“The GOP Is Still Dick Cheney’s Party”: Unintended Consequences Are Never Anything To Worry About
A new survey from the Pew Global Attitudes Project shows that the kind of personalized fear that drove so much of our politics and policy on foreign affairs through the Bush years is almost completely gone. While there are lots of interesting results in the survey, which was conducted in 20 countries, I want to focus on the answers Americans gave to this question: “What countries or groups pose the greatest threat to the United States in the future?”
The answers suggest a powerful shift in the way Americans are thinking about the world — and show why some Republicans are so unsettled by Rand Paul’s arguments against interventionism abroad. As though the GOP didn’t have enough internal disputes to worry about already, this is one more serious divide within the party, and it shows why Dick Cheney’s reemergence hasn’t exactly been greeted with open arms.
Here are the top eight responses people gave when asked what was the greatest threat to the United States:
Russia: 23%
China: 19%
Iran: 16%
North Korea: 7%
Pakistan: 6%
United States: 2%
Japan: 2%
Al Qaeda: 2%
Answers to a question like this one are going to be affected by what’s been in the news lately. But the most extraordinary number there is undoubtedly Al Qaeda coming in at 2 percent. Only one in 50 Americans considers it the top threat to the country.
One of the defining features of Bush-era rhetoric around terrorism was that it was very personal. Al Qaeda didn’t just pose a threat to the country, it posed a threat to you and your family. You had to take off your shoes at the airport. You were enlisted to be on the lookout for bombs (“If you see something, say something”). You were told by the government to go out and buy plastic sheeting and duct tape so you’d be able to protect your home against a chemical weapon attack.
But the threats people are seeing now are broader and more long term. They’re concerned about what Russia will do to its neighbors, but I doubt too many Americans think Vladimir Putin is going to launch a nuclear missile at their home town. The threat from China is primarily economic. Even the idea of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon is a threat mostly to Middle East stability and Israel — but not to us here. Which may explain why there’s sufficient political space for the Obama administration to seek a deal to restrain Iran’s nuclear program.
If this is the world Americans see — one of complexity, with threats of various kinds and some problems that are serious but affect us only indirectly — then the argument Republicans have been making about foreign policy for the last twelve years doesn’t sound quite as persuasive. That argument is, essentially, that the world is still a terrifying place and the only way to handle it is with an unfailingly aggressive posture. In this view there’s barely any such thing as an international conflict that can’t be resolved with the application of American military force in some form (even if it’s not an outright invasion); unintended consequences are never anything to worry about; and the only real danger comes from inaction. This is the Bush-Cheney foreign policy perspective, and it still rules the GOP.
The problem is that the more bellicose faces of that foreign policy, like Dick Cheney himself, make much of the country recoil. Which is why Cheney’s reemergence as a pundit hasn’t exactly had Republicans jumping for joy. It isn’t that too many of them disagree with him on substance, but given his role in the spectacularly deceptive propaganda campaign to sell the public on the Iraq War and the spectacularly destructive war itself, he’s not exactly the messenger they were waiting for.
Meanwhile, the one prominent Republican who questions the party’s foreign policy bellicosity — Rand Paul — is finding himself the target of an awful lot of fire from within his party. Here’s Dick and Liz Cheney going after Paul (“I think isolationism is crazy,” says Dick). Here’s Rick Perry writing an op-ed going after Paul. Here’s John McCain criticizing Paul for wanting “a withdrawal to fortress America.” For his part, Paul says that he isn’t an isolationist, he just wants to set a higher bar for US involvement in foreign conflicts.
Jennifer Rubin argues that Paul is alone in the GOP and the party is actually unified on foreign policy, which might be accurate if you’re talking about prominent elected officials. But the electorate is another story. Assuming Paul runs for president in 2016, this debate is likely to feature prominently in the primaries. And we could discover that there are quite a few Republican voters whose views on foreign affairs go beyond the Bush-era perspective centered around the threat of terrorism and the terror we’re all supposed to feel.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 15, 2014
“Rand Paul’s Opportunism Knows No Bounds”: It’s Not A Real Good Time For Irresponsible Statements By U.S. Politicians
As you probably know, a whole new round of dangerous tension is gripping the Middle East after the savage killing of three Israeli teenagers, reportedly by agents of Hamas, followed by an apparent “revenge killing” of a Palestinian teen. It’s not a real good time for irresponsible statements by U.S. politicians.
