorists themselves to disappear in a puff of smoke if only it were spoken by the commander in chief.
You may remember a few weeks ago when Donald Trump said he had a spectacular, super-classy, guaranteed-to-work plan to destroy the Islamic State, but he wasn’t going to reveal it, lest the terrorists get wind of their impending demise. Then when he finally did, the plan was this: “I would bomb the hell out of those oil fields. I wouldn’t send many troops because you won’t need them by the time I’m finished.” Everyone laughed and shook their heads at the fact that a guy whose policy thinking operates at a fifth-grade level was leading the Republican field.
But how much more sophisticated than that is what Bush and the other candidates are offering on foreign policy? For instance, if you read this recent manifesto from Marco Rubio, you’ll learn that he plans to lead with strength, so America can be strong and full of leadership. And also strength, because that’s what America needs to lead.
Make no mistake: What Jeb Bush and the other GOP candidates (with the exception of Rand Paul) are offering on foreign policy is nothing more or less than a return to the Bush Doctrine. They won’t call it that, because they know that would be politically foolish; Americans may have short memories, but not that short. Maybe in their next debate, someone can ask them how their foreign policy would differ in any way from George W. Bush’s. I doubt they’d have an answer.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 11, 2015
“Creators Of Iran Situation Should Stay Out Of It Now”: They Have No Compunction With Being Repeatedly Wrong
Last Wednesday, in a thoughtful and persuasive speech on the merits of the Iranian nuclear agreement, President Barack Obama chastised Dick Cheney and his ilk. He didn’t mention the former vice president by name, but few in the audience would have missed the reference.
Noting that many critics of the Iranian deal also supported the invasion of Iraq, President Obama said they “seem to have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong.” Tellingly, the former vice president, who still insists that deposing Saddam Hussein was a good idea, has been among the most vociferous critics of diplomacy with Iran. “(The agreement) will in fact, I think, put us closer to the actual use of nuclear weapons than we’ve been at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II,” Cheney recently told Fox News.
He’s not the only one. Those curiously unselfconscious denunciations of the Iranian agreement continued in last Thursday’s GOP presidential primary debates. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said the deal would make the world “an incredibly dangerous place.” (That was at least less hysterical than his assertion a few days earlier that Obama was “marching Israel to the door of the oven.”)
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker pledged to rip up the deal on “Day One” of his hoped-for administration. In the earlier debate for second-tier candidates, former business executive Carly Fiorina said she would telephone “my good friend, Bibi Netanyahu, to reassure him we will stand with the State of Israel.”
Given our history with Iran, it’s no surprise that this deal has attracted many skeptics — including some from the president’s own party. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, prominent among Senate Democrats, has announced his opposition.
But it is the Republican Party that remains a refuge of historical revisionism, full of prominent politicians who refuse to admit that the Iraq war left the Middle East worse off. Indeed, the toppling of Saddam Hussein significantly bolstered Iran, giving it more power in the region.
After all, Saddam was an enemy of Iran’s ayatollahs, a counterweight that kept them in check. That’s why the United States was a tacit ally of his for many years, supporting Baghdad in its eight-year war against Tehran. (Remember that 1983 photo of Donald Rumsfeld, then President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, shaking Saddam’s hand?)
Even if the GOP wants to pretend that its military adventurism hasn’t had a downside, many voters remember anyway. A college student had the gumption to confront Jeb Bush at a campaign stop last May as he blamed President Obama for the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. “Your brother created ISIS” when he disbanded the Iraqi Army, said 19-year-old Ivy Ziedrich.
So it is simply mindboggling to watch the politicians who’ve done the most to empower Iran denounce Obama’s diplomatic efforts to limit its nuclear power. They were wrong when they rattled their sabers to gin up public support for the invasion of Iraq, a strategic misfire with consequences that will ripple for decades. And they’re just as wrong now. Why would anyone listen to them?
Prominent Republicans are quite aware that the American public is weary of war, wary of any armchair hawks who would insist that U.S. military strength would carry the day in any conflict. Even core Republican voters are reluctant to use force; only 21 percent of GOP voters — and 14 percent of voters across the board — support military action against Iran rather than a diplomatic solution, according to an April Washington Post poll. So Republican leaders insist that they’re not pushing for military strikes against Iran.
