“Neocons Have Learned Nothing”: Rand Paul Faces Challenge In Opposing GOP War Hawks
Kentucky senator Rand Paul is a curious vehicle for reformation of the Republican Party. He’s not a font of creative ideas; he’s hobbled by intellectual contradictions; he’s viewed skeptically by his party’s establishment. Still, Paul brings a refreshing view of the limits of warfare to a GOP that has spent the last several decades enthusiastically embracing military interventions across the globe.
So here’s to the senator’s efforts to help his party lay down its battle armor and beat its swords into plowshares. The country needs no more Dick Cheneys and far fewer John McCains.
Paul won’t easily transform the Republican Party’s views on military might. Earlier this month, Texas governor Rick Perry wrote an opinion essay criticizing him as “curiously blind” to the threat represented by international jihadists. “Viewed together, Obama’s policies have certainly led us to this dangerous point in Iraq and Syria, but Paul’s brand of isolationism (or whatever term he prefers) would compound the threat of terrorism even further,” Perry wrote in The Washington Post.
As much as anything, that’s a sign that Perry is considering once again seeking the GOP nomination for president and sees Paul as a significant rival. One way to knock off Paul, Perry believes, is to play to the GOP’s armchair hawks, who haven’t tired of sending other people’s sons and daughters to war.
Paul immediately fought back with an op-ed of his own, published in Washington-based Politico. “Unlike Perry, I oppose sending American troops back into Iraq. After a decade of the United States training Iraq’s military, when confronted by the enemy, the Iraqis dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and hid. Our soldiers’ hard work and sacrifice should be worth more than that,” he wrote.
While Paul’s views are closer to those of the American people, there is still a significant partisan divide — a challenge for the senator. Half of Americans now say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, while only 38 percent say it was the right decision, according to the Pew Research Center. (The rest are undecided.) But a closer look at polling shows that 52 percent of Republicans still believe toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.
That may simply reflect the reluctance of Republican voters to admit the failings of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. And GOP leaders know there is a lot of political fodder in knocking President Obama’s foreign policy, even if few of them present alternatives. They denounce the president’s international leadership as feckless, weak and naive — red-meat rhetoric that fires up the base.
That means Paul will have to be not only smart but also courageous if he is to help his party find a more reasonable response to a complex world. The impulse to bend the globe to our will ought to be resisted, as should the instinct to continue to feed the military-industrial complex by draining the national treasury.
One of the reasons we ended up on a misguided mission in Iraq was that Democrats failed to put up enough resistance to the neocons who were then firmly in charge of the GOP. The doomed Vietnam War (though prosecuted by Democratic presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) had left Democrats labeled wimps and cowards — a reputation they couldn’t shake. As a result, too many who should have known better, including then-senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, voted to give Bush the authority to oust Saddam.
It took Obama’s victory — he campaigned as a critic of the Iraq invasion — to help leading Democratic pols find the courage to resist a “dumb war.” There are still military interventionists in the Democratic Party, but there are far fewer who would support a war in hopes of appearing strong on the national stage.
The Republican Party hasn’t yet managed that transition. Its neocons have learned nothing from their years of folly, with Cheney and the entire cohort of Iraq War cheerleaders refusing to admit their mistakes. But if Paul can win enough support from his party’s base, he can help the GOP come to terms with a world America cannot rule.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia, The National Memo, July 19, 2014
“In Full Swoon Mode”: Rick Perry And How The Press Loves To Treat GOP Campaign Losers Like Winners
Thirty months after flaming out on the Republican primary campaign trail, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose aborted 2012 run logged a fifth-place finish in Iowa and a sixth-place showing in New Hampshire before being suspended, is suddenly enjoying a Beltway media resurgence. With the issue of America’s border security and the influx of unaccompanied children generating headlines, Perry has been out front criticizing President Obama, and the governor’s performance is earning raves.
“People love his ass” is what “one Republican operative close to Perry” told Buzzfeed (anonymously). On The McLaughlin Group this weekend, so many panelists sang Perry’s praise (“shrewd,” “winning,” “absolutely terrific”) that host John McLaughlin announced, “a star is born.”
Time has been in full swoon mode lately, touting Perry as “swaggering,” “handsome and folksy,” and insisting he’s “refreshed his message, retooled his workout routine and retrained his sights toward the national stage.” Meanwhile CNN’s Peter Hamby claimed Perry is “completely underrated” as a 2016 contender. Why? Because “other than Chris Christie, it’s hard to think of another Republican candidate with the kind of charm and personal affability, and frankly just good political skills, that Rick Perry has.”
Keep in mind, Perry recently compared gays to alcoholics (and then acknowledged he “stepped right in it”), and suggested that the Obama White House might somehow be “in on” the wave of immigrant refugees crossing the U.S. border. He also became something of a punch line last week when a sourpuss photo of his meeting with Obama lit up Twitter.
