“A Weighty Decision”: Boehner Ready To Punt On ISIS Vote Until 2015
It was Aug. 8, seven weeks ago tomorrow, that President Obama launched U.S. airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq. It was this week when the president expanded the mission to include strikes on ISIS targets in Syria.
And it was last week when Congress decided to give itself another 54 days off, rather than extend legal authority to the Obama administration to conduct this military offensive.
Most of us have been working under the assumption that Congress had one of two options: (1) debate the use of force during Congress’ post-election, lame-duck session; or (2) return to work before the election to do its duty and meet its constitutional obligations.
But in a new interview with Carl Hulse, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) points to Door #3 – also known as See You Next Year.
[Boehner is increasingly convinced that Congress must hold a full debate on granting President Obama the authority to use military force against terrorists…. But Mr. Boehner believes a post-election, lame-duck session is the wrong time for such a weighty decision.
“Doing this with a whole group of members who are on their way out the door, I don’t think that is the right way to handle this,” he said.
Mr. Boehner, who is open to a more expansive military campaign to destroy the Islamic State, thinks lawmakers should take up the issue after the new Congress convenes in January. At that time, he said, President Obama should come forward with a proposal for consideration.
Greg Sargent noted in response, “You have to love the idea that this is too ‘weighty’ a decision to make during the lame duck session, but not ‘weighty’ enough to vote on before the escalation actually launched, let alone before an election in which voters deserve to know where lawmakers stand on a matter of such great consequence.”
Indeed, it’s difficult to think of a defense for Boehner’s new posture.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but Americans elect members to specific terms, during which they’re expected to meet their obligations. The key word in “lame-duck session” is “session” – these elected federal lawmakers have jobs to do, and the fact that they’re nearing the end of their term doesn’t negate the fact that there’s important work to do.
Boehner makes it sound as if Congress is high school, and everyone can just coast for the last couple of weeks after final exams. That’s crazy – the United States is engaged in combat operations and the people’s elected representatives aren’t supposed to just take a pass on the crisis for the sake of convenience.
As for the notion that the White House “should come forward with a proposal,” I’d remind the Speaker that Congress is a co-equal branch of government. Waiting for the executive branch to write a draft resolution for the legislative branch isn’t a requirement – but Congress approving wars is.
As we talked about yesterday, Americans can take every Republican anti-Obama argument of late – about separation of powers, about co-equal branches of government, about the importance of institutional checks and balances – and throw them right out the window, confident in the knowledge that the GOP didn’t mean a word of it. For all the chatter about the president being an out-of-control, lawless tyrant, here’s an instance in which Obama really is acting without any congressional authority, only to find congressional leaders saying, “No big deal. We’ll think about doing something in a few months, maybe.”
Fair-minded observers can debate the propriety of the president’s actions, but for over two centuries, presidents have gone as far as Congress will let them. Especially in times of war, every Commander in Chief has sought as much power and authority as he can muster.
It’s up to Congress – filled with members who spent the summer complaining about Obama golfing instead of working – to meet its responsibilities. This Congress isn’t even going through the motions. Lawmakers aren’t even keeping up appearances. They’re not even trying.
I thought this Congress couldn’t get any worse. I stand corrected.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 25, 2014
“There’s No Terrorist Shaolin Temple”: Why Are We Afraid Of The Returning Expat Terrorist?
One of the common refrains we hear in the reporting on ISIL is that officials are worried that Americans will go to Syria or Iraq, fight with ISIL, and then return here to launch terrorist attacks on the United States. As a discrete category of terrorist threat, this is something very odd to be afraid of.
It isn’t that such people might not have the motivation to carry out a terrorist attack. But if they went to fight with ISIL, they probably already had the motivation. Ah, but what about the things they learned there? This morning, I heard a reporter on NPR refer to such returnees employing their “newfound terrorist skills” against the United States. But what skills are we talking about? If you want to learn how to make a bomb, you don’t have to go to Syria to acquire the knowledge. There’s this thing called “the internet” where it can be found much easier.
