“Iraq War, 1%; Climate Change, 97%”: Jeb Bush Needs More Evidence For Climate Change Action Than He Does To Start A War
Former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush had a lot to say about climate change this week, putting to rest prior speculation that he might take a more reasonable position on the issue than his Republican opponents. At a campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Bush said, “I don’t think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It’s convoluted.” Though he said the “climate is changing,” Bush isn’t convinced that mankind has contributed or that we have a mandate to do something about it. “For the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you,” he continued. “It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it, even.”
On foreign policy, however, Bush needs much less certainty. The bar is so low, in fact, that he’s said he would still have invaded Iraq, even knowing what we do today about the bad intelligence. “I would have,” he told Fox News earlier this month. “And so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.” As with climate change, it’s hard to pin down exactly how Bush views the Iraq War, and he’s tied himself into knots trying to explain it, later backtracking with, “I would have not gone into Iraq.”
Under George W. Bush’s administration, the White House subscribed to the hawkish war philosophy known as the One Percent Doctrine, which got its name from former Vice President Dick Cheney’s post-9/11 strategy and which was codified in a book of the same name. “If there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction—and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time—the United States must now act as if it were a certainty,” the author, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind wrote. Cheney insisted that “our response” was more important than “our analysis.” The administration presented its severely flawed intelligence as a certainty, in order to convince the public that Iraq had nuclear, chemical, and biological capabilities.
The Bush administration’s troubling approach to foreign policy isn’t a perfect parallel to the case for climate change action, because the certainty is much higher than 1 percent—97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists say that humans are responsible for our changing climate. Still, it exposes the fallacies in Bush’s argument that the U.S. should wait to act on global climate change until the science is more sure. Not only is perfect certainty a stupidly high bar to set for climate action, but it’s irresponsible to insist on perfect knowledge. Climate scientists are still improving their models to forecast the precise effects of warming the planet 4 degrees Fahrenheit and higher, but they agree on this: The longer the world waits to act, the more it risks and the more catastrophic the consequences become. If we waited another few decades to do something while Republicans like Bush misrepresent reality, the damage will already be done. It will be too late.
Advocates for government action on the climate often liken it to taking out insurance for a car or home. The point of investing now is to mitigate the most severe consequences of climate change. “Confronting the possibility of climate catastrophes means taking prudent steps now to reduce the future chances of the most severe consequences of climate change,” a 2014 White House report said. “The longer that action is postponed, the greater will be the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the greater is the risk.”
In another world, Cheney might have said something like: If there’s a chance that we can forestall the worst impacts of climate change, the U.S. must do what it can. It’s about our response, not just our analysis. What if he had?
Compared to going to war, acting on climate change isn’t a risky bet.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, May 22, 2015
“An Iraqi Army That Can’t Or Won’t Fight”: Why Fight For The Iraqis If They Are Not Going To Fight For Themselves?
If Iraqis won’t fight for their nation’s survival, why on earth should we?
This is the question posed by the fall of Ramadi, which revealed the emptiness at the core of U.S. policy. President Obama’s critics are missing the point: Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many troops he sends back to Iraq or whether their footwear happens to touch the ground. The simple truth is that if Iraqis will not join together to fight for a united and peaceful country, there will be continuing conflict and chaos that potentially threaten American interests.
We should be debating how best to contain and minimize the threat. Further escalating the U.S. military role, I would argue, will almost surely lead to a quagmire that makes us no more secure. If the choice is go big or go home, we should pick the latter.
The Islamic State was supposed to be reeling from U.S.-led airstrikes. Yet the group was able to capture Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and is now consolidating control over that strategically important city. Once Islamic State fighters are fully dug in, it will be hard to pry them out.
Among the images from Sunday’s fighting, what stood out was video footage of Iraqi soldiers on the move — speeding not toward the battle but in the opposite direction. It didn’t look like any kind of tactical retreat. It looked like pedal-to-the-metal flight.
These were widely described as members of the Iraqi army’s “elite” units.
In their haste, Iraqi forces left behind U.S.-supplied tanks, artillery pieces, armored personnel carriers and Humvees. Most of the equipment is believed to be in working order, and all of it now belongs to the Islamic State. The same thing has happened when other government positions have been overrun; in effect, we have helped to arm the enemy.