As for the issue of border security, Fox News’ own Brit Hume noted on Sunday, Perry’s demand that the National Guard be sent to patrol the border doesn’t make much sense since, by law, Guardsmen aren’t allowed to apprehend any of the refugee children coming into the country. (Children who are turning themselves over to Border Patrol agents.)
Apparently none of that matters when the press coalesces around a preferred narrative: Perry is hot and perfectly positioned for 2016. (He won the week!)
Perry’s soft press shouldn’t surprise close observers of the Beltway press corps. It’s part of a larger media double standard where Republican campaign trail losers now routinely get treated like winners. (Think: John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney.) The trend also extends to Republican policy failures, like the discredited architects of the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq, who have been welcomed back onto the airwaves to pontificate about Iraq, despite the fact they got almost everything wrong about the invasion eleven years ago.
And no, the same courtesy is not extended to Democrats. John Kerry did not camp out on the Sunday talk shows after losing to President Bush in 2004 and become a sort of permanent, television White House critic, the way McCain did after getting trounced by Obama in 2008.
But wait, Hillary Clinton lost in 2008 and she’s treated as a serious contender, so why shouldn’t Perry be? First, Clinton collected nearly 2,000 primary delegates during her run, whereas Perry earned exactly zero. Second, Clinton enjoys an enormous lead in Democratic nomination polling if she chooses to run. Perry barely even registers among GOP voters.
Last month the Texas Republican Party held a straw vote and among possible 2016 hopefuls, the Texas governor finished a distant fourth, among Texas Republicans. Outside of Texas, his support remains even thinner. A recent WMUR Granite State poll from New Hampshire had Perry winning a barely-there two percent of Republican support for the 2016 GOP primary.
How bad of a candidate was Perry during the 2012 push? Really, really bad. Not only did he suffer a famous brain freeze when he couldn’t remember which three government agencies he boldly promised to dismantle if he became president (“oops”), but he also called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and dined with birther Donald Trump.
Less than three years ago, Rick Perry showed himself to be an extraordinarily bad campaigner with a tin ear for retail politics (i.e. an absent-minded quasi-birther). Yet today, the same Rick Perry is touted by the Beltway press as a “handsome” and “underrated” campaigner who stands poised for greatness in the next presidential campaign.
Somewhere Al Gore must be shaking his head.
After he lost the 2008 election to a Supreme Court ruling, Gore was not treated to pleasing, Rick Perry-like press coverage. Rather than treating Gore as a “swaggering” star of American politics, the Beltway press basically told Gore to get lost. (The caustic coverage continued the endless media slights Gore had suffered during the campaign season.)
When the former vice president grew a beard, the catty D.C. press corps erupted in mockery:
Gore “look[s] more like an accountant on the lam from the IRS than a White House-compatible action figure” (Time); it’s “scrawny and grey-patched” (the New York Post); it “might cover up some of the added chin heft” of his rumored post-election weight gain (the Boston Herald).
And when the former vice president stepped forward in 2002 to offer a prescient warning about against with in Iraq? On CNN’s Reliable Sources, The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle described her colleagues’ reaction to Gore’s speech: “[T]he vast majority of the staff believes this was the bitter rantings of a guy who is being politically motivated and disingenuous in his arguments.”
Note that after losing an electoral landslide in 2008, Republican McCain was showered with the exact opposite type of coverage. As Media Matters noted five year ago, “[T]he media treated McCain as though his loss last November endowed him with even greater moral authority and quickly took up his crusade as their own.”
In fact, despite a wildly unsuccessful presidential campaign and his lack of senior standing inside the U.S. Senate, McCain made at least 15 Sunday talk show appearances in 2009. (By contrast, after he lost his White House run in 2004, Sen. John Kerry appeared on just three Sunday talk shows during the first eight months of President Bush’s second term.) In 2013, the New York Times reported McCain had appeared on more than 60 Sunday talk shows in less than four years.
He wasn’t the only candidate to have their reputation weirdly burnished by losing badly to Obama in 2008. Sarah Palin was catapulted into media superstardom after she helped lead the GOP to magnanimous defeat. In 2009, as she readied her book release, the obedient Beltway press treated her like a political “phenomena.” (“It’s as if she’s like a senator or something,” marveled NBC’s David Gregory.) On the day her book arrived in stores, the Washington Post commemorated the event by publishing no less than four articles and two columns. That week, the paper also hosted nine online Palin-related Q&A sessions.
What did most of the awestruck commentary often politely ignore at the time of the media’s Palin “phenomena”? The fact that the vast majority of American voters were united in their conviction that Palin should not run for president. That included a majority of Republicans.
