“Leading By Weather Vane”: Mitch McConnell Sticks His Finger In The Wind, Makes Up His Mind
In August, as Senate Republicans argued among themselves over budget strategies, their ostensible leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell (R), stayed on the sidelines. Worried that bold stands might hurt his re-election chances, the Senate Minority Leader was too afraid to take a stand.
In September, as GOP lawmakers have argued among themselves over U.S. policy in Syria, McConnell has again been afraid to lead. Yesterday, the Minority Leader didn’t even want to be on the Senate floor for fear he might have to take a position on the issue of the day.
This morning, after carefully waiting for his pollsters to tell him what to say pondering the issue for three weeks, McConnell spoke up.
Breaking his silence on Syria, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell revealed Tuesday that he will oppose a resolution giving President Barack Obama the authority to unleash military strikes.
“I will be voting against this resolution — a vital national security risk is clearly not at play” McConnell said in a speech prepared for delivery on the Senate floor that painted the White House strategy as muddled and rife with “unintended consequences.
McConnell added, “It’s not exactly a state secret that I’m no fan of this president’s foreign policy.”
That’s certainly true, though it’s also not exactly a state secret that McConnell has spent his congressional career as a hawk, broadly supportive of using force abroad and backing military intervention to address national security crises.
So what changed? In case it’s not obvious, McConnell is terrified of losing.
He has a credible primary opponent, an equal credible general-election challenger, and poll numbers that suggest McConnell is one of the least popular senators in the nation. It made for an easy calculus — the Minority Leader will abandon his foreign policy principles because neither the president nor intervention in Syria are popular. Sure, it’s craven to approach U.S. foreign policy this way, but McConnell apparently doesn’t care.
This also, incidentally, creates an unexpected intra-party division — the top two House Republicans (Boehner and Cantor) support the president’s position, while the top two Senate Republicans (McConnell and Cornyn) do not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, Deptember 10, 2013
“Contemptible Animals”: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, And Their Craven And Brazen Hypocrisy On Syria
The Republican hypocrisy on Syria is just amazing. Imagine that Mitt Romney were president. Romney took a far more hawkish line than Barack Obama did on Syria during the campaign. He wanted to arm the rebels, supported in-country cover ops, and so on. So if Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons during President Romney’s tenure, there’s every reason to think he’d be pushing for action too. And what, in that case, would Republicans now temporizing or opposing Obama be doing in that case? They’d be breathing fire, of course. There’s a lot of chest thumping talk right now about how a failed vote will destroy Obama’s credibility. I guess that may be to some. But to anyone paying attention, the credibility of these Republicans is what will suffer, and the vote may well come back to haunt some of them in 2016.
Some Republicans are, to their credit, taking the position consistent with their records. John McCain stood up to those people who looked like they were about two feet away from his face at that town hall meeting last week. Lindsey Graham deserves more credit, since he’s facing reelection and is being called “a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood.” On the other side, Rand Paul and the neo-isolationists are probably taking the same position they’d take if Romney were president, although we can’t be completely sure. If Romney were in the White House, by 2016, “was so-and-so tough on Syria?” would probably be a top litmus test (unless, of course, things got really terrible over there). I could easily see Paul declaiming on the unique evil of chemical weapons that just this once required him to break from his noninterventionist views, but as things stand he at least is taking the position with which he is identified.
But most of them? Please. The Gold Weasel Medal goes to Marco Rubio, as others such as Tim Noah have noted. Back in April, Rubio thundered that “the time for passive engagement in this conflict must come to an end. It is in the vital national security interest of our nation to see Assad’s removal.” Removal! Obama’s not talking about anything close to removal. So that was Rubio’s hard line back when Obama was on the other side. And now that Obama wants action? Rubio voted against the military resolution in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.
Ted Cruz? Just in June, Cruz wanted to go into Syria and rough ’em up. “We need to develop a clear, practical plan to go in, locate the weapons, secure or destroy them, and then get out.” Now? Syria is a distraction from, you guessed it, Benghazi. He said last week: “We certainly don’t have a dog in the fight. We should be focused on defending the United States of America. That’s why young men and women sign up to join the military, not to, as you know, serve as al Qaeda’s air force.”