The way these potential attackers are talked about, you might think that launching a terrorist attack is something you can only achieve after years of intensive training in an arcane discipline, the secrets of which are closely held by wise old masters who deign to impart them only to carefully chosen initiates. But there’s no terrorist Shaolin temple. If all you want to do is kill some Americans and sow chaos, it’s actually not that hard. A couple of knuckleheads like the Tsarnaev brothers could do it.
This is an entirely separate question from whether ISIL as an organization wants to carry out an attack within the United States, because if they do, they don’t need someone with an American passport to execute it. Anyone here on a tourist visa could do it (in 2013, just under 70 million international visitors came to the U.S.).
The point is that there are any number of reasons a person might decide to launch a terrorist attack against the United States. While it’s entirely possible that an American could fight with ISIL and then get sent back to plant a bomb somewhere, that eventuality is no more likely than an American who has never left his home town becoming angry over U.S. foreign policy and deciding to lash out in the same manner. There are no “terrorist skills” you can’t get here at home. So as a matter of policy, the returning expat terrorist is pretty far down the list of things we need to worry about.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 24, 2014
“Obama’s Iraq Is Not Bush’s Iraq”: Plainly And Simply, Obama Didn’t Lie Us Into This War
Last week, a Politico reporter phoned me to ascertain my thoughts on the new war. Among the questions: Was there concern among liberals that Barack Obama was in some sense now becoming George Bush, and did I see similarities between the current war and Bush’s Iraq war that, come on, be honest, made me squirm in my seat ever so slightly? My answer ended up on the cutting-room floor, as many answers given to reporters do.
But since I’m fortunate enough to have a column, I’d like to broadcast it now, because the answer is a reverberating no. In fact it’s hard for me to imagine how the differences between the two actions could be starker. This is not to say that they might not end up in the same place—creating more problems than they solve. But in moral terms, this war is nothing like that war, and if this war doesn’t end up like Bush’s and somehow actually solves more problems than it creates, that will happen precisely because of the moral differences.
The first and most important difference, plainly and simply: Obama didn’t lie us into this war. It’s worth emphasizing this point, I think, during this week when Obama is at the United Nations trying to redouble international support to fight ISIS, and as we think back on Colin Powell’s infamous February 2003 snow job to Security Council. Obama didn’t tell us any nightmarish fairy tales about weapons of mass destruction that had already been destroyed or never existed. He didn’t trot his loyalists out there to tell fantastical stories about smoking guns and mushroom clouds.
The evidence for the nature of the threat posed by the Islamic State is, in contrast, as non-fabricated as evidence can be and was handed right to us by ISIS itself: the beheading videos, and spokesmen’s own statements from recruitment videos about the group’s goal being the establishment of a reactionary fundamentalist state over Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. That’s all quite real.
Difference number two: This war doesn’t involve 140,000 ground troops. That’s not just a debating point. It’s a massive, real-world difference. I know some of you are saying, well, not yet, anyway. Time could prove you right. But if this works more or less as planned, it establishes a new model for fighting terrorism in the Middle East—the United States and Arab nations and fighting forces working together to do battle against terrorism. That’s kind of a huge deal.
Which leads us to difference number three: This coalition, while still in its infancy, could in the end be a far more meaningful coalition than Bush’s. The Bush coalition was an ad hoc assemblage bribed or browbeaten into backing the United States’ immediate geopolitical aims. It was brought together pretty much so Bush could deflect the essentially true unilateralist charge and stand up there and say “41 countries have joined together” blah blah blah.
This coalition is smaller, but the important point is that it’s not built around a goal that is in the interest only of the United States. Defeating the Islamic State is a genuine priority for the region, and the idea that these gulf states that have been winking at or backing violent extremism for years might actually work with the United States of America (!) to fight it is little short of amazing. I’m not saying Obama deserves the credit here, although it seems clear he and others in the administration have worked hard on this point. Rather, the fact is that the Saudis and the Emiratis and others are now doing, however reluctantly, what it’s in their self-interest to do.