“That’s never been the alternative,” Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Post. “It’s either this deal or a better deal, or more sanctions.”
But that’s a far more naive proposition than depending on the inspections regime to limit Iran’s nuclear program. President Obama persuaded China and Russia to join sanctions against Iran, but they’re ready to ink this deal. They won’t be pressed into tightening the financial noose around Tehran. And without their cooperation, sanctions won’t work.
Because America’s military might has limits, diplomacy ought to always be the first and second options. History makes that clear; the war in Iraq was merely a reminder.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary, 2007; The National Memo, August 8, 2015
“Secularism Does Not Have A Lock On Globalization”: What Republicans Keep Getting Wrong About The Iraq War
The 2016 Republican hopefuls more or less agree: Knowing what we know now, they would not have invaded Iraq.
But there is a nagging sense that we weren’t just wrong about invading Iraq — we were missing the point. It’s easy to admit that the war was an error. But it’s more difficult to explain that we entirely misread what was happening in the Middle East.
Make no mistake, we’re still struggling with that very same challenge. We now largely agree that it’s not about remaking the world in our image — nor is it about turning terrorism into a mere nuisance. But we have mostly failed to acknowledge that our struggles in the Middle East stem from a fatal flaw in our view of human progress.
The lessons of Iraq are so hard to unpack because the circumstances surrounding the invasion were so unusual. There was no other regime in the world with such a strange combination of intransigence, opacity, strategic importance, and vulnerability. One big reason we invaded Iraq was how much easier it was to invade than the rest of the so-called Axis of Evil.
Most importantly, in 2003, Iraq wasn’t surrounded by countries in great disarray. It was superficially plausible that a free and whole Iraq might start a chain reaction of beneficent globalization throughout the region.
And even when those ambitions were sharply curtailed, Republicans still argued that the U.S. ought to lead the way in modernizing the Middle East. At a presidential debate in New Hampshire eight years ago this month, Mitt Romney called for us to “combine for an effort to help move Islam towards modernity. There is a war going on, and we need a broad response to make sure that these people have a different vision.”
Despite powerful pressure from the anti-war left, even leading Democrats, including Barack Obama, insisted that modernization and globalization, hand in hand, were essential to remaking the Middle East as a realm of peace and prosperity.
In his landmark Cairo address, President Obama explained that “human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.”
Alas, the Arab world did not share that vision. But it was not because the Middle East’s Muslims wanted to lurch backward in time. Like George W. Bush, Obama was right to sense that the era of secular strongmen was ending in the region. And like Bush — and so many others — Obama failed to understand that globalization and modernization would exaggerate religious fervor and strengthen religious identity, rather than accelerate Western-style liberalization.
As the Islamic State has made obvious, some manifestations of this new religious movement clearly despise some values we associate closely with modernity. That has helped blind us to seeing the radical modernity of religious revival inside and outside the Muslim world.
Americans must be shown that secularism does not have a lock on globalization. “What all Islamist movements have in common is a categorical rejection of any secular realm,” as the philosopher John Gray has observed. “But the ongoing reversal in secularization is not a peculiarly Islamic phenomenon. The resurgence of religion is a worldwide development… For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history underpins their values.”
Republicans teaching the true lessons of Iraq must go even further. The religious resurgence, of which Islamism is only one part, hinges on a particularly modern phenomenon: the yearning for direct, transformative experience, whether in faith or other realms of life. In a bygone age, stable religious hierarchies arranged powerful, official intermediaries between individuals and God — so much so that individuals could hardly see themselves as such. Today, that framework is a shambles. Recall the horrific personal initiative and independence on display on 9/11. Rather than a throwback to a time of obedience to unquestioned creedal rulers, terrorism betokens a stunningly profound break in the vertical of authority that characterized organized religion for centuries.
There is more. Even Islamists’ view of the enemy as absolutely evil and beyond compromise is a modern take on an old idea — starkly contrasting the aristocratic, detached, and calculated view of the secular despot, always shifting sides and weighing advantages.
The true lesson of our Iraq misadventure, Republicans must explain, is that our enemies are more like us than we care to think: not in their values, of course, but in their patterns of thought. Ignore this uncanny fact, and the GOP is likely to lose much more than the presidential election.
