“The Only Way Victory Can Be Achieved”: Republicans Still Obsessed With Message-Sending
There was a weird little sidelight to the just-concluded mini-crisis over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which was that the American Action Network, a group allied with John Boehner, was running ads criticizing conservative Republicans for not supporting a clean DHS funding bill, even as Boehner was trying to win them over with a much softer approach. But what really struck me watching this was something about the message itself:
You may have noticed that when the ad says “put real teeth in immigration enforcement,” the image is of a Predator drone, presumably because we’ll be raining missiles down on people wading through the Rio Grande. Which is…interesting. But here’s the text:
“While the threats grow, conservatives in Congress want to beef up our security, enhance cybersecurity, and put real teeth in immigration enforcement. It’s the right message to send to our enemies. But some in Washington are willing to put our security at risk by jeopardizing critical security funding. That’s the wrong message to send to our enemies. Tell Congressman Tim Huelskamp to fund homeland security. Our safety must come first.”
This is a common argument, particularly when it comes to national security policy. “Sending messages” is supposed to be extremely important, and not just to friends and potential supporters, but to adversaries and enemies as well. Indeed, sometimes it seems that victory can be achieved if only we “send the right message.”
George W. Bush was particularly fond of citing the importance of proper message-sending. For instance, here are some of the things he said in the first debate he did in 2004 with John Kerry:
“[Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi] doesn’t want U.S. leadership, however, to send mixed signals, to not stand with the Iraqi people…I don’t see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. What message does that send our troops? What message does that send to our allies? What message does that send the Iraqis?…I know we won’t achieve if we send mixed signals. I know we’re not going to achieve our objective if we send mixed signals to our troops, our friends, the Iraqi citizens…The way to make sure that we succeed is to send consistent, sound messages to the Iraqi people…I think that by speaking clearly and doing what we say and not sending mixed messages, it is less likely we’ll ever have to use troops…But by speaking clearly and sending messages that we mean what we say, we’ve affected the world in a positive way…[Kim Jong-Il] wants to unravel the six- party talks, or the five-nation coalition that’s sending him a clear message…You cannot lead if you send mixed messages. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to our troops. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to our allies. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to the Iraqi citizens.”
Now I don’t mean to say that message-sending is never important. Adversaries and allies alike notice both what we do and what we say. But the idea that what matters in defeating ISIS is the message we send them is kind of crazy. There are plenty of reasons why it would have been a bad idea to shut down DHS, but it’s not like somewhere in Mosul a bunch of ISIS fighters would be watching CNN and say, “We were prepared to abandon this war, but this sends a message of weakness. The time to strike America is now!”
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 4, 2015
“Rubio Blasts ISIS Strategy He Supports”: His Own Views On Foreign Policy Need Quite A Bit Of Work
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is clearly aware of the fact that many of the Republican presidential candidates are current or former governors. But the Florida senator believes he would have an important advantage over his GOP rivals.
“The next president of the United States needs to be someone that has a clear view of what’s happening in the world, a clear strategic vision of America’s role in it and a clear practical plan for how to engage America in global affairs,” Rubio said. He added that for governors running for the White House, international affairs will be “a challenge, at least initially, because they don’t deal with foreign policy on a daily basis.”
On the surface, that’s not a bad pitch. Indeed, presidential candidates from the Senate have made similar arguments against governors for many years. But listening to Rubio’s remarks this morning at CPAC, the trouble is that his own views on foreign policy need quite a bit of work.
“ISIS is a radical Sunni Islamic group. They need to be defeated on the ground by a Sunni military force with air support from the United States,” Rubio said.
“Put together a coalition of armed regional governments to confront [ISIS] on the ground with U.S. special forces support, logistical support, intelligence support and the most devastating air support possible,” he added, “and you will wipe ISIS out.”
Rubio’s remarks solicited applause from the mostly college-aged audience, as did the senator’s claim that “the reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” during sensitive negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
Given Rubio’s interest in the issue, and the months of research and preparation he’s completed, I’m genuinely surprised at how bizarre this is.
Right off the bat, the notion that the president wouldn’t go after ISIS because he “doesn’t want to upset Iran” is bizarre – ISIS and Iran are enemies. Tehran is more than happy to see U.S. forces go after ISIS targets; in fact, Iran has done the same thing. When it comes to the terrorist group, Americans and Iranians are on the same side. How could Rubio not know this?
For that matter, the argument that Obama “hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS” is plainly untrue. Rubio should know this, not only because he’s a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an unannounced presidential candidate, but also because Obama’s strategy to defeat ISIS is largely identical to Marco Rubio’s.
