“The Neocons Strike Back”: War Should Be Welcomed And Advocated Without Apology
It’s been a while, so you may have forgotten just what a great time it was for the national security hawks widely known as neoconservatives back in 2002 and 2003. With the memory of September 11 still fresh and Republicans controlling the White House and Congress, there was little to stand in the way of the dream of remaking the map of the Middle East, the region that had so vexed us for so long. Democrats sure weren’t going to—most of them were only too eager to show that they weren’t lily-livered pacifists, so they provided barely any impediment at all to a new war.
Sure, when it came to justifying an invasion of Iraq, the hawks had to exaggerate a little here, twist the facts a little there, spin out ridiculous scenarios everywhere. But it would all be worth it once victory was won. Saddam Hussein would fall, we’d quickly set up a new government, and democracy would spread through the region as a glorious new age dawned, brought forth by the beneficent power of American arms.
Then, of course, everything went wrong. Four thousand Americans dead, a couple of trillion dollars spent, Iraq ripped apart by sectarian conflict, and one clear victor in the war: Iran, which saw a dangerous enemy removed by the U.S. and a friendly government installed in Baghdad. Back at home, the neocons saw themselves mocked and scorned, and even worse, saw Barack Obama become president of the United States.
But they stayed true to their faith. They did not abandon for a moment the idea that with the proper application of military force, any country in the Middle East can be made to bend to America’s will. They knew their time would come again.
And maybe it has, or at least that time is growing closer. Forty-seven senators, nearly all of the upper house’s Republicans, sent a letter to the Iranian government intended to persuade it against signing a deal currently being negotiated with the United States and five other countries. It may have been a P.R. fiasco, but it clarified Republican thinking. They all agree with Benjamin Netanyahu that a “bad deal” with Iran is worse than no deal at all. As far as they’re concerned, any deal the Iranians would agree to is bad almost by definition. And if there’s no deal, then the case for war becomes so much clearer.
On Sunday, one such hawk, Joshua Muravchik, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post stating bluntly what many of them were probably thinking but were afraid to say: Iran’s leaders can’t be reasoned with, sanctions won’t work, and that leaves us with only one alternative. “Does this mean that our only option is war? Yes, although an air campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would entail less need for boots on the ground than the war Obama is waging against the Islamic State, which poses far smaller a threat than Iran does.” In other words: Urgent as the need for war is, this will be easy. You might even call it a cakewalk.
How many neocons read Muravchik’s piece and went aquiver with delight? Sure, some people reacted with horror. But now it’s been said: War isn’t something we should fear or something to avoid. It should be welcomed and advocated without apology. There will be assurances of reluctance, of course—we wish it hadn’t come to this, truly we do!—but there will be no shame.
That’s particularly important; for such a long time, those who cheered us into war with Iraq have been told that shame is precisely what they ought to feel. But that kind of shame is not in the constitution of those who know that if you want to make an omelet, sometimes you have to bomb a few chicken farms to dust. And what Iran offers now is redemption. The success of this next war will wipe away everything that went wrong with the last one. This time, we’ll get it right.
We’ll destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities from the air in a series of precision strikes that leave their targets in rubble and produce no collateral damage. The people of Iran will cheer the American warplanes, then take the opportunity to overthrow the regime that has oppressed them for so long. With the Iranian problem solved, Israel will be safe and all the conflicts of the region will quiet, fade, and then disappear. Democracy and freedom will spread, for real this time. And everyone will look to the neocon hawks with admiration in their eyes and say, “You were right. You were right all along.”
That is their dream. And it will be easier to realize than you may think—at least up until the point where the bombs start falling. Spend the next year and a half sowing the seeds, writing the op-eds, going on television, giving the speeches, making the dark predictions of cataclysm should we fail to muster the courage to act. If the Iranians walk away from negotiations, declare that we now have no choice but to use force; if there is an agreement, declare that its weakness is precisely why we have no choice but to use force. Condemn those who disagree as weaklings who refuse to stand up to the ayatollahs and their plan to destroy Israel and then the United States. Pressure the Republican presidential candidates to take the most hawkish position possible, as they compete to see who’s the toughest and strongest. If next November brings the blessed return of a Republican to the White House, with a Republican Congress behind him, the war will be all but begun.