But in an act of increasingly typical opportunism, the junior senator from Kentucky took the occasion to cut loose with a blast at the President of the United States, per this report from Politico‘s Katie Glueck:
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul blasted the White House’s response to a kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in a strongly worded column designed to highlight his pro-Israel credentials.
Paul, a potential GOP presidential contender who is often leery of interventionist foreign policy, has been highly critical of the more hawkish wing of the GOP, most recently in the debate over what to do in Iraq. But Paul also has been trying to show the Republican establishment that his overall approach to foreign affairs is not out of the mainstream, and his tough rhetoric in the National Review op-ed could be seen as another overture.
In the column, Paul reiterated his call to end U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, which reached a unity agreement with Hamas. Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by America and Israel, controls the Gaza Strip.
The White House has expressed outrage over the Israeli teens’ deaths, but it also has called for judiciousness in response, and Paul skewered the administration for urging a show of “restraint.”
“Children are murdered — please show restraint. Cafes and buses are bombed — please show restraint. Towns are victimized by hundreds of rockets — please show restraint while you bury your dead once again,” Paul wrote. “I think it is clear by now: Israel has shown remarkable restraint. It possesses a military with clear superiority over that of its Palestinian neighbors, yet it does not respond to threat after threat, provocation after provocation, with the type of force that would decisively end their conflict.
Paul, of course, has been engaged in a intensive process of overcoming his and his father’s reputation as “anti-Israeli” for favoring a cutoff of U.S. aid to Israel. So there is probably no act Israel could commit that won’t be aggressively praised by the peace-loving senator (in an impressive display of hypocrisy, he’s calling his bill for a termination of U.S. aid to the PA the “Stand With Israel Act.”) But blasting the administration for exercising actual diplomatic care over an explosive situation crosses the line from opportunism to cynical demagoguery. Progressives who have grudging respect for Paul as a paragon of principle should adjust accordingly. He’d likely be happy if the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict blew up into horrific war, subsuming his past hostility to U.S. aid to Israel in fire and blood.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, July 2, 2014
“Paul Lunges For The Reagan Mantle”: His Government-Shrinking Visions Just Might Be A Problem
Yesterday I wrote skeptically about Ross Douthat’s “spitballing” scenario whereby the two parties could undergo a role reversal on foreign policy in 2016 with “interventionist” Hillary Clinton pushing GOPers towards “non-interventionist” Rand Paul. Today we have Paul’s own effort to use the Iraq crisis to re-frame the partisan debate over foreign policy, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
It’s pretty audacious: according to Paul there’s the Bush Republicans who got Iraq wrong before 2009, the Obama Democrats who got Iraq wrong after 2009, and then his own self, right all along, as the sole disciple of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.
Saying the mess in Iraq is President Obama’s fault ignores what President Bush did wrong. Saying it is President Bush’s fault is to ignore all the horrible foreign policy decisions in Syria, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere under President Obama, many of which may have contributed to the current crisis in Iraq. For former Bush officials to blame President Obama or for Democrats to blame President Bush only serves as a reminder that both sides continue to get foreign policy wrong. We need a new approach, one that emulates Reagan’s policies, puts America first, seeks peace, faces war reluctantly, and when necessary acts fully and decisively.
Paul defends this hypothesis with lengthy exegesis of a famous 1984 Cap Weinberger speech laying out criteria for military action. It was, in fact, extended by the so-called “Powell Doctrine” often touted as the justification of the limited-war nature of the First Gulf War, but that made Powell’s stamp of approval on the 2003 Iraq War so important.
