“Foolish And Bellicose”: The Failure Of The Anti-Hagel Campaign
Former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense was really never much in doubt, despite the clamorous complaints of a few vocal conservatives. Still, Hagel’s likely confirmation has gained additional support in recent weeks that make his success all but certain. Despite the concerted efforts of a few outside Republican interest groups and a steady stream of hostile coverage from conservative media outlets, Hagel has received the public support of numerous former national security officials, diplomats, and retired military officers, as well as securing endorsements from several senators even before his hearing began today. Excluding members of the Bush administration, Hagel’s nomination has been endorsed by every living former secretary of defense and secretary of state. Faced with an unprecedented campaign of character assassination and misrepresentation in the media, Hagel has become a rallying point for Americans across the political spectrum interested in greater prudence and restraint in the way the U.S. acts overseas.
While it shouldn’t make a difference to the final outcome, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s threat to put a hold on Hagel’s nomination until outgoing Secretary Leon Panetta testifies on the Benghazi attack is a reminder that issues that are mostly irrelevant to Hagel’s competence to run the Defense Department have dominated the debate over this appointment. Hawkish Republicans have argued that then-Sen. Hagel’s relatively mild dissent on issues related to Israel and Iran disqualify him for the job. However, most of these have no bearing on the responsibilities Hagel will have at the Pentagon, and those that do should increase the public’s confidence in Hagel rather than undermine it. This has underscored the overwhelmingly ideological nature of the campaign against him, which has had more to do with policing what current and future politicians can say on foreign policy than it does with selecting the right people to serve in the Cabinet.
So it appears that the anti-Hagel campaign has failed. The Democratic defections that conservatives coveted never materialized, and this week, the first Republican, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, announced his support for the nomination. The anti-Hagel campaign has mainly managed to waste its donors’ money, and it has made the politicians that have sided with it appear foolish and bellicose, and all for the sake of “taking a stand” against a nominee who, lest we forget, is a Republican.
Still, at least 15 Senate Republicans have declared their opposition to Hagel or are reported to be leaning in that direction, which reflects just how committed a large number of the party’s leaders still are to a hard-line foreign policy vision that has brought the GOP and the country nothing but woe for the last decade. The failure of the anti-Hagel effort could be a final straw that breaks the hold that the worst hard-liners have had on the party, but so far, there is not much evidence of that. In the meantime, the message that most people will receive is that leading Republicans have learned nothing from their past failures and seek retribution against those in their party that have.
After all, Hagel was one of the few national Republican figures who saw the potential pitfalls in Iraq before the invasion, and later came to recognize the full extent of the folly of the U.S. war there. Most of his Republican colleagues in Washington have still not fully reckoned with the disastrous decision to invade in 2003, and to make matters worse, they insist on holding Hagel’s skepticism about the wisdom of attacking Iran against him. Each charge they make against Hagel for being too “soft” on Iran bounces back on them and marks them as the reflexively, dangerously aggressive people that they are.
The good news for the country is that a competent and qualified nominee for the Defense post will almost certainly be approved by the Senate in the near future. Unfortunately, a large number of Hagel’s fellow Republicans have done their best to use this confirmation process to inflict even more damage on their party’s battered reputation on foreign policy and national security. Hagel’s nomination should have been a chance for Republicans to start repairing the party’s image in the eyes of the public. They are well on their way to squandering it.
ByDaniel Larison, The Week, January 31, 2013
“The Moral Case For President Obama”: The Exercise Of Conscience And Judgment
We’ve talked a lot of policy on the Dish this election cycle – airing legitimate differences on how to handle foreign policy, or taxes, or how best to run a healthcare system. And that’s absolutely part of an election, and I fully accept the validity of the views of those who legitimately disagree with me on what are essentially prudential judgments. I’ve supported Democrats and Republicans in my adult life, for different prudential reasons at different moments in time. In politics, I’m a conservative; not an ideologue.
But there is another dimension to politics and it’s about morality. Some issues are not subject to prudential or utilitarian reasoning, but are fundamental a priori moral questions. Let me cite three areas where I think the difference between Obama and Romney is a deep and moral one and requires the exercize of conscience as well as judgment.
The first is universal access to healthcare. I’ve long been a fan of the great parts of America’s private healthcare system: its treatment of patients as customers they want to keep, as opposed to human beings they are simply mandated to treat; the innovation of the pharmaceutical companies in a free market; private hospitals and doctors. But the fact that tens of millions of human beings cannot afford access to this often excellent private healthcare, even in a basic form, remains, to my mind, a scandal. That there are two nations in this country – one with the security of healthcare and one with no security at all – remains, to my mind, a moral disgrace.
