“Obama And The Warmongers”: The Drums Of War And The Chants For Blood; The Politics Of The ISIS Threat
We seem to be drifting inexorably toward escalating our fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as the Obama administration mulls whether to extend its “limited” bombing campaign into Syria.
Part of the reasoning is alarm at the speed and efficiency with which ISIS — a militant group President Obama described as “barbaric” — has made gains in northern Iraq and has been able to wash back and forth across the Syrian border. Part is because of the group’s ghastly beheading of the American journalist James Foley — which Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., called “ISIS’s first terrorist attack against the United States” — and threats to behead another.
But another part of the equation is the tremendous political pressure coming from the screeching of war hawks and an anxious and frightened public, weighted most heavily among Republicans and exacerbated by the right-wing media machine.
In fact, when the president tried to tamp down some of the momentum around more swift and expansive military action by indicating that he had not decided how best to move forward militarily in Syria, if at all, what Politico called an “inartful phrase” caught fire in conservative circles. When responding to questions, the president said, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”
His aide insisted that the phrase was only about how to move forward in Syria, not against ISIS as a whole, but the latter was exactly the impression conservatives moved quickly to portray.
It was a way of continuing to yoke Obama with the ill effects of a war started by his predecessor and the chaos it created in that region of the world.
In fact, if you listen to Fox News you might even believe that Obama is responsible for the creation of ISIS.
A few months ago, the Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro told her viewers that “you need to be afraid” because of Obama’s fecklessness in dealing with ISIS, adding this nugget:
“And the head of this band of savages is a man named Abu al-Baghdadi — the new Osama bin Laden — a man released by Obama in 2009 who started ISIS a year later.”
That would be extremely troubling, if true. But the fact-checking operation PolitiFact rated it “false,” saying:
“The Defense Department said that the man now known as Baghdadi was released in 2004. The evidence that Baghdadi was still in custody in 2009 appears to be the recollection of an Army colonel who said Baghdadi’s ‘face is very familiar.’
“Even if the colonel is right, Baghdadi was not set free; he was handed over to the Iraqis who released him some time later. But, more important, the legal contract between the United States and Iraq that guaranteed that the United States would give up custody of virtually every detainee was signed during the Bush administration.”
Fox, facts; oil, water.
But the disturbing reality is that the scare tactics are working. In July, a Pew Research Center report found that most Americans thought the United States didn’t have a responsibility to respond to the violence in Iraq.
According to a Pew Research Center report issued last week, however: “Following the beheading of American journalist James Foley, two-thirds of the public (67 percent) cite ISIS as a major threat to the United States.”
The report said that 91 percent of Tea Party Republicans described ISIS as a “major threat” as opposed to 65 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents.
The report also said:
“Half of the sample was asked about ISIS and the other half was asked about the broader threat of ‘Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda,’ which registered similar concern (71 percent major threat, 19 percent minor threat, 6 percent not a threat). Democrats were more likely to see global climate change than ISIS as a major threat.
Americans were thrilled by our decision to exit Iraq when we did, but support for that decision is dropping. In October 2011, Gallup asked poll respondents if they approved or disapproved of Obama’s decision that year to “withdraw nearly all United States troops from Iraq.” Seventy-five percent said they approved. In June of this year, the approval rate had fallen to 61 percent.
Yet 57 percent still believe that it was a mistake to send troops to fight in Iraq in the first place.
Now, Republicans are beginning to pull out the big gun — 9/11 — to further scare the public into supporting more action. Senator Lindsey Graham has said on Fox News that we must act to “stop another 9/11,” possibly a larger one, and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has warned, “Sadly, we’re getting back to a pre-9/11 mentality, and that’s very dangerous.”
Fear is in the air. The president is trying to take a deliberative approach, but he may be drowned out by the drums of war and the chants for blood.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 31, 2014
“Something Out Of Nothing”: Obama’s ‘No Strategy’ Moment Is A Non-Story
It’s all so predictable. As expected, media pundits are having a field day dissecting President Barack Obama’s statement yesterday that, when it comes to dealing with the Islamic State (the militant group also known as ISIS), “we don’t have a strategy yet.” That sentence came in response to a journalist’s question regarding whether Obama needed Congress’ approval to go into Syria militarily, and came after an extended analysis by Obama regarding the Islamic State and the situation in Iraq and Syria.
