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“A Threat To Human Existence”: Perils Of Warming Planet Are Ignored By GOP Hopefuls

Amazingly, tellingly, the last Republican debate included not a single question about one of the most ambitious international agreements in civilized history — the recently concluded Paris accord on climate change. Signed by nearly 200 countries, including the United States, the agreement attempts to moderate a threat to human existence: the warming of the planet.

But there was barely a mention of climate change on that debate stage. Not only didn’t the moderators consider it worthy of a question, but neither did the candidates believe it important enough for sustained comment. Global warming came up only in a couple of asides intended as criticisms of President Obama’s agenda.

The debate was about national security, you say? Well, they contrasted a promised muscular approach to what they described as the weakness of the president, who is too cowardly or politically correct, in their telling, to even use the right words to describe Islamic jihadists.

Yet, the Pentagon has concluded that climate change represents “immediate risks” to national security. Last year, the nation’s military leaders issued a report — “2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap” — that says that global warming will “affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the nation.”

Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was widely derided after a November Democratic debate in which he said that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.” No military analyst or climate scientist has gone so far as to draw a straight line between global warming and the savagery of ISIS.

However, the Pentagon’s report does make clear that climate change will lead to greater instability worldwide: droughts, food shortages, mass migrations, failed states. And those are just the sorts of conditions that breed terrorists.

According to the Department of Defense, the U.S. armed forces will also find their resources strained at home as their troops are likely to be called upon more often for civilian assistance in the wake of natural disasters. There will be more extreme events — more violent storms, more fires, more flooding. And as if that were not enough, some of the military’s combat activities will be compromised; amphibious landings, for example, are likely to be more challenging because of rising oceans, according to the report.

Not that you’d know any of that from listening to the GOP candidates. Most leading Republicans are loath even to acknowledge that climate change is occurring — much less acknowledge that it has any connection to national security. Earlier this month, in fact, presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who heads the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, declared at a hearing on climate change that “for the past 18 years … there has been no significant warming whatsoever.”

Au contraire. According to scientists at NASA and the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, 2014 was the warmest year since records were first kept in 1880. “The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record,” NASA said, “with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000.”

The refusal of the modern Republican Party to come to terms with climate change leaves it as the only major political party that doubts the science, the only modern body of flat-Earthers. Conservatives in Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Israel and everywhere else in the democratic world have accepted the scientific consensus.

So, for that matter, has ExxonMobil, which spent decades trying to muddy the waters around climate research. The oil giant may have been forced to acknowledge the facts by increasing legal and economic pressures, but it finally stated the obvious: “We believe the risks of climate change are real, and those risks warrant constructive action by both policymakers and the business community,” ExxonMobil Vice President Ken Cohen said recently. Other major oil companies have also embraced the scientific consensus.

It’s strange that Republicans are peddling fear at every turn, but they refuse to acknowledge an existential threat. Islamic jihadists are troubling, but they don’t come close to the peril represented by a warming planet.

 

By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, December 19, 2015

December 22, 2015 Posted by | Climate Change, GOP Primary Debates, Paris Climate Accord | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“A Foreign-Policy Party No More”: On Foreign Policy, The GOP’s Candidates For President Are Either Ignorant Or Insane

Fairly early on in this week’s Republican presidential debate, Ted Cruz was reminded about his recent quote in which he vowed to “carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion,” testing whether “sand can glow in the dark.” Asked whether he’s prepared to decimate a populated city like Raqqa, informally known as the ISIS capital in Syria, the Texas senator hedged.

“You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops,” Cruz said, adding, “[T]he object isn’t to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.”

This plainly didn’t make any sense. It’s as if Cruz referenced carpet bombing – indiscriminate bombing of large areas, without regard for collateral damage – without having any idea what it means. To hear the Texas Republican tell it, there’s such a thing as precision, “directed” carpet bombing, which is a contradiction in terms.

The gibberish, however, was par for the course. Writing in the Washington Post, Dan Drezner, a center-right scholar, said yesterday, “When it comes to foreign policy, the GOP’s candidates for president in 2016 are either ignorant or insane.”

The overwhelming bulk of what the GOP candidates had to say last night was pure, unadulterated horses***. […]

When I came of political age, the Republican Party had a surfeit of smart, tough-minded foreign policy folk: Brent Scowcroft, Robert Gates, James Baker, Bob Zoellick, Richard Haass, and Lawrence Eagleburger. I pity these people having to listen to what was said on the GOP main stage last night.