Whatever their motivation, the mere fact that they’re signing up for the fight is striking. One should never be optimistic about the Middle East, but if we look at the situation with a little more historical sweep, we can hope that this could be the moment when, after many years of letting these cancers spread, some key players in the Arab world start to try to get their own house in order a little bit with respect to extremism. And if they do that, maybe in the near future some of these regimes will start to see that the darkness in which they make their subjects live has to be lifted.
The irony is not lost on me that Saudi Arabia, our most crucial partner here, may well have beheaded more humans this year (46 so far) than ISIS has. But if these autarkies really do work to arrest the Islamic State, maybe they’ll eventually see that the only real way to make extremism seem unappealing is to make moderation—well-functioning economies, a little free speech, maybe an unrigged election now and again—seem appealing.
There are many ways that what started in Syria Monday night can go wrong. I really don’t think Bashar al-Assad shooting down a U.S. plane is one of them; I suspect Assad knows exactly how long it would take for the United States to decimate his entire air-defense system, and I bet the answer is “not very long.” However, ISIS could shoot one down. What happens to public opinion when there’s an American death, or two? When the Iraq army, even with the benefit of 200 U.S. airstrikes, can’t retake any ground, as appears to be happening now? And what would Congress do in the event of such realities? At the very least Obama does have to get congressional assent in the near future.
So this war could end up being the disaster critics are predicting. But already, it’s not some other things. It’s not a morally dubious hegemonic enterprise built on a pile of lies. That may or may not give it a better chance of success, but at least it means we don’t have to be ashamed of what our country is doing.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 24, 2014
“The Fear Component”: Why The GOP’s Latest National Security Attacks Probably Won’t Work
With the American air campaign against ISIS now expanding into Syria, President Obama updated the nation this morning:
“We were joined in this action by our friends and partners: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. America is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with these nations on behalf of our common security. The strength of this coalition makes it clear to the world that this is not America’s fight alone. Above all, the people and governments of the Middle East are rejecting ISIL and standing up for the peace and security that the people of the region and the world deserve.
“Meanwhile, we will move forward with our plan supported by bipartisan majorities in Congress, to ramp up our effort to train and equip the Syrian opposition, who are the best counterweight to ISIL and the Assad regime…
“I’ve spoken to leaders in Congress and I am pleased there is bipartisan support for the action we’re taking. America’s stronger when we stand united and that unity sends a powerful message to the world that we will do what’s necessary to defend our country.”
Obama obviously wants to spread the responsibility around, not only to other countries — which is crucial to having people in the Middle East and the rest of the world see this as a legitimate common enterprise and not simply America imposing its will on the region yet again — but also to his domestic opponents. However, he won’t be getting too many pledges of bipartisanship in return. In fact, it’ll be just the opposite.
Yes, Republicans voted to support part of Obama’s plan for combating ISIL. But even if they make some positive statements about today’s operation (which some have) or future ones like it, for the most part, we’re going to see a repeat of what we saw in the early 2000s: Democrats saying, “Hey, we’re all fighting this battle together,” while Republicans say, “Terrorists are coming to kill us all, and when they do it’ll be those weak Democrats’ fault!”
This morning, Greg noted a new ad from New Hampshire Senate candidate Scott Brown, saying that terrorists are “threatening to cause the collapse of our country,” and it just might happen because Obama and Brown’s opponent, Jeanne Shaheen, are “confused about the nature of the threat.” And if you want an attack with even less subtlety, check out this ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee: http://youtu.be/o1_6gjdqGRQ
Despite the surface similarity between political attacks like those and the ones we saw when George W. Bush was president, there’s a crucial difference. Back then, there was a Republican president taking actions against America’s enemies, while Democrats supposedly didn’t want to protect the country (even if, in reality, elected Democrats gave ample support to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other elements of the “War on Terror”).
