“The Evolution Of Rand Paul”: Pandering To GOP Mega Donors
A week ago today, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal condemning “interventionists,” who are quick to use military force abroad “with little thought to the consequences.” Over the course of his 900-word piece, the Republican senator was dismissive of the “hawkish members of my own party.”
“A more realistic foreign policy would recognize that there are evil people and tyrannical regimes in this world, but also that America cannot police or solve every problem across the globe,” Paul wrote. “Only after recognizing the practical limits of our foreign policy can we pursue policies that are in the best interest of the U.S.”
But a few days later, the Republican senator attended the annual summit of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ main political operation, where Rand Paul took a very different line.
Speaking to a ballroom later, some of the loudest applause for Paul came when he quipped: “If the president has no strategy, maybe it’s time for a new president.”
In an emailed comment, however, Paul elaborated by saying: “If I were President, I would call a joint session of Congress. I would lay out the reasoning of why ISIS is a threat to our national security and seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily.”
Wait, what?
On Wednesday, Paul said he had no use for “interventionists” and the “hawkish members” of his own party who are calling for using force in the Middle East. But just 48 hours later, Paul supports U.S. military intervention abroad to destroy ISIS?
Also keep in mind, less than a month ago, Paul was asked about U.S. airstrikes targeting ISIS targets in Iraq. The senator said he had “mixed feelings” about the offensive. Apparently, those feelings are no longer mixed and Paul is now eager to “destroy ISIS militarily” – says the senator who complained last week about Hillary Clinton being a “war hawk.”
At what point do Rand Paul’s loyal followers start to reconsider whether Rand Paul actually agrees with them?
Sarah Smith recently noted that the Kentucky senator has changed his mind about federal aid to Israel, use of domestic drones, immigration, elements of the Civil Rights Act, Guantanamo Bay, and even accepting donations from lawmakers who voted for TARP.
Now, even the basic elements of his approach to using military force are up for grabs.
I suppose a Paul defender might take heart by assuming the senator doesn’t actually believe these new policy positions; he’s just saying these things to bolster support from centers of power within the Republican Party in advance of a presidential campaign. His genuine beliefs, the argument goes, are the ones he espoused before he started pandering to GOP mega donors.
But if that is the argument, it’s cold comfort. For one thing, once a politician replaces his fundamental beliefs with a more palatable worldview, it’s hard to know which version is the “real” one. For another, the “don’t worry, he’s lying” defense just never seems to resonate with a broad spectrum of voters.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 3, 2014
“How Absurdly Wrong Neo-Cons Were”: To Defeat ISIS, Ignore Partisan Alarmists And Send Smart Diplomats
It is entirely appropriate that the appalling crimes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which openly declares genocidal intentions, have inspired demands for forceful action to destroy the terrorist entity. Impatient politicians and belligerent pundits express frustration with President Obama because he isn’t bombing more sites or dispatching U.S. troops to Iraq or expanding the conflict into Syria — or just heeding their urgent advice, immediately.
Now any or all of those policies may eventually prove necessary, after careful consideration and consultation with America’s allies. But the president would be wiser to do nothing than to simply parrot the prescriptions of his neoconservative critics. And he would be wiser still to keep in mind that the past enthusiasms and errors of those critics are the underlying causes of the predicament that he and the civilized world confront today.
The undeniable reality is that there would be no ISIS (and no crisis) if the dubious neoconservative desire to invade Iraq had been duly ignored in 2003.
A jihadi movement capable of winning support from oppressed Sunni Muslims in that ravaged country arose directly from the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the installation, under American auspices, of a sectarian Shiite regime. Not only was that regime unwilling to unite Iraqis into a democratic order, but its political allegiance pointed toward Iran rather than the United States.
For anyone who listened to neoconservative “experts” such as William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, these ruinous developments would have come as a wicked surprise. Soon after the U.S. invasion, after all, Kristol had assured us that religious and ethnic divisions among Iraqis would present no significant problems whatsoever. “There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America,” he told National Public Radio in April 2003, “that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”
And the weapons of mass destruction were just around the corner, and the war would pay for itself with Iraqi oil, and the Iranians would rise up next to throw off the mullahs, while the entire Mideast underwent a miraculous transformation under the benign influence of the Bush doctrine, and blah, blah, blah…
By this point, it seems obvious to nearly everyone just how absurdly wrong all those predictions were. Just as salient, however, is that the Iraq war – and the failure of diplomacy that it represents – was the culmination of an enormous squandered opportunity, whose harmful consequences continue today. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the world rallied around the United States, from Europe to Asia; even the Iranians volunteered to help us defeat Al Qaeda.
Instead of assembling an international coalition to confront Islamist extremism – with diplomacy, technology, information, and humanitarian assistance as well as military force – the Bush administration moved against Iraq. By doing so, it alienated nearly all of our allies, forfeited the world’s sympathy, wasted thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, all to create a divided, failed state that now incubates terror.