As I suggested in this previous post prior to Obama’s press conference, the president’s caution regarding how to deal with the Islamic State is warranted, given the fluid nature of the situation in Iraq and Syria, and because there remains a great deal of uncertainty among his foreign policy experts regarding the extent to which the Islamic State presents a security threat to U.S. national interests.
For most Americans who saw Obama’s press conference in full, his candid statement explaining why his administration has not yet settled on a military strategy for dealing with the militants is likely to hardly raise an eyebrow. But for media pundits determined to extract a digestible sound byte or headline from Obama’s rather nuanced and lengthy discourse, the specific statement regarding the lack of a strategy was manna from heaven. Not surprisingly, the twitterverse exploded in consternation that the president would make such an admission, and many news outlets used Obama’s statement to lead their press conference coverage. As a result, Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest went on the news shows to clarify that by lack of strategy, the president referred specifically to military tactics for dealing with the Islamic State, and that he in fact did have a plan for addressing broader regional concerns.
Earnest’s explanation notwithstanding, pundits were quick to assess the damage Obama’s statement would have on a) his political standing, b) the nation’s foreign policy, c) the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming midterms and d) all three. The most common media theme was that Obama’s statement reinforces the impression conveyed by recent polls that Obama is not tough enough when it comes to foreign policy, and that – as Hillary Clinton implicitly suggested in her recent Atlantic interview – Obama’s foreign policy approach lacks any underlying guiding principles. And, not least, it allowed the pundits to recycle all the previous stories about the damage done by presidential gaffes.
Here’s the problem with these instant analyses. They are wrong. Obama’s statement, by itself, will almost surely have no substantive impact on either his political standing or the effectiveness of his foreign policy. Nor will it change the outcome of the 2014 midterms. This despite the best efforts by pundits to fit this statement into a larger media narrative that will surely dominate the next few news cycles.
How do I know this? Consider some other celebrated gaffes that are even now being recycled in light of Obama’s latest statement. For example, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake likens the “we don’t have a strategy yet” to Mitt Romney infamous 47 percent statement during the 2012 presidential campaign, in which the Republican presidential candidate claimed that “47 percent of the people ….are dependent on government” and thus would never vote for him. Blake writes, “As with all gaffes, the worst ones are the ones that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions or fit into an easy narrative. That’s why ‘47 percent’ stung Mitt Romney so much, and it’s why ‘don’t have a strategy’ hurts Obama today.”
The problem with Blake’s analogy, however, is that despite wide-spread media coverage of Romney’s 47 percent statement, including pundits’ claims that he had essentially killed his chances to win the election, it actually had almost no impact on the outcome of the presidential race, a finding documented by political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck in their careful study of the 2012 presidential race. They conclude that, “In terms of the most important decision – who to vote for – there was no consistent evidence that much had changed” as a result of the video. Indeed, they argue that whatever its immediate impact, the video’s effect largely dissipated by the time of the first presidential debate a few weeks later and that it had no lingering influence on Romney’s support. They conclude, “Whatever the explanation, it was striking that this video, a supposed bombshell, detonated with so little apparent force in the minds of voters.”
Despite the media fixation, this will almost certainly be the case with Obama’s latest “gaffe” as well. The reason is that voters are not blank slates whose opinions toward politicians and policies are largely determined by the latest media meme of the day, no matter how pervasive the coverage. Instead, history suggests that voters’ assessment of Obama’s handling of foreign policy will be driven much more by their perceptions of events, including the Islamic State’s progress in Syria and Iraq, as mediated through voters’ own ideological predispositions, than they will by pundits’ single-minded focus on one sentence in a presidential press conference. Nor will it overshadow the more fundamental factors – the state of the economy, incumbency status and the typical seat loss experienced by the president’s party – that primarily determine midterm election outcomes.
Nonetheless, the fact that Obama’s statement will matter little to most of the public won’t stop pundits from endlessly replaying and analyzing it for the next few news cycles in the fervent, albeit misguided, belief that it may turn out to be the equivalent of “‘read my lips’ signature of a failed presidency”. That is, unless another non-story comes along in the next few days to push this one from the headlines.