While Palin likely became the first losing vice presidential candidate exulted into D.C. media celebrity status, Republican Dick Cheney probably also made history by becoming not only the least-liked vice president in modern American history, but the first veep from an utterly failed administration to be treated by the press as a sage upon leaving office.
Cheney’s media return in recent weeks, where he continually blames Obama for the troubles in Iraq that Cheney and President Bush first uncorked with their misguided war and faulty planning, was telegraphed five years ago when the D.C. press, just weeks after Cheney left office, hyped his anti-Obama utterances as news events. Keep in mind, at the time Cheney’s approval stood at a not-to-be-believed 13 percent.
But for some reason, Republican losers get treated as winners by the press.
By: Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America, July 15, 2014
“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
“Winking And Nodding”: Method To Madness In GOP Talk Of Obama Impeachment
In times past, Sarah Palin’s blunt call for the impeachment of President Obama for his alleged bungling of the border crisis would have been laughed off, as it deservedly should. Simply consider the source to understand why. But Obama didn’t laugh it off. During his recent swing through Texas, without referring to Palin directly, he derisively mocked her impeachment call with the shout to an audience, “Sue me! Impeach me!”
Obama has heard this call before, many times, from the legion of right-wing bloggers, websites, and talk-show gabbers, and from a motley group of tea-party-affiliated GOP House reps. Though House Speaker John Boehner and GOP establishment leaders quickly squash any talk of impeachment, the truth is that the call is very much on their table, for very good cynical, crass, and politically chilling reasons. It’s the perfect ploy to further hector, cower, and intimidate Obama into backpedaling fast from the use of executive orders to get even faint action on his major initiatives on gun control, health care, jobs, education and transportation-spending measures, and of course immigration reform. The GOP-controlled House has repeatedly declared these measures “DOA” the instant they come from the White House. The GOP set this up nicely by hammering away on the myth that Obama is recklessly ignoring the Constitution by skirting Congress and going it alone in wielding the executive pen.
This is a gross falsehood. Obama is near the bottom on the list of presidents in the number of executive orders issued. The last president who issued orders at a lower rate than Obama was Grover Cleveland. GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush issued far more executive orders per day in office than Obama. But then the issue is not, nor has it ever been, executive orders but intimidation, pure and simple.
The GOP knows that crying, “Obama is cavalierly using his executive power to bypass Congress and legislate from the Oval Office!” will trigger a powerful public backlash and reinforce its usual charge against him of dictatorial abuse. It has played this card with maximum skill in its fierce fight to wrest back control of the Senate. In this, the GOP can have it both ways on impeachment. Boehner and Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has also sharply dismissed talk of impeachment, can take the high ground on the issue by insisting that their goal is to get more Republicans elected in November — that’s Senate Republicans. But that’s exactly the point of tossing out the word. The hope is that this will stir more doubt and skepticism about Obama among many voters in the key states where GOP senatorial candidates and some House candidates are gunning to unseat Democratic incumbents.
The incessant talk of impeachment has yet another cynical plus for the GOP. It implants the ever-widening notion in the media that Obama is making a mighty effort to impose an “imperial presidency” on the nation. This charge is almost always accompanied by tossing out the words “arrogant,” “indifferent,” and “callous” to describe his alleged thumbed nose at Congress. Boehner played hard on this with his frivolous lawsuit against Obama over the use of executive orders. He self-righteously claimed that his aims were noble and pristine and designed only to protect the rights of the legislative branch against the alleged unconstitutional assault by Obama. This crude campaign to rock Obama and the Democrats back on their heels has gotten traction from a dozen court rulings that have rapped Obama on the issuance of executive orders.
Obama demanded to know how the GOP can sue and impeach him for doing his job. That’s the point. He’s done his job too well. A case in point is the hike in the minimum wage. The GOP adamantly opposes Obama’s proposal to hike the minimum wage. He had absolutely no chance of getting this through the House. Instead he issued an executive order that boosted the minimum wage only to new federal contracts issued, and then only if other terms of a contractual agreement change. This was entirely legal but had little overall effect on the nation’s wage structure. Yet it was significant in another respect.
It was a frontal challenge to the GOP to cease its relentless, dogged, and destructive campaign of dither, delay, deny, and obstruct anything that has the White House stamp on it. There’s always the possibility that the GOP’s loose talk about impeachment could backfire and turn off more voters than it turns on. It could make the GOP look even more rigid, rightist, and desperate to do and say anything to tarnish Obama, even at the risk of making itself look and sound even more ridiculous. The GOP’s hedge against this is to wink and nod at Palin’s call for impeachment while publicly disavowing it but still relentlessly assailing Obama as the “imperial president.” There’s a method to the madness in this ploy.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Author and Political Analyst, The Huffington Post Blog, July 15, 2014
“Obama’s Understated Foreign Policy Gains”: Leadership, Painstaking Diplomacy And Understanding America’s Limitations
It’s been a pretty good couple of weeks for American foreign policy. No, seriously.