Yes, the neocon moment may be at hand once again. Aren’t you excited?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 15, 2015
“What About Israel’s Nuclear Bomb?”: The Tangled History Of Israel’s Poorly Kept Secret
After Bibi Netanyahu’s provocative speech to Congress, The New York Times provided helpful clarifications in an article headlined “What Iran Won’t Say About the Bomb.” Written by two superbly expert reporters, William Broad and David Sanger, the piece walked through the technical complexities for non-experts (myself included) and explained key questions Iranians have failed to answer.
But this leads me to ask a different question: What about Israel’s bomb? Why isn’t that also part of the discussion?
In the flood of news stories about Iran’s nuclear intentions, I have yet to see mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal (if I missed some mentions, they must have been rare).
Yet Israel’s bomb is obviously relevant to the controversy. The facts are deliberately murky, but Israel has had nuclear weapons for at least forty years, though it has never officially acknowledged their existence. The Israeli diplomatic approach has been called “nuclear ambiguity.”
I asked a friend who’s a national-security correspondent in Washington why news stories don’t mention Israel’s bomb. He shrugged off my question. “Because everybody knows that,” he said. Probably that’s true among policy elites and politicians, though I am not so sure this is widely known among average Americans.
In any case, if everyone knows Israel has the bomb, why not acknowledge this in the public debate?
I asked another friend (a well-informed journalist sympathetic to the Palestinian cause) why reporters don’t talk about the Israeli bomb. “Groupthink,” he said. “It’s almost as though Israel gets a bye from the media.”
The Iranians, he added, have raised the issue of the Israeli bomb many times in the past, but their complaints were generally ignored in the Western press. Iranian diplomats pointed out that Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and submits to international inspections as the treaty requires (though Iran still hides stuff, as The New York Times account described). Israel has never signed the NPT and therefore does not submit to inspections.
My point is, the existence of Israel’s nuclear superiority is clearly a pivotal fact of life in the chaotic conflicts and occasional wars of the Middle East. It should not be left out.
Israel’s bomb might be an important factor in motivating Iran to seek a nuclear bomb of its own (though Iran denies that intention). It might also be the subtext for Netanyahu’s bellicose warnings and his occasional calls for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Bibi’s country would lose valuable leverage if it no longer had a nuclear monopoly in the region. Yet it might be considered a provocative act if Israel bluntly acknowledged its nuclear arsenal.
According to Wikipedia’s account, largely based on scholarly sources, Israel has seventy-five to 400 bombs (others say it is more like 100 to 200). It has never threatened to use them anywhere, though during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 Israeli leaders put eight of its nuclear-armed F-4’s on alert. Its adversaries no doubt got the word.
Other nations with nukes are Pakistan, India and North Korea as well as the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. The United States is the only nation that has ever used atomic bombs on people in another nation—Japan at the close of World War II.
The Center for Public Integrity in Washington published an article in September 2014 by Douglas Birch and Jeffrey Smith that described the tangled history of Israel’s poorly kept secret. Some scholars, they wrote, complained that the lack of candor complicates efforts to confront Iran, since the US government cooperates in the pretense of not knowing.
Back in 2009, President Obama was asked about whether Israel possessed nuclear bombs. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” the president said. In US terms, it is an official secret. The government can even prosecute people with security clearance if they tell the truth to the American public.
In a sense, Israel’s nukes have been like an “invisible hand” that warns hostile neighbors and keeps them from going too far. At the same time, however, Israel adopted an “option of pre-emption”—attacking neighbors like Iraq and Syria with non-nuclear bombs if they seemed to be developing nuclear arms.
Israel’s essential rationale was described by various sources cited by Wikipedia: “It cannot afford to lose a single war and thus must prevent them by maintaining deterrence including the option of preemption.”
That brings the story back around to Bibi. For roughly twenty years, Netanyahu has now and then called for bombing Iran to crumple its nuclear intentions. The Obama administration is attempting to accomplish the same result peacefully, through negotiations.
As Juan Cole has written in The Nation, that may be a false choice, because Israeli intelligence and a former defense minister have admitted that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. Cole explained: “Nuclear weapons are in any case defensive, not offensive, and Iran could not deploy a bomb (if it had one, which it doesn’t) against Israel because the Israelis would retaliate by wiping Iran off the map,”
In other words, even if Tehran were to acquire nukes, it could not use them against Israel. Both nations would become prisoners of the stalemate that ruled the United States and Soviet Union for forty years during the Cold War. The doctrine was known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short..