Keep in mind, this isn’t so much about subjective questions. Knowing what we know now, was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a good idea or a bad idea? Marco Rubio says it was a good idea; most people who’ve been conscious for the last 12 years say the opposite; and it can be a topic of spirited conversation.

When a center-right observer like Drezner talks about Republican presidential candidates being “either ignorant or insane,” he’s not referring to debatable judgment calls. He’s referring to an entire field of GOP candidates who at times seemed lost as to what foreign policies actually are.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan noted the debate was “devoted to national security and terrorism, about which most of the nine major candidates proved they knew nothing, a fact that some tried to conceal by making stuff up.”

How did the party that used to dominate on foreign policy fall to such cringe-worthy depths?

Part of the problem is likely the result of the demise of the Republican Party’s elder statesmen. In the not-too-distant past, the GOP was guided on foreign policy by responsible, learned hands – experienced officials like Dick Lugar, John Warner, and Brent Scowcroft – who approached international affairs with degree of maturity. Those Republicans now tend to agree with President Obama.

Which leads to another potential explanation: the more Obama represents some kind of “sensible center” on matters of foreign policy, the more his radicalized Republican critics feel the need to move even further to the right.

I also wouldn’t discount the role of post-policy thinking of the broader debate: the national GOP candidates are speaking to (and for) a party that has no patience for substantive details, historical lessons, nuance, or diplomacy. Heck, we’re talking about a party that has convinced itself that the key to defeating terrorists is literally using the phrase “radical Islam,” as if the words have magical national-security implications. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s emblematic of a party that approaches foreign policy itself with all the maturity of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Finally, some context is probably in order. At the end of the Bush/Cheney era, the GOP’s entire approach to international affairs was discredited and in tatters. It needed to be rebuilt, reconsidered, and molded anew into something coherent. That never happened – the intra-party debate never really occurred, except to the extent that Republicans agreed that Obama is always wrong, even when he’s right, and those who agree with him must always be rejected, even when they’re Republicans in good standing.

Taken together, there’s something genuinely pathetic about the Republican Party’s once-great credibility on these issues. As Rachel put it on the show last night, “We really need two parties who are good at this issue in order to have good policy on this issue. We need good debate because this stuff is hard and our best decisions will come out of good, robust debate. Can the Republican Party hold up its end of the debate?”

It’s hard to be optimistic, isn’t it?

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 17, 2015

December 21, 2015 Posted by | Foreign Policy, GOP Presidential Candidates, Middle East, Terrorism | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“A ‘Where’s Waldo’ Of GOP Leadership”: Sorting Through The Crowd, There’s No Clear Leader

This week’s Republican debate was like a “Where’s Waldo” of leadership. The subject matter discussed – national security and terrorism – is so complex, and so vast, it was tough to find the best leader on the crowded stage. And we want to find that leader. Very much. Because we’re worried and scared.

Part of the reason we feel insecure, let’s face it, is because we have no idea how to solve this problem of the murderous and determined Islamic State group. Common sense tells us that fighting on the ground in Syria and Iraq isn’t enough, or quite right, since there are Islamic State group enclaves in other countries as well as followers all over the globe. So even if we could dismantle or contain the so-called caliphate, we could still have more attacks like we had in San Bernardino and Paris. We understand that technology enables the Islamic State group’s hold to spread like a cancer, but we don’t know if there is a national security equivalent of chemotherapy.

That’s the backdrop of the “Where’s Waldo” leadership puzzle. And like a puzzle, this week’s debate contained multiple moments where we thought, “Oh, there it is!” For example, when Florida Sen. Marco Rubio explained the nuclear triad (“Yes,” we thought, “this is the type of thing I want my president to understand and be able to explain!”) or when Carly Fiorina showed us why the bureaucracy of government is “woefully inadequate” when it comes to assessing and addressing the terror threat. “Every parent in America is checking social media, and every employer is as well, but our government can’t do it?” she said. (“Yes,” we thought, “government has no common sense! We wish it did!”)

Less helpful were the nitty-gritty debates over the law. While certainly an important part of preventing terrorist attacks and bringing their perpetrators to justice, the laws governing everything from data collection to immigration must be part of an overall vision of how we deal with the Islamic State group and its followers. If we can’t see the vision, the details are just details. They obscure leadership.