So Paul’s attempt to appropriate the Reagan mantle in foreign policy will be sharply contested by “Bush Republicans” of all varieties. Beyond that, there’s one problem with Paul quoting Weinberger worth pondering. Cap was less famous for his “doctrine” than for his persistence in securing the highest level of defense spending imaginable. In his endlessly fascinating account of the budget wars of Reagan’s first term, The Triumph of Politics, David Stockman all but calls Weinberger a traitor for his mendacious and successful efforts to trick Ronald Reagan into double-loading defense increases into his seminal 1981 budget proposal. This is one part of the Reagan-Weinberger legacy Paul will probably not want to emulate. And it matters: the most obvious way to convince reflexively belligerent Republicans that he’s kosher despite opposing various past, present and future military engagements would be to insist on arming America to the teeth. But Paul’s government-shrinking visions would make that sort of gambit very difficult. And try as he might, it will be very difficult for Paul to make a credible claim Ronald Reagan stood tall for taming the Pentagon.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 20, 2014
“Rand Paul’s Defining Fraud”: Behind His Moment Of Non-Truth On Iraq
If the United States were finally going to have a sober debate about post-9/11 national security and defense policy, deciding what to do about the chaos in Iraq would seem to be the time for it. It seems like a tailor-made opportunity for Sen. Rand Paul to showcase the foreign policy of realism and restraint his admirers say could make him a formidable 2016 contender; just this weekend, on MSNBC’s “Up With Steve Kornacki,” former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele suggested Paul might emerge as a leader among antiwar voices in Congress.
But not quite yet. While Paul has voiced caution about putting ground troops back in Iraq – as has the president, and most sane people – on Sunday he tried out some new gravitas by saying he’s open to airstrikes, in an interview with the Des Moines Register. Yes, in Iowa, home to the first 2016 caucus.
“I think we aided the Iraqi government for a long time; I’m not opposed to continuing to help them with arms,” Paul said. “I would not rule out airstrikes. But I would say, after 10 years, it is appalling to me that they are stripping their uniforms off and running. And it concerns me that we would have to do their fighting for them because they won’t fight for their own country, their own cities.”
The problem is there’s little that airstrikes can do to change the fundamental political problems that are leading to the bloodshed. That’s why it’s become clearer, over the weekend, that the major voices calling for military action in Iraq don’t foresee getting the job done with a few precision airstrikes, or maybe a drone campaign to minimize the possibility of U.S. casualties. No, they’re now saying Nuri al-Maliki must go, committing the U.S. to another round of regime change at an unimaginable cost.
On Friday MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Sen. John McCain whether Maliki could be coerced into broadening his government and changing his ways, and McCain answered, “He has to, or he has to be changed.” On Sunday Sen. Lindsey Graham even suggested the U.S. work with Iran to topple Maliki and form a new government. “The Iranians can provide some assets to make sure Baghdad doesn’t fall,” he said blithely. “We need to coordinate with the Iranians and the Turks need to get in the game and get the Sunni Arabs back into the game, form a new government without Maliki.”
That’s interesting. Here’s what Graham said about Iran seven months ago, when discussing negotiations over its nuclear program:
We’re dealing with people who are not only untrustworthy: this is a murderous regime that murders their own people, create chaos and mayhem throughout the whole world, the largest sponsor of terrorism. This deal doesn’t represent the fact we’re dealing with the most thuggish people in the whole world” (h/t The Wire).
Now Graham thinks “the most thuggish people in the world” are preferable to the Maliki government. To be fair to Rand Paul, supporting airstrikes does put him in opposition to the surreal hawkishness of his GOP Senate colleagues preaching regime change. But Paul could be meeting the Iraq crisis to lay out his larger vision of a realistic, restrained foreign policy that avoids such entanglements. Instead, there he was in Iowa taking a middle ground. “Rand Paul 2016: Not as Hawkish as the Old Guys” won’t make much of a bumper sticker.
It’s not the first time Paul’s supposed courage to question the national security state has itself come in for questions. After his filibuster against President Obama’s drone policy last year, he suggested he’d support the use of drones against the Tsarnaev brothers, the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, and even against someone trying to rob a liquor store. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him,” the supposed libertarian told a shocked Neil Cavuto on Fox. Sounds like due process to me.