By: Mathew Dickinson, Professor, Middlebury College; Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, August 29, 2014
“Leading From Behind, And Proud Of It”: America May Just Need To Get Over Its Own Sense Of Paternalism
Egypt and the UAE went forward with air strikes against Islamists in Libya without informing the United States. They did this presumably because they are concerned with the growing influence of Islamist extremists in their region of the world. No doubt their concerns don’t exist in a vacuum; the whole world is watching as Islamists garner more control in Iraq and Syria. Apparently America is supposed to be upset about the move because we should have been informed. The thought is that we’ve provided some of the weaponry, so we should have a say. There’s also the uncomfortable truth that America may just need to get over its own sense of paternalism if we really want to stay out of conflict.
Poll after poll shows an American populace that does not favor intervention overseas. It’s become quite clear since the downturn of the economy that we have enough to work on here at home without getting into multibillion-dollar conflicts. So we don’t want to intervene, but we don’t want to be left out either. The favorite saying of what I would call war hawks is that this is what happens when America “leads from behind.”
Well, here’s my question: Why do we have to lead at all?
I would argue that at this point and time we are in no position to lead anyone. We have record -low unemployment, the middle class that once defined the American dream is dissipating, and we have social issues bubbling under the surface that we should probably start to address. We have serious infrastructure needs that need to be met, and plenty of ingrown homeland-security challenges I’m positive our military could focus on (not to mention millions of families who would be grateful not to send off their loved ones into dubious wars).
I understand that America has serious political interests in the Middle East beyond oil. I understand that leaving the area completely is a pipe dream, largely because leaving Israel to its own devices at this point would be like leaving a kid in the desert to fend for herself. That said, isn’t that kind of what Americans did when we declared independence? Or when we fought our incredibly deadly civil war? What if the superpower of the time got involved in our own now-infamous civil conflict? What if we were not allowed to fight it out but were forced to form ourselves under the influence of a foreign culture that no one understood?
That is what we have been doing in the Middle East, and it is time to stop. It is time to let regional powers figure out their own regional conflicts, and it is time for America to begin addressing our own. We have thousands of people trying to get into our country because the situation below our border is so dire, partially for reasons that are well within our control (e.g., the drug war). Maybe we don’t see that problem as just as much of a threat as those in the Middle East, but we should. As we have seen with the latest incident at the Texas border, we can only ignore our neighbors for so long as we toil along overseas.
The interests are strong, and the history is thick, but I, for one, am happy that Egypt and the UAE made a unilateral decision without us. I am happy that Egypt orchestrated the Israeli/Palestinian ceasefire. I am glad that we are starting to “lead from behind” in the rest of the world, because maybe that means we can lead our own country.
By: Courtney McKinney, The Huffington Post Blog, August 28, 2014
“Presumption”: Hillary Clinton’s Hawkishness May Be Her Undoing
Even without a formal declaration of her intent to run, Hillary Clinton is the presumed Democratic nominee for president in 2016. She has earned that status through two decades of hard work on the national stage — as First Lady, as a senator from New York, and, especially, as a loyal and energetic secretary of state in the administration of her former rival, Barack Obama.
But Clinton’s presumed bid for the presidency — a historic run she’s unlikely to turn down — is threatened by the same unfortunate tendency that cost her in 2008: presumption. She seems oblivious to national trends that make some of her stances unpopular.
Nothing better illustrates that presumption than her continued hawkishness, a trait on full display in her interview earlier this month with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly. While Washington pundits focused on her curt dismissal of a few words the president allegedly spoke to reporters — “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said — the substance of her argument is much more troubling than that.
She insisted that if Obama had intervened in Syria, if he had just agreed to arm Syrian moderates, jihadists such as the bloodthirsty cohort of the Islamic State might have been halted in their tracks.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.
That sentiment drew huge cheers from the left-of-center interventionists, as well as the neo-cons, who still occupy positions of influence on the national stage. But it contrasts sharply with average voters, the regular Joes who recognize the limits of American power. Polls show that they want nothing to do with more foreign entanglements that don’t directly reflect U.S. interests.
They remember that even deploying military advisors often leads to more boots on the ground, more American dead. And those dead are unlikely to come from the ranks of powerful politicians or diplomats or journalists, but rather from the working classes. More to the point, mainstream voters want their politicians to concentrate on fixing a broken economy here at home, not on fixing broken nations halfway around the world.
Last fall, 52 percent of the public said the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” according to the Pew Research Center. It was the first time since 1964 that more than half the country held that view, Pew said.