That’s an unsatisfying result for the hawks in Israel but also the hawks in the United States. Remember Senator John McCain singing his light-hearted little ditty? “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
But isn’t talk-talk preferable to risking massive human slaughter and the destruction of nations? The war party in Washington evidently doesn’t think so. Inspired by Bibi, wannabe warriors are brutally trashing their American president. Their logic assumes the mullahs in Tehran are crazy fanatics and that crazy people are not deterred by the prospect of self-destruction.
If Obama’s negotiations fail or Republican meddling derails them, then Americans would face the ultimate question. Do we really want to go to war—again—in the Middle East? Israel might face a different question. Do Israeli citizens really want to bomb Iran if their American friends say, No, thanks—this time you’re on your own?
Maybe the Times reporters, Broad and Sanger, could do another article about the Israeli bomb that has been absent from the debate.
By: Wiliam Greider, The Nation, March 12, 2015
“Don’t Let The GOP Buy Your Vote, Stupid”: The GOP Has Zero Credibility When It Comes To Fiscal Responsibility
If you want to understand exactly how the Republicans plan to buy the votes needed to win the 2016 presidential election, look no further than “The Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Plan.”
Heard of it? The plan, which is being touted with Willy Loman-esque desperation by Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, seeks to fix our “antiquated and dysfunctional…federal tax system.” And it’s won slow clap after slow clap from Republican-friendly conservatives at Americans for Tax Reform, National Review, and The American Enterprise Institute, whose James Pethokoukis raves, “Lee and Rubio might have cooked up the first great tax cut plan of the 2000s.”
Yeah, not so much. Despite some good features that would likely spur economic growth—such as reducing corporate tax rates by 10 percentage points, switching to a territorial collection system, and capping business-income rates filed on individual Schedule C forms—what the plan does is return us to the early years of the George W. Bush presidency, when budget continence was never allowed to get in the way of shoveling cash to targeted voters.
Recall, for instance, how Bush and a Republican Congress pushed through an unfunded (and unnecessary) Medicare prescription drug plan back in 2003 as a straight-up gift to seniors, who had voted Democratic in 2000. Mission accomplished: Bush went from getting just 47 percent of the senior vote against Al Gore in 2000 to pulling 52 percent of the 65-plus crowd against John Kerry in 2004.
At least Bush was pissing away theoretical budget surpluses that were falsely projected to last far into the future. After years of record-setting deficits and mounting national debt, today’s politicians certainly don’t have that excuse. Yet last year’s Republican budget resolution called for net spending increases every year for the next 10 years, starting at $3.7 trillion and culminating in projected spending of $5 trillion in 2024 (in current dollars). And given the whopping increases in real per-capita spending under a Republican president and Congress during Bush’s first term in office, the GOP has zero credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.
There’s no doubt that a spending hawk such as Lee, who has proposed a balanced-budget amendment in the past, knows that. Yet at the heart of his and Marco Rubio’s plan is a massive giveaway to parents in the form of a new $2,500 child tax credit (this would be added to an already existing $1,000 child credit) with no phase-out due to income. However, because it’s “limited to the sum of total income and payroll tax liabilities, including employer-side payroll tax liability,” it means that low-income parents won’t be able to claim the full amount.
The expanded child credit is a big reason why, as AEI’s Pethokoukis grants, the plan would “lose something like $4 trillion in federal tax revenue over a decade, maybe half that if you apply ‘dynamic scoring’ that factors in the effects of economic growth.” (Dynamic scoring attempts to model changes in people’s behavior to changes in the tax code. While the method is easily abused, its core insight—that we change our consumption patterns when costs and benefits vary—is sound.)
But unlike cutting taxes on business activity or trimming top marginal tax rates, expanding the child tax credit has nothing to do with spurring economic growth. This is something that conservatives grant in most contexts. As Curtis S. Dubay of the Heritage Foundation wrote just last year, “Increasing the credit would be a targeted tax cut that would put more money in the pockets of people who qualify for the expansion. However, it would not improve economic growth like rate reductions would because a [child tax credit] increase would not reduce those disincentives on productive activities.”