By: James Poulos, The Week, June 11, 2015
“The Politics Of War”: We Endanger The Peace And Confuse All Issues When We Obscure The Truth
This Memorial Day the nation remembers all those people who died while serving in the American armed forces. More than 1,316,000 military personnel have died during military conflicts in this nation’s history.
The mission of the U.S. military is to fight and win our nation’s wars. The U.S. has the most powerful military in the history of the world, but it should not be utilized as a political tool, or for retribution. The government and its leaders must do their best to make the right decisions, to be truthful with the American people, and to provide all the necessary support needed to fulfill the military’s mission. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case.
Following the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush began to plan a response. Vice President Dick Cheney and neo-con members of the administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, immediately set their sites on Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s tyrannical ruler. They were disappointed that Hussein had not been toppled during the first Gulf War in 1991. Soon the administration made the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that Hussein was linked to the terrorist group al-Qaeda.
But the Bush administration was cherry picking raw intelligence, much of which was unverified. The “evidence” against Hussein was presented to Congress, which on October 11, 2002, passed the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Forces Against Iraq. In early 2003, the British and Spanish governments proposed a U.N. resolution that gave Iraq a deadline for compliance with previous resolutions on WMDs or face military actions. The resolution was withdrawn because France, Germany, Canada and Russia were opposed to military action; instead they called for further diplomacy. In early March, Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix said that progress had been made with the inspections and no WMD’s had been found in Iraq.
The administration, which rejected Blix’s assessment, began making the case for war to the American people. In February, President Bush conducted a series of interviews with news organizations, including the Spanish language channel Telemundo. I was the head of news for Telemundo at that time, and I was present for our session. The president told Telemundo’s Pedro Sevcec that he had not made a decision to go to war. Following the interview, I asked the president, “What about Jacques Chirac,” referring to the French president. President Bush swatted me on the shoulder with the back of his hand and said dismissively, “Oh, he’ll come around.” “We’re going to war,” I thought.
The American invasion of Iraq began on March 20. Vice President Cheney had predicted we would be greeted as liberators. He was wrong. The Iraqi forces were quickly defeated but the administration mismanaged the occupation. The Ba’athist government had collapsed, Hussein’s military was disarmed, and a power vacuum ensued. Sectarian violence broke out between the Shias and the Sunnis. U.S. backed Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, became Prime Minister in 2006, but his government alienated the country’s Sunni minority.
In 2007, President Bush implemented a troop surge in Iraq. By adding 20,000 additional U.S. troops, primarily in capital city Baghdad, the president hoped to buy time for reconciliation among the factions. The situation on the ground stabilized, but Sunnis still distrusted the Maliki government.
In 2008, the Bush administration negotiated a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq granting U.S. troops in the country legal immunities with the understanding the troops would be withdrawn by 2012. When negotiations began to extend U.S. military presence, only a smaller number, Maliki and various Iraqi party leaders agreed to the extended troop deployment, but did not want to continue the legal immunities. These immunities are a condition everywhere U.S. troops are based.
Some critics said President Barack Obama could have done more to secure the legal immunities, but that is debatable. In an interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation Sunday, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) once again claimed an agreement could have been reached with Maliki through negotiations. Nonetheless, President Obama withdrew American combat troops and fulfilled a campaign promise.
The Maliki government collapsed in 2014. In the summer of 2014, ISIS, an Islamic terrorist group that had been incubating for more than a decade in Syria, launched a military offensive in Northern Iraq and declared an Islamic caliphate. ISIS, which is Sunni, has slaughtered thousands of people in its expansion in the region. But many Iraqi Sunnis find ISIS preferable to the Shiite government in Baghdad.
Iraq under Hussein had served as a counter balance against Iran, its bitter enemy. With Hussein gone, Iran, a Shiite country, began working closely with the Shiite government in Baghdad. Iran’s influence in the region has grown, especially with the spread of ISIS. Iraq is in turmoil and it is unlikely all of the factions, including the Kurds in the north, will come together again.
