“The Doomed Wars”: In Afghanistan And Iraq Wars, No Amount Of Enthusiasm From President Obama Was Going To Change That
Washington loves few things more than a tell-all memoir. Even if a memoir doesn’t tell very much, the media will do their best to characterize it as scandalous and shocking. So it is with the book by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates which will soon be appearing in airport bookstores everywhere. From the excerpts that have been released, it sounds like Gates has plenty of praise for President Obama, and some criticisms that are not particularly biting. Sure, there’s plenty of bureaucratic sniping and the settling of a few scores, but his criticisms (the Obama White House is too controlling, politics sometimes intrudes on national security) sound familiar.
Gates’ thoughts on Afghanistan, however, do offer us an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve come in that long war. The quote from his book that has been repeated the most concerns a meeting in March 2011 in which Obama expressed his frustration with how things were going in Afghanistan. “As I sat there,” Gates writes, “I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Well let’s see. Should Obama have trusted David Petraeus? I can’t really say. Hamid Karzai is corrupt, incompetent, and possibly mentally unstable. As to whether he believed in his own strategy (the “surge” of extra troops), by then there were plenty of reasons to doubt that it would work. The war wasn’t his—it had been going on for over seven years before he even took office. And “it’s all about getting out”? Well wasn’t that the whole point? The reason the administration undertook the “surge” in the first place was to create the conditions where we could get out.
Another thing Gates writes is, “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” and that that is a problem for the troops in the field. I’m sure it can be, to a degree, and morale can be undermined if you think the president doesn’t believe you’re going to succeed. I would also imagine that if you were a soldier in Iraq in 2005 or so and you saw George Bush on TV all the time talking about how great everything was going, you’d think your Commander in Chief was an idiot, and that might not be so good for morale either. But the real point is that in neither case was the president’s confidence going to make much of a difference. The problem was never the president’s disposition, or the particular decisions made in one year or one month. It was launching the war in the first place.
Let’s look at Iraq. Bush was nothing if not confident, and after about 4,500 American deaths and an expenditure of two trillion dollars, things finally quieted down enough for us to get out. Success! And two years after we left, the country is devolving into another civil war, or if you prefer, the latest inflammation of a civil war that never ended. We sure as hell aren’t going to re-invade to deal with it, not just because the American people would never stand for it, but because it wouldn’t make anything better there if we did. No sane person can look at the situation today and believe that it all could have been averted if the Americans had made some different decisions along the way.
As for Afghanistan, the predictions back in 2001 that the country was impossible to pacify, the war would inevitably become a quagmire, and we’d end up washing our hands of the place and leaving it to its own miserable existence just like the Russians and British before us, well they’re looking pretty prescient about now.
So what’s going to happen when we leave? I’m hardly an expert in internal Afghan politics, but from this vantage point it sure looks like there’ll be a government in Kabul that isn’t capable of holding the country together, and there will quickly be a violent struggle for power whose outcome is hard to predict. In other words, pretty much exactly what would have happened if twelve years ago we had said, “We kicked out the Taliban, so we’ve extracted what revenge we can on this particular spot on the earth for September 11. Now we’re going to install a provisional government and get the hell out.”
That isn’t to say there weren’t plenty of mistakes along the way and things that could have been done better by both the Bush and Obama administrations. And the question of our moral responsibility to Afghanistan’s future is one we’re going to have to grapple with—though if Iraq is any indication, our response to future death and misery there is likely to be, “Wow, that’s unfortunate. Now put on American Idol.” The awful reality is that the Afghanistan war, like the Iraq war, was doomed from the start, and no amount of enthusiasm from President Obama was going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 8, 2014
“Please Proceed, Republicans”: With No Regard For Facts, Do They Have The Capacity For Shame?
