“My Brother’s Keeper”: Should We Relitigate The Iraq War In The 2016 Campaign? You Bet We Should
If all goes well, in the 2016 campaign we’ll be rehashing the arguments we had about the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003. You may be thinking, “Jeez, do we really have to go through that again?” But we do—in fact, we must. If we’re going to make sense of where the next president is going to take the United States on foreign policy, there are few more important discussions to have.
On Sunday, Fox News posted an excerpt of an interview Megyn Kelly did with Jeb Bush in which she asked him whether he too would have invaded Iraq, and here’s how that went:
Kelly: Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?
Bush: I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.
Kelly: You don’t think it was a mistake?
Bush: In retrospect, the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty. And in retrospect, once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn’t focus on security first, and the Iraqis, in this incredibly insecure environment turned on the United States military because there was no security for themselves and their families. By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place, as well? George W. Bush. So, news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.
While the full interview airs tonight so we don’t yet know whether Kelly followed up to clarify, in this excerpt Jeb Bush deftly answers not the question Kelly asked him but a slightly different question, one that lets him rope in Hillary Clinton and get himself off the hook. While she asked him whether he would have authorized the invasion knowing what we know now, he answered as if she had asked whether he would have authorized the invasion believing what many believed then. For the record, there were plenty of people at the time who objected to the invasion, so it’s utterly false to say “almost everybody” supported it, and while Hillary Clinton did indeed vote for the war, she wouldn’t say she would have invaded knowing what we know now.
Bush’s answer may be evasive, but it’s understandable—after all, it’s not like he’s going to say, “Yes, the whole thing was a catastrophe and we never should have done it.” As of now, Rand Paul is the only Republican presidential candidate who has said that the war was a mistake.
But the question isn’t so much whether a candidate will admit what a disaster Iraq was, but what they’ve learned from the experience. How do they view the extraordinary propaganda campaign the Bush administration launched to convince Americans to get behind the war? Does that make them want to be careful about how they argue for their policy choices? Did Iraq change their perspective on American military action, particularly in the Middle East? What light does it shed on the reception the American military is likely to get the next time we invade someplace? What does it teach us about power vacuums and the challenges of nation-building? How does it inform the candidate’s thinking on the prospect of military action in Syria and Iran specifically? Given the boatload of unintended consequences Iraq unleashed, how would he or she, as president, go about making decisions on complex issues that are freighted with uncertainty?
I would love to know how Jeb Bush would answer those questions, whether he’ll say that the invasion was a mistake or not. The same goes for his primary opponents. But if what we’ve seen so far is any indication, we aren’t likely to get a whole lot of thoughtful foreign policy discussion from them. This weekend the non-Bush candidates were in Greenville for the South Carolina Freedom Summit, where they walked on stage and beat their chests while advocating for a foreign policy inevitably described by the press as “muscular.” Scott Walker apparently thrilled the crowd by telling them that terrorists are coming to America, and “I want a leader who is willing to take the fight to them before they take the fight to us.” But the real good stuff came from Marco Rubio:
“On our strategy on global jihadists and terrorists, I refer them to the movie Taken. Have you seen the movie Taken? Liam Neeson. He had a line, and this is what our strategy should be: ‘We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you.'”
Ah, the inspiringly sophisticated foreign policy thinking of the GOP candidate. I’m old enough to remember when we had another president who liked to sound like a movie-star tough guy. “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall,” he said when asked about Osama bin Laden, “that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.'” You’ll recall that it was a different president who was in charge when bin Laden was found. “There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there,” he said about Iraqi insurgents early on in the war. “My answer is, bring ’em on.” They came, and thousands of American servicemembers were killed in the ensuing fighting. But George W. Bush was praised at the time for his “moral clarity.”
We shouldn’t forget Hillary Clinton—I doubt she wants to talk much about Iraq, since she supported the war at the time (which was one of the biggest reasons she lost to Barack Obama in 2008). She should explain how the the Iraq War will inform her thinking about the foreign policy challenges the next president is likely to face. But twelve years after the war started, we’re back in Iraq (albeit with boots hovering in midair). Large swaths of the country have been taken over by a terrorist group that emerged out of the war’s chaos. And the glorious flowering of freedom and democracy across the region that George W. Bush promised hasn’t come to pass.
So there’s a basic question the Republican candidates should answer: Is there anything they learned from the Iraq War? Anything at all?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, May 11, 2015
“Republican’s Right-To-Discriminate Debate”: At The Intersection Of Reproductive Choices And Discrimination
Under current law, in every state in the union, it is illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That, however, is the floor – some areas choose to go further.
Irin Carmon recently reported on a new policy in the nation’s capital, where policymakers approved a bold new law – the “D.C. Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act” – which adds “reproductive decision-making to anti-discrimination provisions.”
So, for example, an employee in D.C. cannot be fired for being on birth control, using in vitro fertilization, exercising her right to terminate a pregnancy, or getting pregnant outside of marriage. Those are private matters, the D.C. law says, which cannot serve as the basis for a dismissal.