He missed another opportunity to stand out from the craven, anti-Obama Republican Party in the controversy over the prisoner swap that brought home Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The libertarian hero might have stood up for the principle that Bergdahl is innocent until proven guilty of various charges made by some of his fellow soldiers, or for the notion that we don’t leave our military men or women behind on the battlefield. The complicated politics of Bergdahl’s release, and even the circumstances of his enlisting in the Army – he’d been rejected by the Coast Guard but entered the Army on waivers that became common given the strain two wars put on the military – might have provided Paul with an opportunity to discuss the very human implications of America’s military overreach.
Instead, he used it as an opportunity to make a dumb partisan joke, suggesting Obama should have traded Democrats, not Taliban fighters, to retrieve Bergdahl. Another statesmanlike moment for the man some think could be the 2016 front-runner.
Some Republicans suggest Paul could be a formidable 2016 foe to Hillary Clinton, who may or may not be more hawkish than he is on foreign policy. I say “may or may not” because when Paul is pushed on his alleged anti-intervention, pro-liberty stances, he often goes limp: Drones are bad in Pakistan but OK in Boston? There’s not much the U.S. military can do in Iraq but let’s do some airstrikes because … well, we don’t know why. Airstrikes are quickly becoming the safe way for Republicans to trash Obama for the Iraq debacle without committing themselves to ground troops either, and Paul missed another chance to show the foreign policy courage his supporters are always telling us about.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, June 17, 2014
“Shared Values, Shared Goals”: Another Data Point Against False Equivalence
Via MoJo’s Molly Redden and Dana Liebelson, here’s a little taste of the conversation on a conference call held by Bishop E.W. Jackson on which the junior senator from Kentucky was a participant:
During the call, Paul generally gave routine answers to questions on abortion, border security, and the size of the military. One caller did ask Paul if he supported Obama’s recent declaration that June was LGBT Pride Month and if he believed homosexuality is an illness. The question was reminiscent of a tweet Jackson wrote in June 2009, when Obama designated June as Pride Month: “Well that just makes me feel ikky all over. Yuk!”
“I don’t think that there’s really a role for the federal government in deciding what people’s behavior at home should be one way or another,” Paul said. “It’s not something the federal government needs to be involved in.”
After Paul left the conference call, Jackson said he suspected the caller who asked about Pride Month was trying to harass them. “Thank god he was respectful,” Jackson said. “But I just want to encourage everybody, that they are going to talk about us like [we’re] dogs because all they know is hatred, because all they know is anger and bitterness, because there’s something wrong with them on the inside…And by the way, they also want to destroy us…We are in a fight for our very lives, for our survival.”
Jackson then discussed Obama’s announcement of the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier captured in Afghanistan. He said that the president “could not help but smile” when Bergdahl’s father, Robert, said “allahu akbar—or whatever it is they say” at the press conference.
Jackson continued: “I have been roundly criticized for saying the president has Muslim sensibilities. That’s not my statement—that’s just a statement of fact…In this situation you would think he would have restrained himself. But he could not help but smile when that man said ‘Praise be to Allah.'”
None of this, of course, was particularly unusual for Jackson. So what on earth was Rand Paul doing on this conference call? And lest anyone of the False Equivalence tribe dismiss the incident as an example of the craziness that can be found in the “extremes” of both parties, let’s remember Jackson was a Republican nominee for statewide office in Virginia just last year. Is there anyone remotely “equivalent” to Jackson among statewide Democratic nominees anywhere? And even if you can scrounge up one, is there anything on the progressive side of the political spectrum remotely like the dozens of Republican pols who sound just like Jackson in their homophobia, Islamophobia, and crazy-talk about Obama every single day? And if there were, would any Democrat running for president do anything other than run away from these people as rapidly as they could, maybe attacking them for good measure?
No, no and no. And the sad thing is that we barely even notice any more that to an alarming extent the GOP is divided between these people and those who curry their favor and hasten to assure them they share their values and goals.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 4, 2014
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