That view comes ultimately from my Catholic faith. But it also comes from my surviving a plague and seeing so many die in often unbelievable neglect. It comes from realizing that if I encounter a sick person, every particle of my being wants to see that person get care, and it’s only by looking away that I can ignore this core truth. It comes from understanding that as someone with a pre-existing condition, I would be bankrupted if I ever lost insurance through an employer. And I am so much more privileged than so many.
I don’t believe in the kind of socialized medicine they have in my home country, where the government really does run the industry. But I do believe as a core moral principle in universal access to basic healthcare in wealthy countries.
This election is really asking you: do you believe everyone should be able to have access to private health insurance or not? When I examine my conscience, my answer has to be yes.
I believe in equal human dignity, and denying someone medicine to live healthily denies that dignity. To run a campaign in favor of removing that kind of security for tens of millions of Americans and replacing it with nothing remotely comparable is simply, deeply, morally wrong.
Torture is also a non-negotiable issue for me. It is simply unacceptable. It is the negation of the West’s entire founding principles. Any candidate of any party who supports it rules himself out for me on that ground alone. Romney will bring it back. He will make America a torturing nation again. He would employ the former war criminals of the dark years of Bush-Cheney and legitimize them still further. He would reinforce the idea, propagated by Cheney, that torture is a “no-brainer”, giving comfort to every vicious dictator on the planet to do the same. This was not the case in 2008, when both candidates disavowed torture, and one of them had actually suffered by the exact torture techniques approved by Bush-Cheney.
Finally, I cannot reconcile a pre-emptive war against a country that only has the technical ability to make a nuclear bomb, but has not weaponized it or threatened its use, with any reading of just war theory.
I have no illusions about the evil in the Tehran regime. This page was obsessed with the suppressed Iranian revolution three years ago and covered it like no other. I despise theocracy perhaps more than any other form of government – because it is a blasphemy as well as a dictatorship. But when the Supreme Leader of that theocracy publicly declares as religious doctrine that using a nuclear bomb is a sin, and when the opposition in Iran favors the nuclear program as a matter of national pride, and when Iran’s nuclear capability would still be no match for Israel’s massive and fully actionable nuclear apparatus, then pre-emptive war is morally unconscionable. To use an expression like “mowing the lawn” to decribe such acts of war that would kill countless people makes me sick to my stomach.
If the Iranian theocrats were to constuct an actual nuclear bomb and directed it toward other countries, I still would favor containment. I believe in the doctrine of deterrence. But I can see, given the evil nature of the regime, especially its disgusting anti-Semitism, why some may disagree with that view, including the president. I can also see why the Jewish people, given the enormities they have suffered and the extraordinary achievement of their dynamic, tiny state, would lean on the side of extreme caution. But to launch a war with necessary ground troops and brutal bunker-busting bombs simply because a country has the technical capability to enrich enough material for a nuclear bomb – that’s immoral. It’s unjust. When that country poses no threat to the United States itself, it’s way outside the parameters of a just war.
Romney favors such a pre-emptive war based merely on Iran’s capability. Obama favors it based on the actual decision to construct a nuclear weapon. Both, I believe, are morally troublesme, from a just war perspective. But Romney’s is far worse. I’m no pacifist. But I also deeply oppose war except in self-defense with as few civilian casualties as is possible.
I’m not citing civil rights issues, but they of course factor in. The GOP’s institutional bigotry toward gay people and our lives and families and its stated intent to keep a whole class of us disenfranchized from the basic right to marry the person you love appalls me. But I understand this is a state matter, not a federal one. And I’m addressing presidential decisions here. I endorsed George W. Bush and Bob Dole who explicitly opposed marriage equality. Heck, I supported a Democrat named Barack Obama who did at the time as well. But I believe in federalism on this. And always have.
On the universality of access to healthcare, on torture, and on pre-emptive war, my conscience therefore requires me to withhold support for the Republican candidate. I disagree with him on many prudential policy grounds – but none reach the level of moral seriousness of the above. Yes, a lot of this comes from my faith in the teachings of Jesus and the social teaching of the Catholic tradition in its primary concern for the poor and weak and the sick – rather than praising, as Romney and Ryan do, the superior morality of the prosperous and strong and healthy. But on all three topics, a purely secular argument also applies, simply based on the core dignity and equality of the human person, and the fragile advances we have made as a civilization against barbarism like torture.
That matters. It matters in a way that nothing else does.
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, October 26, 2012
“The Neocons’ Long Game”: Don’t Expect Fuzzy Moderate Feelings To Last If Romney Ends Up In The White House
Most of the snap polls taken after last night’s foreign policy debate, the last before the November 6 election, gave the win the President Obama—if not an outright knockout then at least a TKO on points. But beyond the candidates themselves, the debate did have one clear loser: neoconservatives.