Well, lookee here:
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
Let’s go back to that infamous appearance that Susan Rice made on Meet the Press the Sunday following the Benghazi attacks:
DAVID GREGORY: The images as you well know are jarring to Americans watching all of this play out this week, and we’ll share the map of all of this turmoil with our viewers to show the scale of it across not just the Arab world, but the entire Islamic world and flashpoints as well. In Egypt, of course, the protests outside the U.S. embassy there that Egyptian officials were slow to put down. This weekend in Pakistan, protests as well there. More anti-American rage. Also protests against the drone strikes. In Yemen, you also had arrests and some deaths outside of our U.S. embassy there. How much longer can Americans expect to see these troubling images and these protests go forward?
MS. RICE: Well, David, we can’t predict with any certainty. But let’s remember what has transpired over the last several days. This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Obviously, our view is that there is absolutely no excuse for violence and that– what has happened is condemnable, but this is a– a spontaneous reaction to a video, and it’s not dissimilar but, perhaps, on a slightly larger scale than what we have seen in the past with The Satanic Verses with the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Now, the United States has made very clear and the president has been very plain that our top priority is the protection of American personnel in our facilities and bringing to justice those who…
GREGORY: All right.
MS. RICE: …attacked our facility in Benghazi.
I seem to recall that Ms. Rice received some criticism for those remarks. Yet, the New York Times reports:
Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs…
…There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.
So, to recap, the attacks in Benghazi were not carried out by al-Qaeda, were not meticulously planned, and the motivation to participate in them was largely “a spontaneous reaction to a video.”
It appears that Ms. Rice’s comments weren’t all that far off the mark.
The lack of an al-Qaeda role is particularly damaging to the Republicans because their main conspiracy theory all along has been that the administration blamed the whole thing on the Innocence of Muslims movie to deflect from the fact that they had not eradicated the terrorist organization by eliminating their leader, Usama bin-Laden. Supposedly, the real problem in Benghazi wasn’t insufficient security but the actual identity of the attackers.
But it wasn’t the administration that politicized the tragedy. It was Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, behind in the polls and smelling blood, that tried everything they could think of to gain an advantage.
I wonder if they have the capacity for shame.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 28, 2013
“So Say The American People, And History”: Confirmed, This Is The Worst Congress Ever
Though millions of Americans received Christmas gifts Wednesday, none got the one thing just about everybody wanted. No, not a new iPhone: A new Congress.
Two-thirds of Americans in a CNN poll released Thursday said the current Congress was the worst one in their lifetimes. And it wasn’t just one party or demographic who felt that way.
“That sentiment exists among all demographic and political subgroups. Men, women, rich, poor, young, old — all think this year’s Congress has been the worst they can remember,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
Three cheers for bipartisanship!
Meanwhile, three-fourths of respondents said lawmakers had “done nothing to address the country’s problems” through the first year of the 113th Congress. That gets at what’s primarily to blame for Congress’ horrible image: Lawmakers didn’t do much of anything this year, and the few things they did do were spectacularly infuriating. Heck, one of Congress’ most notable actions was failing to pass a bill to fund the government and, as a result, shuttering Washington for two weeks.
It’s not just a skewed, subjective view of congressional inaction either. The 113th Congress is statistically on track to be one of the least productive in history.
The 113th Congress passed only 66 laws in its first year, according to GovTrack. That was the lowest tally in four decades, or as far back as GovTrack has reliable data. Worse, only 58 of those bills became law, and many of them did nothing more than name post offices.
Meanwhile, many enormously popular bills fizzled. Nine in ten Americans supported tougher background checks for gun purchases, though Congress spiked gun control legislation. Two-thirds of Americans supported the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill, but the House refused to take it up this year.
So yes, people aren’t too thrilled with how Congress has been functioning, a sentiment that’s been made clear throughout the year. Polls have found Congress less popular than dog turds and cockroaches, and in November, Congress’ approval rating fell to an all-time low of nine percent, according to Gallup.
Don’t count on that trend turning around any time soon either. Sure, Congress just passed a bipartisan budget agreement before fleeing Washington for the holidays, but that compromise was relatively tiny, and there are other major showdowns looming, including yet another one over the debt ceiling. Oh, and 2014 is a midterm election year, which should make lawmakers even more tepid toward major action.
