“The Follies Of Overreach”: The Limits Of American Power; Judging Obama’s Foreign Policy
When I was young, a mantra among progressives was that America had to stop operating as global policeman. Vietnam was the signal episode of arrogant and ultimately self-defeating American overreach. But there were plenty of other cases of the U.S. government doing the bidding of oil companies and banana barons, and blithely overthrowing left-democratic governments as well as outright communists (or driving nationalist reformers into the arms of communists.)
As the late Phil Ochs tauntingly sang, “We’re the cops of the world.” Or as Randy Newman mordantly put it, “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.”
At the same time, I viewed myself as sensible left. I was the guy at the Moratorium demonstrations of the late 1960s and early 1970s (actually covering them for Pacifica) hoping to make prudent withdrawal from Vietnam a majority cause, not the guy chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.”) I liked Norman Thomas’s line: Don’t burn the flag, wash it.
Overthrowing elected leaders like Chile’s Allende, staging coups against Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, blocking the elected presidency of Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic—those were outrages. Yet the basic containment of Soviet expansionism seemed necessary and smart policy to me.
As a lapsed political scientist, I agreed with the received wisdom that global anarchy and American isolationism led to 20th century war and chaos. I thought people who preached world government were naïve. I was, if you will, on the left wing of the realist camp. Yes to benign use of American power, no to marginal Cold War adventures and corporate-led foreign policy. Pick your battles and don’t assume unlimited power; give colonies their liberty but with very limited forays into “nation building.”
I understood that much of the pent-up rage in the global South was a delayed reaction to earlier Western imperialism, both political and economic. But I did not romanticize every Third World uprising.
Later, I thought Bill Clinton got it about right with his intervention in the former Yugoslavia, warm embrace of Mandela, diplomacy in Northern Ireland, realistic anti-terrorism policies, and relative restraint generally. I applauded Clinton’s Mid-East peace efforts, but thought both parties were far too indulgent of Israeli settlement-building on the West Bank.
Today, the legacy of the Cheney-Bush regime has underscored the folly of overreach. Every place where America intervened under the Cheney doctrine, we’ve left a worse mess than the one we attempted to fix.
In a sense, the Left has gotten its wish. Events have made crystal clear that America can’t intervene everywhere. It’s not even apparent that we can constructively intervene anywhere.
Challenges to global peace and stability are hydra-headed and localized, not the work of a central conspiracy. Not even Henry Kissinger could cut a deal with non-state militias, and there’s not much to negotiate with the ISIS caliphate.
Despite the partial culpability of Western excesses during the last century, it’s hard to argue that Jihadists are therefore the good guys and Yankee imperialists the bad guys. On the contrary, radical Islam is at war against the Enlightenment, not to mention the rights of religious others, women, and basic political democracy. (So, for that matter, are ultra-orthodox Zionism and ultra-fundamentalist Christianity.)
Despite its omissions, limitations, and the central role of dead white Europeans, I’m rather fond of the Enlightenment. Its basic ideals are worth defending.
Many Jihadists would surely use nuclear weapons if they could get them, making the events of 9/11 look like a mere prologue, and requiring U.S. global vigilance.
So, Left friends, be careful what you wish for. America’s power today is humbled—and the world is more of a cauldron than ever. Even for lefties inclined to “blame America first,” as the Right likes to put it, U.S. intervention is often a lesser evil.
So if you were Czar, as the old saying went, exactly what foreign policy would you venture?
Given the limited options, is Obama getting it mostly right? Or is he pursuing the correct policies but somehow projecting weakness (as he surely does with Republicans at home)?
Where does it make sense to exit the game, even if the vacuum is filled by true crazies and sectarian wars, as in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Where must we conclude that we have little constructive role to play despite humanitarian outrages, because of limited resources and leverage, as in Syria?
Where are truly vital interests at stake (Ukraine, and China?) and what’s the possible policy? Where is robust diplomacy a substitute for brute force?
How do we deal with the true menace of nuclear proliferation, when it’s no longer feasible to police the world?