During the many years Mitt Romney has been running for president, he’s taken a number of fluid positions on foreign policy. In addition to reflecting Romney’s character as an eager-to-please shape-shifter, the changing positions also represent a genuine—and growing—policy tension among foreign policy factions within the GOP establishment.
Even though old school realists like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft retain some influence, and more isolationist voices like Senator Rand Paul represent a rising challenge, the neoconservatives remain the most dominant. But even though Romney had worked diligently since 2009 to build ties to the GOP’s neoconservative wing, and relies heavily on a number of them as his key advisers, the foreign policy vision he articulated last night indicates that he understands that American voters (at least the ones he needs to eke out an Electoral College victory) just aren’t that into the expensive, world-transformative schemes that neocons are still busy dreaming up.
Romney’s new foreign policy tack was evident on the very first question of the night, in which moderator Bob Schieffer served the issue of the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks to him on a plate. Romney chose not to re-boot his fumbled criticism of the Obama administration from the last debate, something his hawkish surrogates and the GOP’s Fox News annex have been pushing hard for over the last week. Rather, Romney chose to draw back to a broader view of a region in chaos. His Obama-esque declaration that “We can’t kill our way out of this mess,” while surely appealing to voters tired of war in the Middle East, was sure to disappoint the neocons, for whom there are few problems in the world that can’t be solved through the application of American ordnance.
It wouldn’t be the last time Romney echoed the president last night. With regard to the prospect of U.S. military interventions, Romney insisted that “We don’t want another Iraq,” even though neocons still proclaim the Iraq war a success (a commanding majority of Americans disagrees). On Iraq itself, though he criticized the failure to achieve a new status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments, Romney recoiled from President Obama’s suggestion that he didn’t support withdrawing American troops. On Syria and Afghanistan, Romney took positions 180 degree opposite what his neoconservative supporters have been advocating, assuring viewers that “I don’t want to have our military involved” in the former, and agreeing with President Obama’s withdrawal timetable for the latter.
One moment where Romney did let his inner neocon out to play was in his claim that President Obama’s efforts to engage the Iranians in diplomatic talks were taken by Iran as a sign of weakness. “I think from the very beginning, one of the challenges we’ve had with Iran is that they have looked at this administration and—and felt that the administration was not as strong as it needed to be,” Romney said. “I think they saw weakness where they had expected to find American strength.”
First, when one considers how Iran’s hardliners profited—both domestically and in regional influence—from the Bush administration’s reckless show of “strength” in the Middle East, this claim falls apart. But it also seriously misunderstands the manner in which U.S. diplomatic outreach to Iran has discombobulated an Iranian regime that much prefers to deal with an openly hostile U.S. government.
As Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar noted, President Obama “called this regime’s bluff by recognizing it. This is the worst thing you can do to your enemy, to unmask them.” Exploring this dynamic in a 2010 column, David Ignatius wrote, “White House officials argue that their strategy of engagement has been a form of pressure, and the evidence supports them.”
Perhaps the most brutal moment of the night was President Obama’s takedown of Romney’s claim that the president had gone on an “apology tour” after taking office, a treasured conservative myth despite its pantaloons being rendered aflame by virtually every fact-checking organization in existence. True to form, the Romney campaign blasted out a new “Apology Tour” ad this morning, which notably doesn’t include any footage of President Obama apologizing.
It tells us a lot about Romney’s lack of a clear foreign policy agenda that this was the moment his campaign thought most-worthy of highlighting from last night—a cheap attack based not on any substantive policy difference, but a stylistic difference founded on a complete falsehood, the idea that President Obama hasn’t proclaimed or exerted American power boldly enough.
Which is why, despite Romney’s momentary embrace of President Obama’s policies, we should still be concerned with the role that neoconservatives would play in a Romney administration. It’s important to keep in mind that, as a candidate, Governor George W. Bush made a lot of moderate, reasonable-sounding noises about foreign policy too. But when faced with a crisis on 9/11, the inexperienced president with unformed foreign policy ideas fell back on the comforting but naive idea that America’s greatness could be proclaimed, and its deterrence re-established, through the massive exercise of military force. The next president will likely face a similar crisis, even if not likely on the scale of 9/11. It very much matters who has his ear.
By: Matthew Duss, The American Prospect, October 23, 2012
“Bald-Faced Romney”: Lying As Easy As He Breathes
One of the most dramatic moments of the three presidential debates occurred during Monday night’s foreign-policy finale. In a back-and-forth over diplomacy with Iran, Mitt Romney threw Barack Obama a bone by repeating his persistent claim that the president had gone on an “apology tour” in 2009. The baseless notion of Obama “apologizing for America” has been a central theme from the start of Romney’s campaign, and his opponent was ready to jump on it: “Nothing Governor Romney just said is true,” Obama said. “Starting with this notion of me apologizing. This has probably been the biggest whopper told during this campaign.”