When it comes to security, we ask a lot of our leaders. We need a lot. We want everything from tactics and strategy, to cues on how to think and feel about the threat, to reassurance that the bad guys are going to lose and the good guys will win.

President Ronald Reagan excelled at this during the Cold War. President George W. Bush was also very good at it in the months following 9/11. To find out who can reassure, and fight, and inspire in the age of the Islamic State group is our responsibility as voters. It will be the job of our nation in 2016 to sort through the crowd and find our Waldo – the woman or man who will someday add his or her voice and leadership to a proud presidential history that still echoes with moments like “Ich bin ein Berliner,” “tear down this wall” and “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

 

By: Jean Card, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, December 17, 2015

December 19, 2015 Posted by | Fearmongering, GOP Leadership, GOP Presidential Candidates, ISIS | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“On Terrorism, Cruz Has No Idea”: By What Mystical Powers Of Clairvoyance Does Cruz Think We Can Spot The “Bad Guys”

Terrorism is not going away. We saw that in the closing of the Los Angeles schools after what was deemed a “credible” threat. The threat turned out to be not real, but with the country under heightened alarm, local authorities have become hyper-vigilant. That was 650,000 students sent or kept home.

When a good piece of time passed without a serious terrorist attack, politicians went soft. Many hawks on the right switched gears, turning on “big government” as the predominant evil and its national security programs as an assault on the privacy of innocent Americans.

With the massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, California, still in the headlines, many Americans are wondering what was so terrible about the federal bulk surveillance program that Congress ended in September. Rekindled fears of terrorism have changed the conversation.

Hence the violent pendulum swinging of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz in Tuesday’s debate. Cruz had championed the law that stripped the National Security Agency of the power to collect the metadata of Americans’ communications. He had some explaining to do on Tuesday.

“Metadata” refers to such information as the time and length of calls and the numbers called. It does not include the content of the conversation or even names. In the now-ended program, the NSA could delve deeper only when a disturbing pattern was detected. And even then, it had to first obtain a court order.

During the debate, tweeters stuck on horse race politics thrilled to the brawl between Cruz and the other Cuban-American candidate, Marco Rubio. But there was real substance in their battle. Rubio, who supported the NSA program, came off as the man for all seasons. Cruz dissolved into frantic evasion.

What was Cruz’s reason for supporting a bill to stop the NSA program? “It ended the federal government’s bulk collection of phone metadata of millions of law-abiding citizens,” he explained.

Well, yeah. Every day, security officials at American airports inspect the baggage of over a million law-abiding citizens to find the one possibly carrying a bomb. The jihadi terrorists who have preyed on this country appeared to be law-abiding, even model, citizens. By what magical, mystical powers of clairvoyance does Cruz think we can spot the “bad guys,” as he puts them?

The candidates routinely bashed President Obama as weak on terrorism. In truth, he fought like a tiger to retain the NSA’s ability to conduct bulk surveillance. In doing so, he often butted heads with fellow Democrats jumping on the same phony privacy-rights bandwagon as did Cruz.

(Would someone please explain why an NSA computer’s going through raw metadata — a computer that doesn’t even register our names — is somehow violating our privacy? Furthermore, what is so private about information that the phone company has?)

Republican backers of the NSA program, such as Rubio and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, also had to buck their own party. As it turned out, the program was killed by a Republican-run Senate and a Republican-led House, with considerable help from Democrats.

The collection of the metadata has already ended, and soon all the information will reside with the phone companies. To get at it, the NSA will have to obtain a warrant and take it to a phone company, of which there are thousands.

The goal of protecting both security and privacy is a worthy one, but it requires two things: One is the maturity to accept the often-difficult trade-offs. The other is an understanding of what the data collection being considered actually involves.

It’s unclear how we can have security without a federal bulk surveillance program. Terrorists don’t walk around wearing neon “bad guy” signs.

 

By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, December 17, 2015

December 18, 2015 Posted by | Big Government, National Security Agency, Ted Cruz, Terrorists | , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Most Simplistic And Mindless Solutions Imaginable”: Breaking; GOP Candidates Admit American Military Force Has Its Limits

Amid the competition in last night’s debate to see which candidate could make Americans more terrified that we’re all going to be killed by terrorists any day now, an actual substantive policy difference emerged on national security. While none of the candidates took positions they hadn’t taken before, it was the clearest explication of what actually is a real division within the Republican Party on foreign policy.