The senator fleshed this out at CPAC: target ISIS by using local ground forces, coupled with air support from the United States, all while U.S. officials take the lead in assembling an international coalition.
That, as of this morning, is Rubio’s plan. It’s also exactly what Obama has been doing since August.
This isn’t even the first time the senator has run into this problem. A month after the president launched a military offensive against ISIS targets, Rubio wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post with the following pitch:
To confront the Islamic State terrorists, we need a sustained air campaign targeting their leadership, sources of income and supply routes, wherever they exist. We must increase our efforts to equip and capacitate non-jihadists in Syria to fight the terrorist group. And we must arm and support forces in Iraq confronting it, including responsible Iraqi partners and the Kurds. In addition, we must persuade nations in the region threatened by the Islamic State to participate in real efforts to defeat it.
I’m not accusing Rubio of plagiarism, but this is awfully close to a word-for-word summary of the Obama administration’s policy.
If the senator wants to complain about the pace of progress against ISIS, fine. He’s not alone. But for Rubio to criticize Obama for adopting a policy Rubio endorses, all while getting Iran’s position backwards, is a bad sign for a guy whose “clear view of what’s happening in the world” is supposed to set him apart from his GOP rivals.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 27, 2015
“Just Differing Species Of The Same Family”: ISIS And American Conservatives; If It Looks Like A Duck And Quacks Like A Duck…
Look who just banned teaching evolution in schools:
The extremist-held Iraqi city of Mosul is set to usher in a new school year. But unlike years past, there will be no art or music. Classes about history, literature and Christianity have been “permanently annulled.”The Islamic State group has declared patriotic songs blasphemous and ordered that certain pictures be torn out of textbooks.
But instead of compliance, Iraq’s second largest city has — at least so far — responded to the Sunni militants’ demands with silence. Although the extremists stipulated that the school year would begin Sept. 9, pupils have uniformly not shown up for class, according to residents who spoke anonymously because of safety concerns. They said families were keeping their children home out of mixed feelings of fear, resistance and uncertainty.
I know we’re not supposed to say this out loud because it’s so outrageous to suggest that ISIS and American conservatives might have anything in common. And obviously the level of outrageous and murderous violence perpetrated by ISIS has no parallel in the American political system–but that’s also because of the secular counterweight of civil society and constitutional democracy. Culturally, there are a lot of striking similarities between the conservative reactionary ethos in both the western and the Islamic worlds.
Hate evolution? check.
Hate sexually liberated and empowered women? Check.
Love guns and hate gays? Check.
Hate big liberal government? Check.
Believe that society should be organized according to religious principles and that secular people should have no right to curtail religious “freedom”? Check.
Want to empower down-home rural principles against those corrupt city bubble dwellers? Check.
Believe in eye-for-an-eye retributive justice? Check.
Love to sport big Duck Dynasty-style beards? Check.
Just how much quacking do we need to see here before we acknowledge they’re just differing species of the same family of ducks?
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 22, 2015
“A Triumph Of American Culture Welcoming Immigrants”: Why Republican Fear-Mongering About France Is Detached From Reality
One frequent criticism conservatives make of Barack Obama when it comes to terrorism is that he doesn’t “understand” the threats we face. This supposed lack of understanding, they say, is what leads the President to be so weak when what is needed is more strength, more military action, more belligerence. Those who “understand” terrorism know that this is the only path to combating it effectively.
With the attacks in Paris last week, conservatives and Republicans are again asserting that Obama’s lethal combination of ignorance and weakness is leaving us vulnerable, because terrorist incidents like the ones in France are soon to occur here in America. For instance, here’s an excerpt from a glowing story about John McCain in today’s New York Times:
He said in an interview last Thursday that Mr. Obama’s decision not to send more American troops to Iraq to thwart the Islamic State had put America at risk.
“That attack you saw in Paris? You’ll see an attack in the United States,” Mr. McCain said. He repeated his frequent assessment that the president’s foreign policy is “a disaster” and “delusional.” He said “of course” he would have made a better commander in chief.
Let’s follow the logic here. McCain is arguing that because we don’t have enough troops in Iraq, someone could get some guns and shoot a bunch of Americans — presumably at ISIS’s behest — whereas if we had more troops there, ISIS would still want to launch (or order, or encourage, or inspire) that kind of an attack, but they wouldn’t be able to.