On June 23, the last of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile was loaded onto a Danish freighter to be destroyed. The following day, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia asked his Parliament to rescind the permission that it had given him to send troops into Ukraine. Meanwhile, there is still cautious optimism that a nuclear deal with Iran is within reach.
What do these have in common? They were achieved without a single American bomb being dropped and they relied on a combination of diplomacy, economic sanctions and the coercive threat of military force. As policy makers and pundits remain focused on Iraq and the perennial but distracting discussion about the use of force, these modest but significant achievements have, perhaps predictably, been ignored. Yet they hold important lessons for how American power can be most effectively deployed today.
Nine months ago, President Obama eschewed military means to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons and instead negotiated an agreement to remove them. Critics like Senator John McCain blasted it as a “loser” deal that would never work. By refusing to back up a stated “red line” with military force, Mr. Obama had supposedly weakened American credibility.
In Damascus, however, the threat of military engagement by the United States was taken more seriously. And when given the choice between American bombing or giving up his chemical weapons, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria chose the latter.
Four months ago, some pundits confidently declared that Mr. Putin had “won” in Crimea and would ignore a Western response of toothless sanctions. But Russia has paid a serious price for its actions in Ukraine: diplomatic isolation and an economic downturn spurred by capital outflows, declining foreign investment and international opprobrium.
Mr. Putin’s recent effort to tamp down tensions appears to be a response, in part, to the threat of further sanctions. In trying to operate outside the global system, Mr. Putin found that resistance to international norms came at an unacceptable cost.
While it is far too early to declare success on the nuclear talks in Vienna, that the United States and Iran are sitting down at the negotiating table is a historic diplomatic achievement. When Mr. Obama spoke during the 2008 election campaign of his willingness to talk with Iran’s leaders, it led to criticisms that he was naïve about global politics. But his efforts as president to extend an olive branch, even as Iran continued to pursue its nuclear ambitions, enabled America to build support for the multilateral economic sanctions that helped make the current negotiations possible.
While one should be careful in drawing expansive judgments from disparate examples like these, there are noteworthy commonalities. The most obvious is that military force is not as effective as its proponents would have Americans believe. Had the United States bombed Syria or hit Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, it would almost certainly not have been as successful as the nonmilitary approaches used.
Yet, at the outset of practically every international crisis, to bomb or not to bomb becomes the entire focus of debate. That false choice disregards the many other tools at America’s disposal. It doesn’t mean that force should never be considered, but that it should be the option of last resort. Force is a blunt instrument that produces unpredictable outcomes (for evidence, look no further than Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya).
What did work in these three situations was the patient diplomatic effort of building a global consensus. The success of international sanctions against Iran and Russia respectively relied on the support of both allies and rivals. Acting alone, the United States would never have achieved the same results.
It wasn’t just Americans who were outraged by the seizure of Crimea — so, too, were nations that had few interests in the region. The reason is simple: When countries invade their neighbors with impunity, it puts every country at risk. A similar global consensus against chemical and nuclear proliferation, backed by international treaties, also served as the foundation for American diplomacy toward Iran and Syria.
Critics will fairly argue that these outcomes hardly justify great celebration. Mr. Assad has relinquished his chemical weapons, but the bloody civil war in Syria continues. Mr. Putin has backed off in eastern Ukraine, but he’s keeping Crimea. Iran may agree to a nuclear deal, but it will remain a destabilizing power with the potential to upgrade its nuclear capacity.
This speaks to the limitations of American power. The United States cannot stop every conflict or change every nefarious regime. Any foreign policy predicated on such ambitions will consistently fail.
What the United States can do is set modest and realistic goals: upholding global norms and rules, limiting conflicts and seeking achievable diplomatic outcomes. With China flexing its muscles in the Far East, these lessons are more important than ever.
But they are not transferable to every international crisis. Sanctions don’t mean much, for example, to radical nonstate actors like the jihadists of the Islamic State. And unilateral pressure from the United States cannot, for example, bring about the political reforms in Iraq that are needed to stabilize the country. Sometimes, America has no good answer for disruptive events like these.
All too often, though, our foreign policy debates are defined by simplistic ideas: that force is a problem-solver, that America can go its own way and that mere application of American leadership brings positive results. But the results with Syria, Russia and Iran remind us that when American foreign policy is led by painstaking diplomacy, seeks multilateral consensus and acts with an understanding of its own limitations, it can produce positive results. More often than not, boring is better.
By: Michael A. Cohen, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, July 9, 2014
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