As it turns out, this quickly became the latest twist in the right-to-discriminate debate, and Roll Call reported late last week on congressional Republicans intervening in city law.
In a largely symbolic move, the House voted mostly down party lines late Thursday night to block a District of Columbia bill that D.C. officials say would combat workplace discrimination.
A corps of mainly Republicans passed a joint resolution of disapproval 228-192…. Conservatives argued the act could force employers to violate their religious beliefs.
It was, the article noted, the “first time in nearly 25 years the entire House voted to block a D.C. law.”
The ridiculous push from House GOP lawmakers didn’t change city policy – the Senate chose not to act on the matter – and the local law took effect over the weekend.
But as it turns out, there’s a presidential angle to this.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took it upon himself to go after the D.C. anti-discrimination policy, issuing this press release on Friday.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, released the following statement urging Congress to formally disapprove of the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act (RHNDA) and the Human Rights Amendment Act (HRAA) recently passed by the District of Columbia in order to protect First Amendment rights for D.C. citizens.
“The D.C. Council has proposed two measures that trample the very rights the First Amendment was designed to protect – the right of citizens to freely practice their faith,” Sen. Cruz said. “The Constitution gives Congress the authority to exercise jurisdiction over the District of Columbia ‘in all cases whatsoever.’ And both the House and Senate have a constitutional duty to protect citizens’ religious liberty, as enshrined in the First Amendment.
The Senate GOP leadership ignored Cruz’s cries, but Roll Call reported this week that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) “appears to support the effort to block the law.”
In other words, two Republican presidential candidates apparently believe employers should be able to fire workers if bosses don’t like employees’ personal reproductive-health decisions. One of the two candidates is ostensibly from the GOP’s libertarian wing.
This strikes me as a great litmus-test issue for the rest of the Republicans’ 2016 field. How about it, candidates? Should Americans lose their jobs if their employers disapprove of their reproductive choices?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 6, 2015
“Perry To Texas; Stop Being Insane”: Buckle Up Guys, 2016 Is Going To Be Nuts
An Infowars conspiracy theory about military takeover of the American Southwest might become a surprising wedge issue among Texas’s Republican presidential candidates.
The Daily Beast detailed last week how the Jade Helm 15 military training exercises—wherein U.S. Special Operations forces will move throughout the Southwest preparing for atypical warfare conditions—have set off such a noisy panic that Texas’s governor has ordered the state’s military to keep an eye on things.
Concerns about those training exercises have been fueled by Alex Jones’s goofball site Infowars, which soberly suggested that this might be the beginning of a military war on the Tea Party. That is not a thing that is happening. Still, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas stated he was directing the Lone Star state’s military to tail U.S. troops in part “to ensure that Texas communities remain safe.” Abbott’s move generated much levity, with one Texas Democrat consultant suggesting that the governor’s next area of concern might be abominable snowmen.
When I was reporting out that story, I reached out to a number of presidential contenders’ camps for comment and got radio silence. Most of the candidates’ spokespeople didn’t even bother to reply to my email, and understandably—who wants to go on the record awkwardly not commenting about a wacky conspiracy theory that has a small but vocal sector of the Republican base buying hollow-tip ammo and investing in survival food?
But a few of those presidential contenders have spoken about the issue to other media outlets, and their answers are quite telling. On April 21, conservative Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson asked Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul if he knew what the deal with Jade Helm was.
“You know I’ve gotten a few questions about it on the road and I really don’t—” Paul replied, per Talking Points Memo’s transcript. “I’m not sure about exactly what is going on with that.”
“It’s making some people nervous, but it doesn’t take much to make people nervous nowadays,” Mickelson replied. “If you get a chance to, I’d like to know what the rest of the story is on that.”
“We’ll look at that also,” the Kentucky senator replied.
Never fear, citizens of the Southwest: Rand Paul is going to make sure the military doesn’t take over your Whataburgers.
Not to be outdone, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Bloomberg at the South Carolina Republican convention that he’d had his office reach out to the Pentagon to make sure everything is OK.
“We are assured it is a military training exercise,” he said. “I have no reason to doubt those assurances, but I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.”
Former Texas governor Rick Perry drew the sharpest contrast with Abbott’s Infowars pandering.
“It’s OK to question your government. I do it on a regular basis,” he said on May 5, per the Dallas Morning News. “But the military is something else. Our military is quite trustworthy. The civilian leadership, you can always question that, but not the men and women in uniform.”
Questioning men and women in uniform is exactly what Abbott did, and exactly what Cruz and Paul endorsed. Now, thanks to Infowars and unfounded anxieties, we have an early way of differentiating between some of the most conservative—and, in Perry’s case, potential—presidential candidates. Buckle up, guys. 2016 is going to be nuts.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, May 7, 2015
“Abandon Your Bipartisan Fantasies: The Baltimore Uprising Won’t Make GOP Get Serious About Urban Reform
Elite pundits like Richard Cohen may expect zombie Richard Nixon to soon sweep the nation with a new campaign of law and order, but for those of us who see something more in America’s future than an endless rehash of the 1960s, the political ramifications of the uprising in Baltimore are still unclear.