The Iraq War has been costly. More than 4,500 members of the U.S military have been killed since the invasion. Hundreds of thousands of casualties have been suffered by Iraqis. Two years ago the “Costs of Wars” project, part of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, estimated that the Iraq War had already cost America more than $2 trillion. And many veterans of Iraq, who have returned home, are unemployed, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, or have committed suicide.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and many Republican presidential candidates blame President Obama for today’s chaos in Iraq and the region. Yet these candidates do not offer a plan or a solution. In fact, former Senator Rick Santorum recently said, “If these folks (ISIS) want to return to a 7th-century version of Islam, then let’s load up our bombers and bomb them back to the 7th century.” ISIS and Iraq have turned into political fodder for the Republican base.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq, and subsequent mismanagement by the Bush administration, is the biggest mistake the U.S. has made since Vietnam. It has led to a series of unintended and disastrous consequences. And there is no light at the end of this tunnel for America.
Perhaps the architects of the Iraq War should have heeded the counsel of their spiritual leader, President Ronald Reagan. In a 1985 Veterans Day speech he said, “We endanger the peace and confuse all issues when we obscure the truth.”
By: Joe Peyronnin, Hofstra Journalism Professor; The Blog, The Huffington Post, May 24, 2015
“Honor Our Armed Forces By Avoiding Unnecessary Wars”: Our Kids Should Not Be Used To Bend The World To Our Political Will
With recent military victories by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, President Barack Obama’s critics are once again ratcheting up their rhetoric, blaming him for the spreading violence in the Middle East. Beginning his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) chimed in:
“If you fought in Iraq, it worked. It’s not your fault it’s going to hell. It’s Obama’s fault,” he said.
That’s been more or less the tack taken by all the declared and potential candidates in the Republican presidential field: Pretend that George W. Bush’s invasion had nothing to do with the disastrous escalation of war and terror from Syria to Iraq to Yemen. Blame it all on Obama. Play to a public nervous about the gruesome videos of Islamic State jihadists beheading their captives.
But here’s the one thing that you’re unlikely to hear from those armchair hawks: a plan to put large numbers of U.S. forces on the ground. The graves that are being spruced up for Memorial Day are too fresh, the memories of our Iraqi misadventure too raw.
Then again, GOP politicians still want to pummel the president for allegedly pulling troops out of Iraq too soon. Speaking to a crowd in New Hampshire recently — and trying to recover from a dumb defense of his brother’s invasion — Jeb Bush accused Obama of following public opinion rather than sound military advice.
“That’s what the president did when he abandoned, when he left Iraq. And I think it was wrong,” he said.
That’s a glib answer from a man whose children don’t serve under fire, whose friends and fat-cat donors keep their kids far away from the duties and demands of the U.S. armed forces. And that’s true for the vast majority of the GOP field. Graham was a military lawyer who never saw combat, but at least he served. Most of them did not.
Indeed, the drumbeat for war depends on the service of a relatively small percentage of Americans. Fewer than 1 percent of our citizens currently serve in the armed forces, and they are disproportionately drawn from working-class and lower-middle-class households.
As a rule, members of the 1 percent don’t go. (None of Mitt Romney’s five sons ever served.) For that matter, neither do the members of the top 10 percent.
And it’s especially irksome that those armchair hawks refuse to acknowledge that George W. Bush’s decision to depose Saddam Hussein set up the conditions for the current chaos in the Middle East. (Young Ivy Ziedrich, a college student, was right when she confronted Jeb Bush at a Reno, Nevada, event: “Your brother created ISIS,” she said.)
The Islamic State jihadists are largely Sunni; while they claim many grievances, they are chiefly waging war against their fellow Muslims who are Shi’a. Saddam was a Sunni who cruelly repressed Shiites and granted special favors to Sunnis, but his iron-fisted rule kept the peace.
Had the invasion of Iraq depended on a military draft, it’s unlikely Bush would have attempted it. It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. Senate would have given him the authority to go in. The news media, which were largely quiescent in the face of Bush’s warmongering, would probably have asked more questions.
After all, it was clear even then that members of the Bush administration — especially Dick Cheney, who received deferments to avoid service in Vietnam — were exaggerating or distorting intelligence claiming ties between al Qaeda and Saddam. And while most Republicans now claim that faulty intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was to blame for the invasion, the fact is that should not have mattered. Even if Saddam had WMDs, they were no threat to us. A few months before 9/11, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had said as much.
If we’ve learned anything (and it’s not clear that we have), it should be this: As brave and capable as they are, the men and women of the U.S. armed forces cannot calm every conflict, destroy every dictatorship or bend the world to our will. The best way to honor their service is to refrain from sending them recklessly to war.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, May 23, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 