Obama pledged to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State. His strategy is to use U.S. air power to keep the jihadists at bay, while U.S. advisers provide the Iraqi military with the training it needs to recapture the territory the Islamic State holds.
But this is a triumph of hope over experience. The United States spent the better part of a decade training the Iraqi armed forces, and witness the result: an army that can’t or won’t fight. The government in Baghdad, dominated by the Shiite majority, balks at giving Sunni tribal leaders the weapons necessary to resist the Islamic State. Kurdish regional forces, which are motivated and capable, have their own part of the country to defend.
If the Islamic State is to be driven out of Ramadi, the job will be done not by the regular army but by powerful Shiite militia units that are armed, trained and in some cases led by Iran. The day may soon come when an Iranian general, orchestrating an advance into the city, calls in a U.S. airstrike for support.
The logical result of Obama’s policy — which amounts to a kind of warfare-lite — is mission creep and gradual escalation. Send in a few more troops. Allow them to go on patrols with the Iraqis. Let them lead by example. Send in a few more. You might recognize this road; it can lead to another Vietnam.
What are the alternatives? One would be to resurrect Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force: Send in enough troops to drive the Islamic State out of Iraq once and for all. We conquered and occupied the country once, we could do it again.
But the Islamic State would still hold substantial territory in Syria — and thus present basically the same threat as now. If our aim is really to “destroy” the group, as Obama says, then we would have to wade into the Syrian civil war. Could we end up fighting arm-in-arm with dictator Bashar al-Assad, as we now fight alongside his friends the Iranians? Or, since Obama’s policy is that Assad must go, would we have to occupy that country, too, and take on another project of nation-building? This path leads from bad to worse and has no apparent end.
The other choice is to pull back. This strikes me as the worst course of action — except for all the rest.
The unfortunate fact is that U.S. policymakers want an intact, pluralistic, democratic Iraq more than many Iraqis do. Until this changes, our policy goal has to be modest: Contain the Islamic State from afar and target the group’s leadership, perhaps with drone attacks.
Or we can keep chasing mirages and hoping for miracles.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 21, 2015
“Chest-Thumping Belligerence, Been There, Done That”: Why Marco Rubio’s Tough Guy Act Is Actually A Display Of Cringing Cowardice
Marco Rubio is laying out his foreign policy platform for 2016, and the take-home message is this: PANIC!!!
Join me in keeping our country safe in the New American Century. Click here now: http://t.co/r8aMy4fU2E pic.twitter.com/g5ri5UuCT0
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 16, 2015
Elsewhere, Rubio is laying claim to the usual panoply of hyper-masculine tough guy imagery: flags, bald eagles, and banners proclaiming “American Strength.”
What he means by strength can be seen in a speech he gave to the Council on Foreign Relations, blaming everything bad that has happened overseas in the past six years on President Obama’s insufficiently aggressive stance towards Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba. It would appear that chest-thumping belligerence is how safety is to be obtained.
Let’s call this what it is: cowardice. Whatever happened to political courage?
I’m speaking of real political courage, not the kind that neoconservatives equate with moar war. The politics of courage, as it is practiced by the Republican Party, is heavily gendered and homophobic — as can be seen in the slurs (e.g., “sissy”) used against those less militarily inclined. Attacking political enemies for lacking “manly” courage is a political commonplace going back hundreds of years.
Sexism, of course, has been a bipartisan affair, but these days Rubio’s party is undoubtedly the worse offender. Since the end of World War II, attacking liberals for their weak, effeminate unwillingness to make the “tough decisions” to kill or imprison lots of people has been a staple of conservative rhetoric. This has been buttressed more recently by Democrats’ association with feminism and gay rights, their corresponding greater number of female candidates, and the opening of a gender gap between the parties.
Such attacks rely on sexist tropes about women (or LGBT people) being incapable of hard, logical analysis due to excessive emotion or softness. Needless to say, those are totally illegitimate grounds for criticism. To the contrary, there is nothing strong, tough, or courageous about constant demands for more use of violence, or executing innocent people, or invading random countries for no reason.
However, if one can clear away the various prejudiced dross, there is a political case to be made for courage. I reject the idea that one can quickly and easily obtain more security by sacrificing liberty — and I also believe that not flying into a hysterical frenzy every time something terrible happens takes real courage.