There are many others. These two are worth singling out because they want to be president, and their craven and brazen flip-flopping on one of the most important issues to come before them in their Senate careers is more consequential than the flip-flopping of some time-serving senator no one’s ever heard of. But the whole picture is contemptible.
Can you imagine how these people would be wailing for Assad’s head on a pike if Romney were asking for this resolution? And the Republicans in the House? I suppose a small percentage of them may be opposed. But the radio blowhards, now inveighing against “Obama’s war,” would be whooping up war fever like Hearst, and most in the House would follow suit. And remember, this is the party that voted en masse for a massive Medicare expansion in 2003—that is, a vote that was against everything they stood for, but one they took in the name of party loyalty.
They are out to undermine Obama’s credibility. They don’t care a whit about Assad, Iran, Hezbollah; indeed, on that last point, if any of them knows anything about Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, they must admire him. Nasrallah accomplishes with impressive efficiency in Lebanon what they want to accomplish in America—preventing the government from being able to do anything good for the people. All they want to do is make Obama look bad.
In contrast, look at Obama’s explanation of why he went to Congress in the first place. He was asked this question last week while in Russia. What he said is worth reprinting at length, I think: “I did not put this before Congress, you know, just as a political ploy or as symbolism. I put it before Congress because I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed an imminent, direct threat to the United States. In that situation, obviously, I don’t worry about Congress; we do what we have to do to keep the American people safe.
“I could not say that it was immediately, directly going to have an impact on our allies. Again, in those situations, I would act right away. This wasn’t even a situation like Libya, where, you know, you’ve got troops rolling towards Benghazi and you have a concern about time, in terms of saving somebody right away. This was an event that happened. My military assured me that we could act today, tomorrow, a month from now, that we could do so proportionally, but meaningfully. And in that situation, I think it is important for us to have a serious debate in the United States about—about these issues, because these—these are going to be the kinds of national security threats that are most likely to recur over the next five, 10 years.”
That’s a candid and thoroughly decent (and by the way, thoroughly constitutional) thought process. Obama couldn’t honestly say to himself that what Assad did represented the kind of direct threat to the American people that would permit the sidestepping of Congress, so he decided to go through all this. Now, of course, one can more cynically say it was the polls, and surely they played a role. But the president’s statement is in line with what we know about virtually all his top aides telling him “Don’t go to Congress” and him resisting that advice.
Obama isn’t a stupid man. He knew a lot of these yahoos would vote no just because it’s him. But he surely hoped that a certain number of them just might cast a vote in line with their worldview, which would slide many of them into the yes column. I’m sure many of my liberal readers are just glad they’re voting no, however cynically they might be doing it. Fine. But you should also leave a little space in your brain for the contemplation of just what a bunch of relentless hypocrites they are, making a decision as weighty as this purely on the basis of their hatred of Obama. And this defeat, if defeat it is, is supposed to destroy his credibility? It would only destroy theirs—that is, if they had any.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 9, 2013
“A Presidency Is Not On The Line”: The Vote On Syria Is Important, But It Will Not Dictate The Fate Obama’s His Presidency
The Hill published an item this morning that helps capture much of the Beltway thinking about Congress’ upcoming votes on military intervention in Syria. “The fate of President Obama’s second term hangs on his Tuesday speech to the nation about Syria,” the piece argues. “If Congress votes against a military attack on President Bashar Assad’s regime, Obama’s credibility may be shot, perhaps for the rest of his tenure.”
This is certainly the conventional wisdom, eagerly touted by Republicans. If Congress rejects the White House’s call for action, Obama’s defeat will be so catastrophic, he might as well resign.
Obviously, the House and Senate votes are very important; it’d be foolish to argue otherwise. The world is watching, and if the president’s call for authorization is rejected by Congress, it will carry significant consequences — for Syria, for U.S. foreign policy, and for the administration.
But let’s not go too overboard.