In other words, the 113th Congress is already one of the most unpopular and least-productive in history, and it’s probably only going to get worse.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, December 26, 2013
“All In The Dysfunctional Family”: Boehner’s Blasts, One More Volley In The Long GOP Battle
With a few words that reflected a mountain of frustration, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has escalated the ongoing struggle over the future of the Republican Party. Whether it proves to be a truly crystallizing moment for a party still trying to find its way after its defeat in 2012 is the critical question.
For much of the year, the Republican Party has been in a deep hole, its credibility diminished, its image at historical lows and its direction heavily influenced by conservative tea party insurgents and their allied outside groups. This fall’s government shutdown only made the hole deeper. Boehner seems to have decided it’s time to stop digging.
The speaker’s blast at outside groups that were calling for the defeat of the bipartisan budget agreement, even before it was unveiled, has reverberated widely. Among other things, Boehner declared that these organizations, which also advocated the strategy that led to the shutdown, have “lost all credibility” because of their extreme positions and incendiary tactics.
Boehner’s comments did not trigger a Republican civil war, as some have suggested. The reality is that the internal conflict has been underway for years. Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama in the 2012 election intensified the debate, and those tensions will be front and center as the GOP heads toward a divisive round of primary elections next year and then a potential battle royal when it picks a presidential nominee in 2016.
Both factions in the GOP’s ongoing struggle — those in the tea party wing and those in the establishment wing — have real grievances. Tea party insurgents have long viewed their congressional leaders as capitulating repeatedly over the years on tougher spending cuts. They see Obama’s Affordable Care Act as such an egregious expansion of big government that it prompted them to embrace a budget strategy this fall that had no chance of success.
This past week, with the bipartisan budget deal negotiated by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the tea party activists see one more example of the party’s refusal to do more to rein in government. The fact that the agreement could spare all members of Congress — and the public — repeated reruns of budgetary standoffs and shutdown threats (likely political losers for the GOP) is not an adequate offset to them.
In terms of the presidency, many conservatives believe that the GOP has not nominated a true and authentic conservative for the job since Ronald Reagan. (Whether Reagan could win his party’s nomination today, given his gubernatorial record of raising taxes and expanding access to abortion, is another matter.) Neither Romney in 2012 nor John McCain in 2008 met their standards.
But it doesn’t stop there. Former president George W. Bush disappointed many in the party’s base who argue that he perpetuated Washington’s big spending ways. Former Senate majority leader Robert Dole, the party’s nominee in 1996, was derided by supply-side conservatives (among them former House speaker Newt Gingrich) as the “tax collector for the welfare state.”
Former president George H.W. Bush proved an apostate to tax-cutting conservatives for breaking his “no new taxes” pledge, an action that split his party in 1990. Conservatives such as Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, later recalled being elated when Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, seeing his defeat as an opening to create a more-conservative party.
Now it’s Paul Ryan who is the disappointment. Ryan has been the intellectual leader of conservatives in the House and, more broadly, in his party. Now he is seen as something of a traitor to the cause for negotiating the bipartisan budget deal.
But the GOP establishment has its own list of grievances and is threatening to fight back. Establishment Republicans view the purity police on the right with disdain. They believe in big-tent Republicanism and pragmatism when it comes to governing.
They see the tea party movement writ large as a decidedly mixed blessing, a faction whose grass-roots energy is valued, but which also has engaged in a series of divisive primary battles. It’s arguable that the tea party cost the Republicans four or five Senate seats over the past two elections. Had most of those races gone the other way, Republicans would be at near-parity with Democrats in the upper chamber.
Establishment Republicans have special scorn for outside groups that are fueling the primary challenges and trying to dictate to members of Congress the strategies they should pursue. These groups include Heritage Action, the Senate Conservative Fund and the Club for Growth — the ones that drove the disastrous shutdown strategy and oppose the latest budget agreement.