The free-market Tax Foundation agrees. In fact, in an analysis of the Rubio-Lee plan, it ran both static and dynamic scores of the plan. On its static score for the next 10 years, the Tax Foundation found the Rubio-Lee plan meant serious reductions in annual federal revenue. For instance, switching to just two tax brackets of 15 percent and 35 percent would mean $31 billion less each year compared to current law. The full expensing of business equipment would lead to another annual loss of $78 billion, while the changes to the business taxes would cut $210 billion. And the expanded child tax credit would mean the feds would forgo another $173 billion.
Yet in its dynamic score of the same provisions, something different happens. The consolidation of tax brackets yields an average annual net gain of $5 billion, full expensing yields of $115 billion, and the changes in business taxes pulls in a net of $210 billion a year. But the expanded child tax credit? It still shows an average annual loss of $173 billion.
So the expanded child tax credit has nothing to do with promoting growth. Indeed, as my frequent co-author Veronique de Rugy points out at National Review, the generally accepted best way to promote economic growth via tax policy is by cutting high marginal rates. But because of the size and scope of Rubio and Lee’s expanded child tax credit they can’t reduce the top individual rate below 35 percent without punching an even bigger hole in revenue. “If bolstering the economic status of families is the point of all this,” she writes, “the way to go is lower tax rates, not a tax credit.”
In their explanation of the plan, Rubio and Lee claim that the expanded child tax credit is simply a way of abolishing what they call “the Parent Tax Penalty.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who has trouble following the logic here: “As parents simultaneously pay payroll taxes while also paying to raise the next generation that will pay payroll taxes, parents pay more into the old-age entitlement systems.” Huh? Parents pay to raise their children, yes. When those kids enter the workforce, they (not their parents) will pay taxes on their wages. Forget those “It’s a child, not a choice” bumper stickers. Kids today apparently are to be most valued for their ability to pay into unsustainable old-age retirement plans that need to be scrapped, not propped up.
Questions abound: If the amount of income subject to Social Security taxes is capped, doesn’t it also make sense then to phase out the credit above certain income levels? What about all the tax dollars that flow to children (and their parents) during their first 18 to 21 years? And if the expanded child tax credit is supposed to credit parents for future tax payments made by their children (yes, getting complicated), then why are low-income parents’ credits “limited to the sum of total income and payroll tax liabilities”? Aren’t we crediting parents for their kids’ future tax payments?
I’d argue instead that the “family fairness” portion actually has very little to do with the future past the 2016 election. Expanding the child tax credit, especially in a way that keeps the full amount for middle- and upper-class parents while limiting the amount low-income parents can get, is a pretty obvious (and obnoxious) way to buy votes among likely Republican voters. Especially when we all know that the GOP has no intention of trimming $173 billion out of federal spending to pay for it.
We’re long past the time for a serious conversation about how much government we want to buy and at what price. If the Obama years are any indication, the Democrats are genuinely uninterested in having that conversation. (The president’s latest budget proposal would increase spending over the next decade by more than 50 percent and end the period with bigger annual deficits than we have today.) But the Republicans, who are supposed to know better and be better on fiscal issues, are part of the problem too.
Every bit as much as the tax-and-spend Dems they love to attack, the Party of Reagan ushered in “the Golden Age of Government by Groupon.”
The only question that remains is how much our kids and grandkids will hate us for how much debt—I mean “family fairness”—we’ve amassed in their name.
By: Nick Gillespie, The Daily Beast, March 13, 2015
“I Don’t Follow That Every Day”: Selma’s Senator Not Really Sure What’s Going On With That Voting Rights Stuff
It was just last weekend that people flooded into Selma, Alabama, to mark the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights marches there — marches that led to the Voting Rights Act.
Dozens of lawmakers made the trek, including Democrats who have been desperately seeking Republicans to help them pass legislation to restore the landmark 1965 law. The Supreme Court in July 2013 struck down a key provision that determined which states and localities with a history of suppressing minority voters had to get permission from the Justice Department to change their voting laws. The court ruled 5-4 that the section of the law was outdated, and left it to Congress to come up with a new formula for designating which regions of the country warrant special scrutiny.
Lawmakers have put forward a bill that offers a solution: It would update the formula to make it apply to states and jurisdictions with voting violations in the past 15 years. But supporters have had a hard time getting Republicans to sign on, which prevented the measure from moving in the last Congress. This year, the House bill has a handful of GOP co-sponsors; the forthcoming Senate bill has none.