Yes, Obama is prepared to use force in response to Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons, and lawmakers seem prepared to turn down the president’s request. But let’s not lose sight of the larger dynamic here: Obama asks Congress for a lot of things, and lawmakers routinely say no. Kevin Drum’s take rings true:
[W]hy would rejecting Obama’s request “incapacitate the president for three long years”? I’m not asking this in the usual rhetorical way, where I pretend not to know even though I really do. I’m really asking. Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?
Legislation that Congress was unlikely to pass will face equally long odds regardless of the outcome of the Syria debate. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine any lawmakers looking at a bill that might yet pass and saying, “Well, I was prepared to vote for this, but since the authorization to use force in Syria didn’t work out, forget it.”
Obama couldn’t get Congress to focus on job creation. Or gun violence. Or really much of anything at all. A loss on a Syria resolution may have some qualitative differences — it’s foreign policy, not domestic — but Clinton lost House votes on Bosnia and Kosovo, and his presidency didn’t magically collapse on the spot.
If Obama comes up short on Syria, it’d really just be a reminder that congressional Republicans will simply reject everything the president wants out of hand, even when they agree with him — which is something we already knew.
Brian Beutler is thinking along the same lines.
When President Obama decided to seek authorization to bomb Syria, he didn’t just throw the fate of his plans into the hands of 535 unpredictable members of Congress. He also made himself vulnerable to overblown suggestions that his entire second term is on the line.
Political reporters have a weakness for narratives, and the narrative of a weakened president is irresistible. Moreover, members of Congress will feed that narrative. Even Democrats. If you’re Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, a great way to pad your vote count is to plead to your caucus that if the resolution fails, Obama will become a lame duck a year earlier than he ought to.
This pitch is both morally and factually incorrect.
Lawmakers who were prepared to vote for immigration reform won’t change their minds over Syria. The same is true of lawmakers who want to hold the debt ceiling hostage, change the sequestration policy, or really do much anything. The vote on Syria is important, but it will not dictate the fate of Obama’s presidency.
Just to be clear, the outcome of this foreign policy fight matters. In the short term, it will carry life-and-death consequences in Syria, and in the medium term, it will likely affect the nation’s diplomatic and national security efforts (though I’ve long argued that Republican radicalism has put the U.S. in a post-treaty phase anyway).
But the notion that Congress can effectively end Obama’s presidency with one vote on a resolution on force in Syria appears to be an overstatement. Some Republicans may want to use it as an excuse to reject an agenda they disapprove of anyway, and some in the media may see a pretense to write the president’s political obituary, but both are a little over the top.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 9, 2013
“Our New Isolationism”: Sometimes, You Have To Put Some Spine In Your Diplomacy
The United States has just spent thousands of American lives in a distant land for a victory that now seems hollow, if indeed it can be called a victory at all. Our own country, moreover, is emerging from a recession, dispirited and self-absorbed, worried about the fragility of the recovery and the state of our democracy. Idealism is in short supply. So, as another far-off war worsens, Americans are loath to take sides, even against a merciless dictator, even to the extent of sending weapons. The voices opposed to getting involved range from the pacifist left to the populist right. The president, fearful that foreign conflict will undermine his domestic agenda, vacillates.
This is the United States in 1940. Sound a little familiar?
I’ve been reading two engrossing new histories of that time — “Those Angry Days” by Lynne Olson and “1940” by Susan Dunn — both focused on the ferocious and now largely forgotten resistance Franklin D. Roosevelt had to navigate in order to stand with our allies against Hitler.
Of course, 2013 is not 1940. The Middle East is not Europe. President Obama is not F.D.R. But America is again in a deep isolationist mood. As a wary Congress returns from its summer recess to debate Syria, as President Obama prepares to address the nation, it is instructive to throw the two periods up on the screen and examine them for lessons. How does a president sell foreign engagement to a public that wants none of it?
The cliché of the season is that Americans are war-weary from our long slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is true, but not the whole story. To be sure, nothing has done more to discredit an activist foreign policy than the blind missionary arrogance of the Bush administration. But the isolationist temper is not just about the legacy of Iraq. Economic troubles and political dysfunction have contributed to a loss of confidence. Add to the mix a surge of xenophobia, with its calls for higher fences and big-brotherly attention to the danger within. (These anxieties also helped give rise to the expanding surveillance state, just as nativism in that earlier period gave license to J. Edgar Hoover’s obsessive eavesdropping.)