Given the half-hearted economic recovery, it’s no wonder that voters want their politicians to focus on rebuilding the broad American middle class. While Washington politicians and the scribes who cover them are doing just fine, much of the country has yet to mount a full comeback from the Great Recession.
Moreover, it turns out that voters’ skepticism toward foreign interventions is supported by research, which shows that arming “moderates” was likely to backfire.
Recently, political scientist Marc Lynch, writing in The Washington Post, summarized the data this way:
In general, external support for rebels almost always makes wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve. … Worse … Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective.
To be fair, Clinton didn’t suggest sending U.S. troops into Syria. Still, her criticism of Obama’s approach shows a tone-deafness, a calculated disregard for the attitude most Americans now hold toward foreign interventions. Sometimes, that sort of brush-off of popular sentiment is a hallmark of genuine leadership. In this case, it’s just arrogance.
Clinton should know better. She was defeated for the Democratic nomination by a lesser-known senator largely because his opposition to the war in Iraq, by then a clear disaster, contrasted with her support for it. While she won’t face Obama in 2016, she might find herself up against Republican Sen. Rand Paul in the general election. And his skepticism toward military interventions could prove more popular than her stubborn, ill-advised hawkishness.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor, The University of Georgia; The National Memo, August 23, 2014
“Everyone Expects The President To Be A Magician”: Why President Obama Is Right On Foreign Policy
Hillary Clinton surprised both Republicans and Democrats with her sharp criticism of President Obama over his foreign policy, calling it a “Don’t do stupid stuff” strategy that did not conform to the definition of a policy at all.
Her assessment has merit but is also unfair. America’s foreign policy is definitely scattershot but it is not the fault of the president. It is the fault of our culture. We are getting the foreign policy we have chosen.
On one hand, Americans are the most soft-hearted and empathetic people on earth, capable of feeling the pain of people an entire world away. And yet we also have a visceral hatred of war, preferring diplomacy to settle differences and sometimes even refusing to fight when it is the only way to prevent catastrophe. We do eventually wake up to reality but it is only after a massive humanitarian crisis such as the one now being witnessed in Iraq.
Our foreign policy, to put it succinctly, is reactive and not proactive and allows situations — whether it be the rise of Al Qaeda, Hassad’s regime in Syria, the pro-Russian movement in Ukraine, or ISIS in Iraq — to deteriorate until there is no option from a humanitarian perspective but to commit military resources to it. In the process, we often make a bigger mess than we started, such as we have made in Iraq and Afghanistan. We detest conflict and therefore fail to take action in time to prevent a full-scale disaster.
President Obama is simply meeting this mandate given to him by the American people. It is arguable, of course, that as the commander-in-chief he should lead and not follow, but this particular president has been hamstrung on both sides by the Republicans and the Democrats — each of whom have their own (sometimes hypocritical) belief system and agenda, and have been brutal in holding the President to it.
On the right, the GOP would love for him to launch as many wars as possible to support the defense industry and to appease the party’s hawkish foreign policy beliefs, but also routinely attack him on the budget deficit and the government’s inability to balance the books; and on the left, the Democrats demand that he not risk any U.S. lives but criticize his inability to save the lives of persecuted souls all over the globe. In other words, everyone expects the president to be a magician who can pursue a strong foreign policy and stand up for humanitarian causes without spending any money and without risking any American lives.
The White House’s reactive strategy, then, is a direct response to these contradictory pressures and the best that it can do to address world crises. If we really want a more comprehensive foreign policy and a longer-term strategy for the Middle East, Russia, North Korea, and other problem areas of the world, the American people first need to rethink their own attitudes towards international intervention and only then can their leader really do anything about it. We need to make up our minds — either we are willing to pursue a policy of preventing bloodshed across the world and make the personal financial and human sacrifice needed to do it, or we need to accept that we cannot save everyone and will have to accept the best that our government can do.
Peanut gallery criticism, which is what most of us offer, including at the moment Hillary Clinton, is disingenuous and counter-productive. It also sends a bad signal to the world that we don’t know what we are doing, which is not true. President Obama does know what he’s doing. The problem is that he just can’t do much more given the constraints he works under.
By: Sanjay Sanghoee, Political and Business Commentator; The Huffington Post Blog, August 11, 2014
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