Though we sometimes think of the GOP as divided between Rand Paul on one side and everybody else on the other — one lone candidate skeptical of foreign interventionism up against a bunch of unreconstructed hawks — the truth is more complicated. And as we saw last night, the candidates currently in first place (Donald Trump) and second place (Ted Cruz) in the race represent a foreign policy vision that acknowledges that American power has its limits. That’s a stark contrast with their opponents, who essentially believe in George W. Bush’s vision, which says that American military power can solve nearly any problem and plant the seeds of democracy anywhere.

There are reasons not to give too much credit to Cruz and Trump, which I’ll get to in a moment. But their beliefs on the fundamental question of the limits of American power, particularly in the Middle East, were clearly laid out last night. Here’s part of what Cruz had to say:

So let’s go back to the beginning of the Obama administration, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama led NATO in toppling the government in Libya. They did it because they wanted to promote democracy. A number of Republicans supported them. The result of that — and we were told then that there were these moderate rebels that would take over. Well, the result is, Libya is now a terrorist war zone run by jihadists.

Move over to Egypt. Once again, the Obama administration, encouraged by Republicans, toppled Mubarak who had been a reliable ally of the United States, of Israel, and in its place, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood came in, a terrorist organization.

And we need to learn from history. These same leaders — Obama, Clinton, and far too many Republicans — want to topple Assad. Assad is a bad man. Gadhafi was a bad man. Mubarak had a terrible human rights record. But they were assisting us — at least Gadhafi and Mubarak — in fighting radical Islamic terrorists.

And if we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen U.S. national security interests. And the approach, instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter, we ought to hunt down our enemies and kill ISIS rather than creating opportunities for ISIS to take control of new countries.

We didn’t actually topple Mubarak and we didn’t exactly topple Gadhafi, but in any case, Cruz is articulating a realist foreign policy vision here: We should focus on direct threats to American national security and not try to impose democracy, because overthrowing dictators creates volatile situations in which the outcome can be even worse than what came before. This is a direct contradiction to George W. Bush’s expansive vision in which the right invasion or two would spread democracy across the Middle East in a glorious flowering of freedom. (And yes, we should acknowledge that this vision was always selective — nobody proposed overthrowing the government of Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive dictatorships on earth).

After Cruz’s statement, Marco Rubio and John Kasich chimed in to argue that we actually should overthrow Assad, then Donald Trump came back with a statement that could have come from Bernie Sanders:

In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.

The typical telling of the Iraq story Republicans offer is that everything was going great until Barack Obama came in and screwed it all up. But here, Trump isn’t even bothering with that — he’s saying that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a bad idea from the start and had all kinds of negative unintended consequences.

It’s important to understand that Trump and Cruz aren’t doves. In fact, they have wedded this skepticism toward nation-building with the most belligerent attitude toward the Islamic State. Trump says he wants to “bomb the s— out of them,” while Cruz proposes to “carpet-bomb” them. So on the one hand they have a broader approach that seems grounded in history, while on the other they’re offering the most simplistic (you might even say mindless) solution imaginable to the immediate problem of the Islamic State.

For many of the other candidates, it’s precisely the reverse. Against all evidence, they still talk as though American power is essentially limitless and there are no unintended consequences we need to concern ourselves with when we do something like inject ourselves into a civil war in the Middle East. Yet on the Islamic State, they try to sound like they have a nuanced plan that’s built on an understanding of the complexities of the situation. Marco Rubio’s Islamic State plan might be wrong in all its particulars, but at least it has particulars, meant to demonstrate that he knows what he’s talking about. (You may have noticed that Rubio spends a lot of time trying to demonstrate that he knows what he’s talking about.) The same could be said of Jeb Bush.

As last night’s fear-fest made clear, the candidates know that their electorate is on edge and looking for a strong leader who will make them feel like the threats they perceive around them are being confronted. Trump and Cruz are offering instant gratification in the form of a glorious bombing campaign against the Islamic State, combined with a more careful approach over the longer term that would seek to avoid quagmires in places where, as Cruz likes to say about Syria, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” The question is whether that’s appealing to a significant portion of the Republican electorate. We don’t yet know the answer, but eventually we’ll find out.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, December 16, 2015

December 18, 2015 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, Terrorism, U. S. Military | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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