So what exactly does McCain think was required for those two men to attack the Charlie Hebdo offices? Was it an international conspiracy involving a huge mobilization of resources and the coordination of large numbers of people spread across the world? No. Despite the fact that al Qaeda in Yemen is trying to claim responsibility for it, all that the attack required was two guys and a couple of guns.
Yet McCain thinks that whether such an attack occurs in America will be determined by how strong and aggressive we’re being against ISIS.
McCain’s good friend Lindsey Graham had a similar interpretation of the events in Paris: it’s going to happen here, and it’s because President Obama is weak. “I fear we can expect and must prepare for more attacks like this in the future,” he said, adding that, because of Barack Obama’s poor policy choices, “I fear our intelligence capabilities, those designed to prevent such an attack from taking place on our shores, are quickly eroding.”
But even if you believed that Obama is eroding our intelligence capabilities (and I have no idea what he’s talking about on that score), does that make us more vulnerable to a couple of guys with guns shooting up a public place? If such an attack were in the works, it wouldn’t require getting resources from overseas, and it wouldn’t require coordination and communication of the kind American intelligence might intercept. All that would be necessary is for someone who is angry enough to go to a gun show, pick up some heavy weaponry, and he’d be on his way. And he probably wouldn’t have to go far — according to this calendar, there are 61 gun shows happening this week in America — not this year or this month, but just this week.
Given how easy it would be to carry out an attack like the one on Charlie Hebdo, the real question is why it doesn’t happen all the time. While there have been a number of cases in recent years in which right-wing terrorists have tried to shoot a bunch of people, there have been only a couple of occurrences of politically motivated jihadist attacks like the ones in Paris — not an attempt to plant a bomb or do something similarly elaborate, but just somebody taking a gun and shooting a bunch of people — most notably that of Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people at Ft. Hood in 2009 (there was also a Seattle man who killed four people last year and claimed it was revenge for American military actions).
So why doesn’t it happen more here? The answer is that unlike their European counterparts, American Muslims are as a group extremely assimilated and patriotic. So there’s virtually no one here who wants to carry out such an attack. Our relative safety on this score isn’t a triumph of intelligence, it’s a triumph of the American culture of welcoming immigrants.
Of course intelligence is important in preventing terrorism. But Republican critics, who are so proud of their supposedly deep understanding of national security issues, seem to believe that every kind of terrorist attack is exactly alike, and is made more or less likely for exactly the same reasons. That’s the kind of sophisticated thinking on terrorism we’ve supposedly been missing for the last six years.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 14, 2015
“Voters Remorse”: The New GOP Congress Americans Do Not ‘Wish They Had’
The man who lost the last (presidential) election round and who goes around talk shows trying to pretend he did not, has some advice for the man who beat him in 2012.
Appearing on Sunday’s CBS Face the Nation, failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney told Bob Schieffer, when asked about the possibility of “Obama taking executive action to overhaul immigration policy,” “The president has got to learn that he lost this last election round.”
The man who lost the last (presidential) election round said so after lecturing his nemesis about how to fight ISIL (“what we should have done by now is have — is have American troops staying by in — in Iraq”) and after implying that perhaps the President should just curl up in a fetal position, contrary to David Axelrod’s and most Americans’ expectations. “The President ought to let the Republican Congress, the Republican House and the Republican Senate come together with legislation that they put on his desk which relates to immigration,” the man who lost the last (presidential) election round told Bob Schieffer.
This latest bit of GOP arrogance is very similar to Mitch McConnell’s recent hubris: “We’d like for the president to recognize the reality that he has the government that he has, not the one that he wishes he had, and work with us,” when a “very disturbed” incoming Senate Majority Leader lamented that the president was still the President and was still intending to use his executive powers.
Which, in turn, is very reminiscent of the effrontery of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whose callous response to a soldier asking for better protection for our troops in Iraq was: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Memo to Messrs. Romney and McConnell — and to the GOP:
Midterm elections are not intended to neuter a president. They are midcourse corrections intended to make government work better for the people who elect their representatives; to — in fact — transform the government we have into the government the people wish they have. On November 4, 2014, the American people gave Republicans another chance to stop the obstruction, stop the obfuscation, stop the gridlock, stop the arrogance, stop the raw partisanship and work with a man who is still President of the United States for the common good of all Americans, not just a few.
To do all this, congressional Republicans must disprove the disturbing allegation that they “have been sent to Washington with a mandate not so much to conduct business but rather to collect a bounty, to do what they promised and what their supporters expect: Stop Obama at any cost and at every turn, to erase his name or at least put an asterisk by it.”
Or will they?
By: Dorian de Wind, The Huffington Post Blog, November 17, 2014
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