Isolationism is strong in the Tea Party, where mistrust of executive power is profound and where being able to see Russia from your front yard counts as mastery of international affairs. But sophisticated readers of The New York Times are not immune, or so it seems from the comments that arrive when I write in defense of a more assertive foreign policy. (In recent columns I’ve advocated calibrated intervention to shift the balance in Syria’s civil war and using foreign aid to encourage democracy in Egypt.) Not our problems, many readers tell me.
Isolationism is not just an aversion to war, which is an altogether healthy instinct. It is a broader reluctance to engage, to assert responsibility, to commit. Isolationism tends to be pessimistic (we will get it wrong, we will make it worse) and amoral (it is none of our business unless it threatens us directly) and inward-looking (foreign aid is a waste of money better spent at home).
“We are not the world’s policeman, nor its judge and jury,” proclaimed Representative Alan Grayson, a progressive Florida Democrat, reciting favorite isolationist excuses for doing nothing. “Our own needs in America are great, and they come first.”
At the margins, at least, isolationists suspect that our foreign policy is being manipulated by outside forces. In 1940, as Olson’s book documents, anti-interventionists deplored the cunning British “plutocrats” and “imperialists,” who had lured us into the blood bath of World War I and now wanted to goad us into another one. In 2013, it is supposedly the Israelis duping us into fighting their battles.
Many pro-Israel and Jewish groups last week endorsed an attack on Syria, but only after agonizing about a likely backlash. And, sure enough, the first comment posted on The Washington Post version of this story was, “So how many Americans will die for Israel this time around?” This is tame stuff compared with 1940, when isolationism was shot through with shockingly overt anti-Semitism, not least in the rhetoric of the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Both Lynne Olson and Susan Dunn, in interviews, were wary of pushing the analogy too far. The Middle East, they point out, is far murkier, far less familiar.
“In 1940 everything was black and white — there was no gray,” Dunn told me. “On one side, Adolf Hitler and ruthless, barbaric warfare; on the other side, democracy, humanism, morality and world civilization itself.” Yes, at least so it seems in hindsight, but the choice was not so clear in 1940. Both books offer copious examples of serious, thoughtful people who had real doubts about whether Hitler was a threat worth fighting: cabinet members and generals, newspaper publishers and business leaders. At Yale, Dunn reports, an antiwar student movement that included such future luminaries as Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart and Sargent Shriver drafted a petition demanding “that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.”
Olson told me she was startled to hear Secretary of State John Kerry inveighing against “armchair isolationism” last week in his testimony on Syria. “I think to be skeptical now does not mean you’re an isolationist,” said Olson, who is herself skeptical about taking sides in Syria. “It’s become a dirty word.”
Fair enough. But can we dial down the fears and defeatist slogans of knee-jerk isolationism and conduct a serious discussion of our interests and our alternatives in Syria and the tumultuous region around it?
The event that ultimately swept the earlier isolationists off the board was, of course, Pearl Harbor. But even before the Japanese attack the public reluctance was gradually giving way, allowing the delivery of destroyers to the British, the Lend-Lease program, a precautionary weapons buildup and the beginning of military conscription.
One factor that moved public opinion toward intervention was the brazenness of Hitler’s menace; Americans who had never given a thought to the Sudetenland were stunned to see Nazis parading into Paris.
Another was a robust debate across the country that ultimately transcended partisanship and prejudice.
Most historians and popular memory credit Roosevelt’s leadership for the country’s change of heart, but Olson points out that for much of that period Roosevelt was — to borrow a contemporary phrase — leading from behind. He campaigned in 1936 on a pledge to “shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars” and to seek to “isolate ourselves completely from war.” It was a vow he renewed repeatedly as Hitler conquered country after country: there would be no American boots on the ground.
Olson argues that while Roosevelt resolved early to send aid to Britain, it is not at all clear that he would have taken America into the war if it had not been forced upon him by Pearl Harbor. But by December 1941, she writes, “the American people had been thoroughly educated about the pros and cons of their country’s entry into the conflict and were far less opposed to the idea of going to war than conventional wisdom has it.”