So when someone like Kristol urges the president to bomb first and think later, as he did recently, the only sane response is bitter laughter. We need sober diplomacy and smart strategy, which President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have vowed to pursue when the United States takes over the leadership of the UN Security Council this month. And we need the patience to muster at last the broad, invincible alliance we could have led against Al Qaeda from the beginning.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, September 2, 2014
“The Calls For Panic”: There’s Time For Prudence In Addressing ISIS Threat
Over the weekend, the Century Foundation’s Michael Cohen had a terrific piece in the New York Daily News, making the case against pundits and politicians demanding more U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. The same edition of the same paper on the same day had a five-word, all-caps headline on the front page: “ISIS will be here soon.”
There’s quite a bit of this going around. President Obama’s Republican critics haven’t just condemned his foreign policy, they’ve also suggested the White House’s approach will lead to a terrorist attack on American soil. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went further than most a few weeks ago, insisting that if Obama “does not go on the offensive against ISIS,” presumably in Syria, “they are coming here.” Graham added, “[I]f we do get attacked, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages.”
Rhetoric like this isn’t subtle: ISIS wants to kill us all and that rascally Obama is doing nothing except launching several dozen airstrikes on ISIS target in Iraq. A 9/11 kind of event may be in the planning stages, the argument goes, so the president must strike in Syria immediately.
But how imminent a threat are we talking about, exactly? The New York Times reported the other day on ISIS’s “prodigious” print and online materials, which reveal some relevant details.
ISIS propaganda, for instance, has strikingly few calls for attacks on the West, even though its most notorious video, among Americans, released 12 days ago, showed the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, threatened another American hostage, and said that American attacks on ISIS “would result in the bloodshed” of Americans. This diverged from nearly all of ISIS’s varied output, which promotes its paramount goal: to secure and expand the Islamic state.
The same article quoted a scholar who said ISIS has consistently focused on what militants call “the near enemy” – leaders of Muslim countries like Bashar al-Assad of Syria – and not “the far enemy” of the United States and Europe. “The struggle against the Americans and the Israelis is distant, not a priority,” Fawaz A. Gerges said. “It has to await liberation at home.”
The piece added, “Al Qaeda has often stressed the advantage to the terrorist network of supporters who hold Western passports and can attack in their countries. But a common public rite of passage for new recruits to ISIS is tearing up or burning their passports, signifying a no-going-back commitment to the Islamic state.”
I wonder if Lindsey Graham read the article.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not suggesting ISIS is irrelevant or that U.S. officials should be indifferent to the terrorist threat. The terrorist group is clearly dangerous and the national security apparatus has a responsibility to take ISIS seriously.
But there’s a line of argument that’s emerged in recent weeks that effectively calls for panic – as if Obama’s reluctance to attack Syria without a coherent plan is going to kill us all.
There’s no reason to take such rhetoric seriously. There’s time to get this policy right, whether Republicans and the Beltway media find this unsatisfying or not.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 2, 2014
“Forget About The Disasters Of The Past”: On The Islamic State, The Voices Counseling Panic Grow Louder
There’s a new message coalescing around events in the Middle East, coming from Republicans, the media, and even a few Democrats: It’s time to panic. Forget about understanding the complexities of an intricate situation, forget about unintended consequences, forget about the disasters of the past that grew from exactly this mind-set. We have to panic, and we have to panic now.
The centerpiece of every Sunday show yesterday was a sentence that President Obama spoke in a press conference on Thursday. He answered a question about “go[ing] into Syria” by saying that we shouldn’t “put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.” Naturally, Republicans leaped to argue that Obama wasn’t actually talking about military action in Syria, but about dealing with the Islamic State (or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) more generally, and who knows what else. Many in the media took the same line. The first rule of a “gaffe” is that it should be taken out of context, and then the discussion should quickly be shifted away from whatever it was actually about to how, thus decontextualized, it might be perceived.
So on “Meet the Press,” Andrea Mitchell ignored the fact that the question Obama was answering was about U.S. military action in Syria, and asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein, “is the president wrong to signal indecision by saying that we still don’t have a strategy against ISIS?” When that didn’t elicit a sufficiently strong condemnation from Feinstein, Mitchell pressed on: “Doesn’t that project weakness from the White House?” Obviously, there’s nothing worse than “signaling indecision” or “projecting weakness.” Not even, say, invading a country without having a plan for what to do after the bombs stop falling.
Let’s not forget that the Obama administration is already taking military action against the IS by bombing their positions in Iraq. And the military is conducting surveillance flights over Syria in preparation for military action there. But to the war caucus, whose advice has proven so calamitous in the past, it’s not big enough and it’s not fast enough.
And let’s be clear about this, too: the position of the people who pretend to be horrified at Obama’s “gaffe” about not having a strategy for invading Syria is that we don’t need a strategy. As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — a man who wants to be commander in chief — said, “we ought to bomb them back to the stone age.” Having a carefully constructed plan that takes into account not just what you want to blow up but what the consequences of American action will be in the coming months and years? That’s for wimps. We should just invade, yesterday if possible, and worry about all the messy stuff later. After all, it worked in Iraq in 2003, right?