Today, however, it’s a Democratic president who is taking action against terrorists. Even if you believe that action is inadequate, it still creates a fundamentally different impression with the public when they see Tomahawks launching and jets taking off from aircraft carriers on Barack Obama’s orders.
What the public is primarily witnessing right now is a war being waged by the head of the Democratic Party. Twelve years ago, Republicans successfully argued that they were the ones favoring action, while Democrats were a bunch of wimps who wanted to stand on the sidelines. And the Democratic party was deeply divided over Bush’s wars, its own internal arguments only lending credence to the GOP claim that only Republicans would stand up and protect America.
In contrast, no matter how hawkish some Republicans sound right now, they’re in the role of commenting on what the Obama administration is doing, while televisions play images of American military power — again, launched on Obama’s orders — on an endless loop.
So what Republicans are left with is the fear component: Terrorists are coming to kill your children, so vote GOP. That’s not nothing — fear can be effective, and research has shown that reminding people of terrorism and their own mortality can be enough to push some to support more conservative candidates. But it won’t have nearly the power it did in the days after September 11, when Democrats lived in desperate fear that Karl Rove might call them weak.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 23, 2013
“Cruz Channels The Base on IS”: Unfocused Rage Confused With Patriotism
To the casual reader of headlines, what most distinctively characterizes Sen. Ted Cruz’s typically loud rhetoric on the IS challenge and what to do about it is his bizarre focus–which NH Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown has also picked up on–on the Mexican border rather than Syria or Iraq as the most important theater of operations against IS.
But in a perceptive piece last Friday, Peter Beinart looked a little more carefully at how Cruz talks about the IS threat and discovers he represents a POV–which he calls “militaristic pessimism”–that favors military strikes without any real political strategy for–or even interest in–dealing with the situation in Syria and Iraq:
Like George W. Bush before them, McCain and Graham are militaristic optimists. They want America to bomb and arm its way toward a free, pro-American Middle East. Cruz is a militaristic pessimist. He mocks the Obama administration’s effort to foster reconciliation “between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad” because “the Sunnis and Shiites have been engaged in a sectarian civil war since 632.” Notably absent from his rhetoric is the Bush-like claim that Muslims harbor the same desire for liberty as everyone else. Instead of mentioning that most of ISIS’s victims have been fellow Muslims, Cruz frames America’s conflict in the language of religious war. “ISIS right now is the face of evil. They’re crucifying Christians, they’re persecuting Christians,” he told Hannity.
Notice the difference. When Sunnis kills Shiites, Cruz shrugs because there’s been a sectarian divide within Islam since 632. But when Muslims kills Christians—another conflict with a long history—Cruz readies the F-16s.
In this respect, says Beinart persuasively, Cruz probably best represents the views of the GOP “base:”
With his combination of military interventionism and diplomatic isolationism, Cruz probably better reflects the views of GOP voters than any of his potential 2016 rivals. According to polls, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to see ISIS as a threat to the U.S. and to back airstrikes against it, but less likely to support arming Syria’s non-jihadist rebels. As Republican strategist Ford O’Connell recently told The Hill, “Ted Cruz is probably most in line with the Republican base in the sense he doesn’t want to have a discussion of Syria versus Iraq. He wants to dismantle and destroy ISIS. Period.”
More than a decade after the invasion of Iraq, this is where the GOP has ended up. Ted Cruz wants to kill people in the Middle East who he believes might threaten the United States. And he wants to defend Christianity there. Other than that, he really couldn’t care less.
There’s an old military saying (variously attributed to Marines or special forces troops, and dating back to the Catholic Church’s 13th-century campaign of extermination against the Albigensians) that probably describes this POV even better than “militaristic pessimism:” It’s “Kill em’ all and let God sort ’em out!” It’s a monstrous but ever-popular sentiment that’s highly appropriate for a political party where unfocused rage is often confused with “patriotism.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 23, 2014
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