“Obviously we got into it because of Pearl Harbor, but that debate made a crucial difference,” Olson told me. “And I think that is what’s called for now.”
Congress in recent years has not won much respect as an arena of policy debate, but it was heartening last week to hear leaders of both parties moving a little beyond petty obstructionism and bitter partisanship and inviting a serious discussion.
I hope that Congress can elicit from the president this week a clear and candid statement of America’s vital interests in Syria, and a strategy that looks beyond the moment. I hope the president can persuade Congress that the U.S. still has an important role to play in the world, and that sometimes you have to put some spine in your diplomacy. And I hope Americans will listen with an open mind.
By: Bill Keller, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 8, 2013
“Polarized Politics”: Syria Puts Our System On Trial
It was only a matter of time before our polarized politics threatened to destroy a president’s authority and call into question our country’s ability to act in the world. Will Congress let that happen?
To raise this question is not to denigrate those, left and right, who deeply believe that the United States should temper its international military role. Nor is it to claim that President Obama’s proposed strikes on Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons constitute some sort of “slam dunk” policy that should win automatic assent. But a bitter past hangs over this debate and could overwhelm a discussion of what’s actually at stake.
The wretched experience of Iraq is leading many Democrats to see Obama’s intervention in Syria as little different from what came before. Never mind that the evidence of Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people is far clearer than the evidence was about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or that Obama has been so reluctant to take military action up to now. He faces a peculiar problem: While hawks criticize Obama for not being willing to act boldly enough against Assad, doves criticize him for being too willing to risk a wider war. Members of Obama’s party have to understand the risks of forcing him to walk away from a red line that he drew for good reason.
At the same time, Democrats will never forget how their patriotism and fortitude were questioned when they challenged President George W. Bush on Iraq and other post-9/11 policies. Yes, Bush did sign a fundraising letter before the 2006 midterm election that spoke of Democrats “who will wave the white flag of surrender in the global war on terror and deny the tools needed to achieve victory.” At a campaign event that year, he said of Democrats: “It sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is to wait until we’re attacked again.”
I bring this up only to remind Republicans opposing Obama on Syria — and I’m not talking about the consistent anti-interventionist libertarians — that some in their party are making arguments now that they condemned Democrats for making not very long ago. Can we ever break this cycle of recrimination?
Obama bears responsibility here, too. Precisely because he had been so unwilling to intervene in Syria, he has handed opponents of his policy some of the very arguments they are using against him. Until Obama decided that the chemical attacks required a strong response, he was wary of getting involved, because the United States has reason to fear victory by either side in Syria. His old view may have been reasonable, but it can easily be invoked to undercut his current one.
The question now is whether Congress really wants to incapacitate the president for three long years. My hunch is that it doesn’t. This is why Republicans such as John Boehner, Eric Cantor and John McCain and Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Chris Van Hollen and Gerry Connolly all find themselves battling to give Obama the authority to act. The inconsistency of some Republicans shouldn’t blind us to the fact that others in the GOP are taking courageous risks to avoid paralyzing the president.
They will not prevail, however, unless Obama makes an unabashedly moral case on Tuesday explaining why things are different than they were a few months ago while laying out a practical strategy beyond the strikes. He must do something very difficult: show that his approach could succeed, over time, in replacing Assad with a new government without enmeshing the United States in a land conflict involving troops on the ground.
The administration’s view is that only a negotiated settlement will produce anything like a decent and stable outcome in Syria — and that only forceful U.S. action now will put the United States in a position to get the parties to the table. It’s not tidy or an easy sell, but it’s a plausible path consistent with what the United States can and can’t do.
If Obama wins this fight, as he must, he should then set about restoring some consensus about the United States’ world role. He has to show how a priority on “nation-building at home” can be squared with our international responsibilities. The seriousness of this crisis should also push Republicans away from reflexive anti-Obamaism, Rush Limbaugh-style talk-show madness, extreme anti-government rhetoric and threats to shut Washington down.
If we want to avoid becoming a second-class nation, we have to stop behaving like one.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 8, 2013
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