A few months ago, Boehner made himself an agent of this strategy, and both he and his party paid a big price. This past week, when these groups called for defeat of the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, Boehner blew his stack.
Whether this was a well-thought-out plan to launch an attack or a spontaneous statement by a fed-up leader isn’t clear. Whatever it was, he was able to marshal a big majority of Republicans to support the agreement in the House, along with a sizable majority of Democrats. The partisan breakdown of the vote in the Senate is likely to look considerably different.
Establishment Republicans hope the tea party’s influence will diminish as a result of the shutdown debacle. That will depend in part on the tea party’s success in challenging a number of incumbent GOP senators next year, but there’s nothing right now to suggest its adherents are in retreat.
The announced opposition to the budget deal by three Republican senators who are prospective 2016 presidential candidates — Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas — suggests that they at least believe the tea party wing will continue to be a powerful force in charting the GOP’s direction.
GOP strategist John Feehery said the fact that so many Republicans voted for the budget agreement in the House was “hugely significant” and gives members an opportunity to begin to do some repair work. “It allows Congress to do its job,” he said. “They can get the appropriations process going, go home and talk about accomplishments and get their ratings above 10 percent.”
That could help in next year’s midterm elections, which will be influenced as much by Obama’s approval ratings, the state of the economy and judgments about the new health-care law as by the relative popularity of the Republican Party. But whether Boehner’s pushback marks a real turning point inside the party is another matter.
The business community has vowed to become more active in the intraparty battles, but their history of success is spotty. Conservative groups, fueled by some big donors and grass-roots energy, show no sign of pulling back, but will the fire burn as strongly as it has in the past?
In the absence of a consensus, and with both sides committed to the fight, the intraparty conflict will probably shift from the House and Senate floors to future elections. As one GOP strategist put it: “We’re in for a long, bloody conflict. Inside the family, we’re going to duke it out, and the place you duke it out is where you’re supposed to, which is at the ballot box.”
By: Dan Balz, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 14, 2013
“A Phony Civil War”: Nobody Here But Us Conservatives
Speaker John Boehner’s serial criticisms (yesterday in an NBC interview, today in a press conference) of conservative “outside groups” and their harassment of his own self and of House Republicans who do his bidding is getting massive media attention at the moment. Any minute now someone in the MSM is going to go over the brink and toast the Ohioan as the bravest man in American politics, a veritable colossus of strength and wisdom.
That’s all well and good; best I can tell Boehner got through both outbursts without weeping, and it is nice to see him not crawling on his belly like a reptile when it comes to Heritage Action and other right-wing bully boys. You kinda get the feeling, moreover, that Boehner was behind the firing of Republican Study Committee staff director Paul Teller, which has people in the “outside” groups and the allied blogospheric precincts freaking out.
But the Teller brouhaha is a reminder that this whole “war” between Boehner and “the groups” is pretty much inside baseball, and about Boehner’s role as Republican tactician rather than any deep matter of ideology or principle. And anyone who wants to lionize Boehner as some sort of “moderate” or even “pragmatist” free of ideological fervor should heed his own words in today’s press conference:
Asked if he was officially saying “no” to the tea party, Boehner emphasized the deficit reduction achieved under the budget deal and said there was no reason to oppose it.
“I came here to cut the size of government,” he said. “That’s exactly what this bill does, and why conservatives wouldn’t vote for this or criticize the bill is beyond any recognition I could come up with.”
Boehner also defended his own commitment to conservative principles, which has repeatedly come under fire. This criticism has at times threatened his speakership when he has attempted to negotiate with President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
“I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he said. “I’m as conservative as anybody around this place.”
Can you imagine Harry Reid, who occasionally gets criticized by the left, saying “I’m as liberal as anybody around this place”? No, you can’t.
So even this “act of war” between Boehner and “the groups” needs to be understood for what it is: an argument over strategy and tactics and operational control rather than goals and ideology. So progressives shouldn’t go too far in celebrating another battle in what I think is a phony “civil war,” or in exaggerating its effects.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 12, 2013
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