We should be able to agree on at least one thing: Anyone proposing large-scale military action in Iraq and/or Syria ought to be required to explain exactly how and why it will achieve the goal of destroying the IS, and exactly why the unintended consequences that result from some kind of invasion won’t be worse than those that would grow from a more carefully planned course of action. “Just start bombing already!” doesn’t qualify as an explanation.
If the war advocates ever get around to thinking about those consequences, they may come up with a compelling case for why proceeding carefully is a mistake, and why the dangers of acting methodically are greater than the dangers of acting with maximal force as soon as possible. They could be right. I think most Americans would be willing to listen. But they haven’t even tried to make that case. Instead, what we’re hearing is a lot like what we heard in 2003: The clock is ticking, the danger is rising, if we stop to think then we’re all gonna die.
As Michael Cohen wrote over the weekend, “if there is any one lesson from the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the nearly 13 years since Sept. 11, 2001 it is that — exceptionalist rhetoric notwithstanding — America is far from omnipotent.” Obama has always understood that fact, to the endless exasperation of Republicans who would prefer to believe, in defiance of all evidence, that there is no problem that can’t be solved with sufficient deployment of U.S. munitions. And his impulse to use calming rhetoric is anathema to those (in both the GOP and media) who mistake bellicose fist-shaking for “strength.” But Cohen’s smart and measured op-ed ran inside a newspaper with the screaming headline “ISIS WILL BE HERE SOON” on its front page. The voices of panic are getting louder.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, September 1, 2014
“Obama And The Warmongers”: The Drums Of War And The Chants For Blood; The Politics Of The ISIS Threat
We seem to be drifting inexorably toward escalating our fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as the Obama administration mulls whether to extend its “limited” bombing campaign into Syria.
Part of the reasoning is alarm at the speed and efficiency with which ISIS — a militant group President Obama described as “barbaric” — has made gains in northern Iraq and has been able to wash back and forth across the Syrian border. Part is because of the group’s ghastly beheading of the American journalist James Foley — which Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., called “ISIS’s first terrorist attack against the United States” — and threats to behead another.
But another part of the equation is the tremendous political pressure coming from the screeching of war hawks and an anxious and frightened public, weighted most heavily among Republicans and exacerbated by the right-wing media machine.
In fact, when the president tried to tamp down some of the momentum around more swift and expansive military action by indicating that he had not decided how best to move forward militarily in Syria, if at all, what Politico called an “inartful phrase” caught fire in conservative circles. When responding to questions, the president said, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”
His aide insisted that the phrase was only about how to move forward in Syria, not against ISIS as a whole, but the latter was exactly the impression conservatives moved quickly to portray.
It was a way of continuing to yoke Obama with the ill effects of a war started by his predecessor and the chaos it created in that region of the world.
In fact, if you listen to Fox News you might even believe that Obama is responsible for the creation of ISIS.
A few months ago, the Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro told her viewers that “you need to be afraid” because of Obama’s fecklessness in dealing with ISIS, adding this nugget:
“And the head of this band of savages is a man named Abu al-Baghdadi — the new Osama bin Laden — a man released by Obama in 2009 who started ISIS a year later.”
That would be extremely troubling, if true. But the fact-checking operation PolitiFact rated it “false,” saying:
“The Defense Department said that the man now known as Baghdadi was released in 2004. The evidence that Baghdadi was still in custody in 2009 appears to be the recollection of an Army colonel who said Baghdadi’s ‘face is very familiar.’
“Even if the colonel is right, Baghdadi was not set free; he was handed over to the Iraqis who released him some time later. But, more important, the legal contract between the United States and Iraq that guaranteed that the United States would give up custody of virtually every detainee was signed during the Bush administration.”
Fox, facts; oil, water.
But the disturbing reality is that the scare tactics are working. In July, a Pew Research Center report found that most Americans thought the United States didn’t have a responsibility to respond to the violence in Iraq.
According to a Pew Research Center report issued last week, however: “Following the beheading of American journalist James Foley, two-thirds of the public (67 percent) cite ISIS as a major threat to the United States.”
The report said that 91 percent of Tea Party Republicans described ISIS as a “major threat” as opposed to 65 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents.
The report also said:
“Half of the sample was asked about ISIS and the other half was asked about the broader threat of ‘Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda,’ which registered similar concern (71 percent major threat, 19 percent minor threat, 6 percent not a threat). Democrats were more likely to see global climate change than ISIS as a major threat.
Americans were thrilled by our decision to exit Iraq when we did, but support for that decision is dropping. In October 2011, Gallup asked poll respondents if they approved or disapproved of Obama’s decision that year to “withdraw nearly all United States troops from Iraq.” Seventy-five percent said they approved. In June of this year, the approval rate had fallen to 61 percent.
Yet 57 percent still believe that it was a mistake to send troops to fight in Iraq in the first place.
Now, Republicans are beginning to pull out the big gun — 9/11 — to further scare the public into supporting more action. Senator Lindsey Graham has said on Fox News that we must act to “stop another 9/11,” possibly a larger one, and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has warned, “Sadly, we’re getting back to a pre-9/11 mentality, and that’s very dangerous.”
Fear is in the air. The president is trying to take a deliberative approach, but he may be drowned out by the drums of war and the chants for blood.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 31, 2014
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