There was more, and it was damning for Romney. But in the aftermath, the Republican’s response set a bold new standard for shamelessness (not an easy thing for a politician to do). This morning, his campaign blasted out a brand-new “Apology Tour” ad—containing zero evidence to support the lie he won’t let die.
Both Romney and his campaign have made it abundantly clear they believe that American voters have grown so cynical about politics and politicians that they don’t care whether a presidential candidate is a bald-faced liar. Which, if it’s true, would be a terrible thing for the country—and a fortuitous thing for Romney, since he has proven himself to be a man who lies as easily and casually as he breathes.
If Romney wins the White House, this will put the country in uncharted territory. Sure, we’ve had plenty of lying presidents (and almost all of them could be called “fibbing presidents,” at least.) Just in recent decades, we saw Bill Clinton lie about “sexual relations with that woman”; we saw Richard Nixon tell terrible whoppers about Watergate; we watched LBJ lie about Vietnam. But there was a qualitative difference: Those presidents, at least, knew that they were lying. Have we ever had a commander-in-chief who could not distinguish between truth and fiction, as appears to be the case with Romney?
God only knows what kind of president Romney might turn out to be if he’s elected—center-right, some believe, or (far more likely) a prisoner of his party’s right wing. But there’s one thing we can count on: He will lie to us, and then lie some more. And American politics, hard as it is to fathom, will descend to a whole new, far deeper, level of cynicism.
By: Bob Moser, The American Prospect, October 23, 2012
“No Daylight”: From “Opposition” To “Red Line”, Justification For Another MId-East War
Since Mitt Romney has decided, for reasons that are a bit obscure, to make foreign policy a major focus of his campaign at this sensitive moment of the presidential contest, it’s time once again to note a rather jarring contradiction nestled in the center of his and his party’s policies and rhetoric. It’s nicely presented once again in a Wall Street Journal op-ed signed by the Republican nominee himself.
It begins with the usual “American exceptionalism” rap: the world is safe if the United States not only walks tall, but walks alone in its status as the source of all virtue and power:
Since World War II, America has been the leader of the Free World. We’re unique in having earned that role not through conquest but through promoting human rights, free markets and the rule of law. We ally ourselves with like-minded countries, expand prosperity through trade and keep the peace by maintaining a military second to none.
But Obama doesn’t get it, and isn’t maintaining our towering-colossus position:
President Obama has allowed our leadership to atrophy. Our economy is stuck in a “recovery” that barely deserves the name. Our national debt has risen to record levels. Our military, tested by a decade of war, is facing devastating cuts thanks to the budgetary games played by the White House. Finally, our values have been misapplied—and misunderstood—by a president who thinks that weakness will win favor with our adversaries.
But what is the supreme example of Obama’s “weakness” and refusal to keep the United States the world’s sole supremely sovereign super-power? Refusing to outsource our Middle Eastern policy to Bibi Netanyahu:
The president began his term with the explicit policy of creating “daylight” between our two countries. He recently downgraded Israel from being our “closest ally” in the Middle East to being only “one of our closest allies.” It’s a diplomatic message that will be received clearly by Israel and its adversaries alike. He dismissed Israel’s concerns about Iran as mere “noise” that he prefers to “block out.” And at a time when Israel needs America to stand with it, he declined to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In this period of uncertainty, we need to apply a coherent strategy of supporting our partners in the Middle East—that is, both governments and individuals who share our values.
So the first step Romney urges is “placing no daylight between the United States and Israel.” And that clearly includes a shift in U.S. policy towards Iran away from opposition to acquisition of nuclear weapons to the “red line” Netanyahu is demanding, acquisition of “nuclear capability,” which because of the vague nature of the definition of “capability,” means a pre-justification for military action against Tehran any old time now.
Put aside for a moment the arguments about Iran’s ultimate intentions and its alleged historically unique indifference to nuclear deterrence, or about the actual balance of military power in the Middle East. Forget if you can the calamitous consequences, not only to regional peace and stability, but to the U.S. and global economies, of war with Iran.
Think about this: Mitt Romney is running for president on a platform of indistinguishable and conjoined exceptionalism for the U.S. and Israel. And because Israel faces a vastly greater military threat, this means America would abandon its own independence of action and consign its fate to Bibi Netanyahu, a man whose views on peace and security are highly controversial in Israel itself.
Republican foreign policy thinking has had to go through a lot of twists and turns to arrive at this extraordinarily anomalous place. But the bottom line seems to be remarkably similar to the one embraced twelve years ago by George W. Bush and his advisors, who took office determined to wage war with Iraq, despite the cover of all the middle-school bully-boy talk of preventing war by plotting it constantly.
If Romney wins and the United States supinely follows Bibi into yet another, and this time vastly more dangerous, Gulf war, nobody can say we were not warned.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Anmal, October 1, 2012
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