Are we destined to live through another round of backlash politics, largely driven by white and affluent voters’ fears? Or might the dysfunction and injustice that was so explosively revealed in Baltimore — and Ferguson before it — kick-off a rare bout of genuinely useful bipartisan cooperation?
Cynics will likely find these questions gratingly naive, but you don’t have to be a pollyanna to see reasons for optimism. After all, ending mass incarceration and reforming the criminal justice system were making their way into the political mainstream before anyone had heard the name Freddie Gray. And even conservative politicians like Sen. Rand Paul, a man some people (wrongly) consider a serious threat to be the next president, have been talking about these issues frequently and at length.
Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but although I think a return of “tough on crime” politics is unlikely, it still appears to me that a serious response to urban poverty and mass incarceration won’t be coming out of Washington any time soon. This useful Tuesday article from the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent helps explain why, but the answer can be boiled down to two words: demographics and location.
If you want to understand why Republicans in D.C. will ensure this problem goes unaddressed, you must start, as always, with the House of Representatives, where the GOP’s grip on power is white-knuckle tight. According to Sargent (via David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report) one way to think of the Republicans’ dominant position in Congress is to look at one of the usual explanations — the fact that Democratic voters are inefficiently packed into a smaller number of overwhelmingly Dem-friendly districts — from a new angle.
Viewed through the lens of land mass rather than population, Sargent reports, Republicans control nearly 86 percent of the United States, despite holding “only” 57 percent of the seats in the House. Democrats, on the other hand, lay claim to 43 percent of House seats yet only control around 14 percent of actual American land. As Wasserman explains to Sargent, what that means, in practice, is something you probably intuitively got already — in the House, the coalition that makes up the Democratic Party is very urban; and the Republican one, conversely, is not.
Put simply, the GOPers in the House whose constituents look like (or care about) the folks in Baltimore, Ferguson and so forth are few and far between. Most Republican members of Congress’s “lower” chamber represent people in rural or suburban areas. Except as a place they fear and prefer kept at a distance, these voters are not thinking about the American city. And even if they are, the fact that they’re Republicans will tell you all you need to know about whether they’d be open to a plan that involved increased social investment, as any bipartisan agreement no doubt would.
If you’re someone who believes politics is driven more by big, indifferent forces — like the economy or geography or demographics — rather than personal relationships, that would seem to be the end of the discussion. Politicians want above all else to be reelected, and they respond to incentives accordingly. It’s hard to see why a far-right representative of rural Kansas would be particularly interested in joining up with Nancy Pelosi to try to make it suck a little less to be an African-American kid in Jersey City. Someone so inclined probably wouldn’t even make it through their district’s GOP primary.
Still, as useful as that political science 101 framing can be in most cases, it is not all-seeing. At least that’s what someone trying to make a counter-argument would say, before pointing to the Senate. In the “upper” chamber, of course, Republican politicians have to worry about representing all of their state’s citizens. So you might expect a GOPer from Ohio (home of Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland) or Virginia (which shares a border with Baltimore’s Maryland to its north) to be more interested in reform. And that goes double for the next Republican presidential nominee, who will need to win some of those big, purple states in 2016.
Moreover, while politicians are often astonishingly simple-minded creatures, the same is not always true for voters. There are plenty of suburban moderates, for example, who don’t want to send a Democrat to Washington to represent their district but don’t want to have a Republican “eat-the-poor” ogre as president, either. Such voters shouldn’t be mistaken for true believers in social justice, mind you — but the desire to assuage a nagging sense of guilt by supporting a “compassionate” conservative can be a powerful thing. Pure self-interest, then, would lead a smart GOP presidential contender to support at least some elements of urban investment and reform.
But here’s the reason why I don’t expect that alternative scenario to play out in the real world, and why I suspect we won’t see a response to Baltimore from Washington — certainly not a bipartisan one — any time soon: Most of these elements were present during the 2012 election, but they had basically no influence on the behavior of House Republicans. Then-candidate Mitt Romney sure could have used some leeway to wander a bit from conservative orthodoxy and prove he was no real-life Mr. Potter. He got an Ayn Rand fanboy as his teammate instead.
It doesn’t feel like that was quite so long ago but, in political terms, America was a different place. This was before the lily-white Republican base had to endure two full terms of a relatively liberal African-American president, and before that same base had begun spending much of its time defending cops and describing poor communities of color as mired in a “tailspin of culture” and “government dependence.” This was when Darren Wilson was just another run-of-the-mill, mildly thuggish cop; and before “black lives matter” became a national slogan.
If the chances of congressional Republicans supporting a bipartisan legislative response to inequality were slim a few years ago, the likelihood of their doing so now, in the face of civil unrest, has to be right around zilch.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, May 6, 2015
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