After 9/11, that kind of courage was notably absent from American political leadership. Instead, there was a grasping panic; impossible, childish demands for physical security (the “one percent doctrine“); and a blind, psychotic thirst for vengeance. The most convenient victim turned out to be Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. That war of aggression did nothing for American security — indeed, it gravely harmed it. And like any act of bullying, it was fundamentally an act of cowardice.
Sometimes courage requires standing up to physical danger, like not losing one’s wits when under fire. It can also be strength in the face of pain and grief. A sensible reaction to terrorist attacks would involve both: a realization that total security is an impossible goal, and that senselessly lashing out at random targets will not heal the damage done by the attackers.
Unfortunately for something like half a million Iraqis, President Bush was a knock-kneed coward. It’s too bad that Rubio mistakes his foreign policy for courage.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 20, 2015
“Jeb Bush’s Brotherly Bind”: There Are More Important Issues Here Than Family
Am I the only person outside the Bush family who has a smidgen of empathy for Jeb Bush’s roller-coaster ride in trying to answer a straightforward question: Was going to war in Iraq the right thing to do?
It’s hard to go much beyond “smidgen” because it remains astonishing that Bush hadn’t worked out long in advance how he’d grapple with an inevitable query about the invasion his brother launched. Jeb’s responses over four days were, as The Post’s Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe wrote, “wavering, uncertain and incongruous.”
The saga began when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly asked Bush if, knowing all we know now, he would have gone to war. “I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody,” Bush replied. “And so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
Bang! The political world, including conservatives who had strongly supported George W.’s foreign policy, came down on him hard. After going this way and that, Jeb admitted defeat on Thursday. He mixed the first-person singular and plural with the second person in, finally, responding to Kelly’s original question. “Knowing what we know now, what would you have done? I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq.”
So why have any sympathy for him at all? The main reason is very old-fashioned: His apparent reluctance to cast his own brother into the darkness. In justifying his initial answer, Bush later used his own reframing of Kelly’s words as an excuse, explaining he hadn’t understood the “know now” part. But it’s just as possible that he knew perfectly well what Kelly had asked — Jeb Bush is not stupid — and hoped he could get away with answering a different question to avoid being disloyal to George W.
Loyalty is a virtue in rather short supply in our culture, so I admire it when I see it. Of course it can be misplaced. There are times when other virtues should trump it. But loyalty does matter, and I have some respect for Jeb for trying to stay true to his family ties over four utterly miserable days.
Still, there are more important issues here than family. Bush’s agony isn’t over because Iraq raises profound questions not only for him but also for all of his GOP opponents. If Bush’s initial answer about the war was wrong and his most recent answer was right, this means that opponents of the war were also right. They included a young Illinois state senator, Barack Obama, who predicted in 2002 that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”
Many of the war’s staunchest supporters understand that they can never concede that Obama was right because doing so would undermine their ongoing defense of a hyperinterventionist foreign policy. That’s why some of them remain unrepentant. “I believed in it then,” former vice president Dick Cheney said of the war to Politico’s Mike Allen last July. “I look back on it now, it was absolutely the right thing to do.”
Bill Kristol, one of the war’s leading promoters, told CNN last June: “I’m not apologizing for something that I think was not wrong. I think going to war to remove Saddam was the right thing to do and necessary and just thing to do.” Donald Rumsfeld, George W.’s first secretary of defense, said that it would have been “immoral” not to go to Iraq.
But other hawks would rather see the was-the-Iraq-War-right question magically disappear because they know it’s a no-win for them. Most Americans now think the war was ill-advised. Why remind them that most of the same people who are super hawks now brought them an adventure they deeply regret? Thus did the Wall Street Journal editorial page on Friday come out firmly and unequivocally in favor of — evasion. “The right answer to the question is that it’s not a useful or instructive one to answer, because statesmanship, like life, is not conducted in hindsight.”