Asked Tuesday if he supports efforts to restore the law with historic roots in his state, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said he’s not sure what that’s all about.
“I’m not on the Judiciary Committee. I don’t follow that every day,” said Shelby. “You probably need to talk to one of the people who would do the initial action there.”
Shelby said he didn’t read the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act, but remembers seeing something about it in the newspaper. He said he doesn’t know anything about how members of Congress are proposing to fix the law.
“No, no, no,” said Shelby, when asked if he’s familiar with a bill aimed at restoring the law. “But my colleagues are. I deal with banking and appropriations … I don’t know what the court did. I know what they did — they struck down something. But let the Judiciary Committee look at that. I will listen to them.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who introduced last year’s Voting Rights Act bill and held hearings on it, has been vocal in his quest to find a GOP co-sponsor. He plans to reintroduce his bill again soon.
“I have been working for the past six months to find a single Senate Republican to join me,” Leahy said Friday. “Restoring the Voting Rights Act should not be a partisan issue.”
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who teamed up with Leahy in sponsoring last year’s Voting Rights Act bill, told HuffPost last week that Republicans have given him different reasons for not supporting the bill. Some don’t think it’s necessary, he said, and others want to make broader to changes to the law.
But other Republicans may be more amenable, and the challenge for Democrats may simply be in singling them out and bringing them up to speed on the legislation.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), for one, said Tuesday that he’s not opposed to restoring the Voting Rights Act.
“I supported the last one,” Flake said, referring to the last time Congress reauthorized the law itself. “It just hasn’t been on my radar screen. I’ll take a look.”
By: Jennifer Bendery, The Blog, The Huffington Post, March 11, 2015
“The Option Behind Door #3”: McCain, Rand Paul Roll Out New Excuses For Sabotage Letter
After putting his signature on the Senate Republicans’ infamous sabotage letter, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) started hedging Tuesday night, saying the GOP’s missive to Iranian leaders may not have been “the best way” for his party to achieve its goals.
By late yesterday, the longtime senator offered an entirely new rationale.
Some Republican senators admitted Wednesday they were caught off guard by the backlash to a letter warning Iranian leaders against a nuclear agreement with President Barack Obama. And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Republicans – many of whom blessed the missive during a brisk signing session at a Senate lunch a week ago, as senators prepared to flee a Washington snowstorm – should have given it closer consideration.
“It was kind of a very rapid process. Everybody was looking forward to getting out of town because of the snowstorm,” McCain said.
McCain went on to tell Politico that he and his colleagues “probably should have had more discussion” about the document, “given the blowback that there is.”
Note, this appears to be the third excuse Republicans have come up with for the letter intended to derail American foreign policy. The first rationale was that the 47 GOP senators were kidding, and this was all an attempt at being “cheeky.” The second was that Republicans tried to undermine international nuclear talks, but this is all President Obama’s fault.
And here’s John McCain rolling out the option behind Door #3: Republicans were concerned about snow, so they rushed.
Oddly enough, that’s probably slightly better than the rationale Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) came up with.
On NBC’s “Today” show yesterday morning, the Kentucky Republican told Matt Lauer that he signed on to the sabotage letter because he wanted to “strengthen the president’s hand.”
If there’s a way to see this as a coherent argument, I can’t think of it. Rand Paul thought it would strengthen Obama’s hand at the negotiating table if Republicans told Iranian officials not to trust or cooperate with Obama?
In the larger context, let’s not forget that Republicans tend to consider foreign policy and national security as their signature issues, and polls, reality notwithstanding, generally show Americans trust the GOP more on matters of international affairs. Credibility on foreign policy is generally seen as a birthright throughout the Republican Party.
And yet, consider what we’re seeing from Republican senators right now and the degree to which it’s amateur hour within the GOP.
At a certain level, the fact that so many in the GOP are scrambling to address the scandal they created is itself a heartening sign. All things considered, it’s better to hear Republicans making bizarre excuses than to hear then boast about how proud they are of their sabotage letter. Senators like McCain and Paul aren’t defending the letter on the merits so much as they’re looking for excuses to rationalize their participation in a dangerous stunt.
But I’m nevertheless reminded of Fred Kaplan’s assessment from earlier this week: “It is a useful thing when a political party reveals itself as utterly unsuited for national leadership.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2015
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