Sorry, but inquiring minds will want all the candidates to offer straight answers. This means that Bush’s Republican opponents will have to do more than trash his botched dodging. Bush at least had the excuse that he didn’t want to speak ill of his brother. The rest of them still need to explain how their own views of the past relate to where they’ll take us in the future.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 17, 2015
“What A Marvelous Historical Anomaly”: How Dubya Is Winning 2016 For Hillary
What a delightful week, watching Republicans not Democrats sink in the foreign policy quicksand. For most of my adult lifetime—come to think of it, all of it, and pretty much all of my entire lifetime—to the extent that foreign policy has mattered in presidential campaigns, it’s been brandished by Republicans to accuse the Democrats of being soft on whatever the supposed threat was at the time. To think that we might have a presidential campaign in which the Democrats are the ones playing foreign policy offense, forcing the Republicans to profess that they are not war-mongering psychopaths, would be a thing to behold—as well as a measure, eight long years later, of how much damage George W. Bush and his co-belligerents did to the Republican Party.
It surely caught Jeb Bush by total surprise, the shitstorm that kicked up after his first answer about invading Iraq. Yes, he’s rustier than a 1970s Plymouth; yes, he appears not to have been really quite listening to Megyn Kelly; and yes, it’s beginning to dawn on all of us, God help us, that Dubya may have been the smart one.
But all those factors are subordinate to the main one, which is this: History instructs that if you’re a Republican running for president and you’re asked about a war, you probably can’t go wrong by saying you’re for it. A past war, a current war, a future war (perhaps these most of all!), it doesn’t matter. Be pro-war, accuse the Democrats of wanting the United States to suckle at the teat of the UN and the new global order; and if it’s a current war that’s not going swimmingly, blame the Democrats and the anti-war elements at home. These are can’t lose propositions.
Or were. This week, Bush learned otherwise. I know, specifically it had to do with the “knowing what we know now” language, which is what really cranked up the media’s chainsaw. But public anti-war sentiment is even more blunt than that. Here for example is a question from a Quinnipiac poll last summer: “Do you think the result of the Iraq War was worth the loss of American lives and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?” This does not say “knowing what we know now,” which would clearly prod the respondent to think, “Oh, yeah, no WMD,” and would be more likely to produce a higher “not worth it” result.
But even keeping the WMD lie out of the conversation, not worth it won by 75-18 percent. Even Republicans said not worth it by 63-27.
It has created a new and perhaps not un- but let’s say little-precedented default foreign policy position in the American electorate: Now, the cowboys have to prove their solution to every problem isn’t to invade it or bomb it. This may have been true for the 1976 election, during the Vietnam hangover. But even if so, concerns about Vietnam were a distant second to unease about Richard Nixon’s rape of the Constitution and Gerry Ford’s pardon of him for doing it. Today, though, this question of reflexive Iraq hawkery is enough of a no-no that some people think Bush might already be sunk and should just quit now.
And this is why we saw Marco Rubio also reverse himself last week (although he would deny that) on the Iraq War. He used to defend the war, but now, with the new Kelly Standard in play, he decided he’d better come out and say: “Not only would I not have been in favor of it, President [George W.] Bush wouldn’t have been in favor of it and he said so.”
Rubio, of course, has neo-conned himself to the gills, and there will be plenty of time for him during this primary season to come out swinging on Iran, once he figures out that Iran and ISIS are not allies. But that even he “clarified” his position in the anti-war direction says something.
Now I should note: It may not play out the way I’m describing during the primary campaign. Yes, as we saw above, rank-and-file Republicans said the Iraq War wasn’t worth it by 63-27. But in the context of a primary season, that 27 can be as loud as or louder than the 63. It’s probably the 27 who are more likely to vote or attend caucuses, which means the minority would have inordinate influence over the shape of the candidates’ rhetoric.
But in a general-election context, the GOP nominee will probably have to tack back pretty quickly toward the anti-war position. This will give Hillary Clinton a great opportunity. For one thing, it’ll weaken the salience of the whole “she can’t defend the country cuz she’s a girl” line of attack, which will come, however subtly. It will allow Clinton to define the terms of what constitutes a sensible foreign policy, and the Republican man will likely have to agree with her.
And most of all it will be a lot better for the world than if the situation were reversed. Contrary to liberals’ deepest suspicions about her, she is not a neo-conservative; she is not going to have regime change in Iran on her mind, which any of the Republicans as president would, except for Rand Paul.
Poor Republicans! Crime is down; they can’t scream law and order. And now war is unpopular, so they can’t say the Democrats are soft on whomever. Their economic theories are increasingly discredited. I guess that leaves the old standby: race-baiting. But we may have reached a point where that doesn’t work anymore either. Should be an interesting race.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 18, 2015
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