I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Warren. I hope she runs for president. However, several progressive Democrats, not unreasonably, have lately said to me: But she has no foreign policy experience. Do we have any idea of her views, or whom she’d appoint? With the world in crisis, would people vote for someone like Warren solely on pocketbook issues?
Well, Cheney and Rumsfeld had plenty of foreign policy experience, and look what it got us. Obama had none whatever, but Kerry and Biden seem to be doing about as well as anyone could, given the terrible hand that history has dealt them. Clinton, if memory serves, had been governor of Arkansas, a state without a foreign policy.
Here is one more story from my youth. At my Oberlin graduation, in 1965, the Commencement speaker was Martin Luther King, Jr. The College trustees, perhaps to balance Dr. King, were also giving an honorary degree to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, architect of the Vietnam escalation.
One faction of students wanted to boycott or picket Commencement, but that would have insulted Dr. King. Moderate lefties like me proposed a compromise. If Rusk would meet with us and listen to our proposal, we would not stage a demonstration. The meeting was duly brokered. The few far lefties groused that the student leaders had sold them out.
At the meeting, we pitched the following proposition. Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a nationalist. His real enemy was China. South Vietnam was corrupt, non-democratic, and in any case not viable as a state. Why not allow Ho’s National Liberation Front to take power, as America should have done when Ho won his anti-colonial war with France in 1954, and guarantee Vietnam’s neutrality in exchange for Vietnam’s non-intervention elsewhere?
Rusk smiled indulgently. What did we know? We were a bunch of kids.
As events turned out, we were better realists than Rusk. Today, half a century later, the communist government in Hanoi prizes trade deals with America, practices semi-capitalism, does not threaten its neighbors, and relies on the U.S. as a counterweight to China. We might have had roughly the same outcome in 1965, with 50,000 fewer American combat deaths.
But I digress. Here are two concluding thoughts.
First, despite far-left fantasies, American can’t simply exit the world stage. There are too many menaces that require our constructive engagement. But America’s room to operate is very limited.
Secondly, better to have a thoughtful and well-read progressive leader with limited foreign policy experience than an experienced right-wing zealot like Cheney, or even a misguided experienced moderate like Rusk.
By: Robert Kuttner, Co-Founder and Co-Editor, The American Prospect; The Huffington Post Blog, July 27, 2014
“Moral Responsibility And The Israel-Palestinian Conflict”: No Moral Equivalency, Being Responsible For Your Own Actions
As Israel begins a ground invasion of Gaza in which hundreds of civilians will almost certainly be killed and the endless misery of the people who live there will only intensify, we haven’t actually seen much debate about the subject here in the U.S. There’s plenty of news about it, but unlike most issues, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one we don’t actually argue about much. There aren’t dueling op-eds in every paper the way there are when even a country Americans care far less about, like Ukraine, works its way into our attention.
There are many reasons for that, not least of which is the absurdly constrained debate we have over the topic of Israel. But I suspect that the relative quiet is in part because in a debate where even casting the two sides as equivalent is portrayed as a betrayal of Israel (you’ll notice, for instance, that the White House is careful to say, again and again, that Israel has a right to defend itself, but you’ll hear them say that the Palestinians also have a right to defend themselves at the approximate time the Winter X Games are held in Hell), few people can even manage to say with a straight face that both sides are suffering equally. Having to constantly rush to the bomb shelters and being afraid go outside is awful; I have many relatives and friends in Israel who are experiencing that right now. But it’s different from knowing that there is a good possibility that in the next few days a missile will blow apart a house on your street—as one “targeted” strike after another kills a house full of people—and there are no shelters to retreat to.
It’s been said many times that no government would tolerate rockets being fired into its territory without a response, which is true.But those rockets do not grant Israel a pass from moral responsibility for what it does and the deaths it causes, any more than prior acts of terrorism have. In this as in so many conflicts, both sides—and those who defend each—try to justify their own abdication of human morality with a plea that what the other side has done or is doing is worse. We’ve heard that argument made before, and we’ll continue to hear it. But when we do, we should acknowledge it for what it is: no justification at all.
Actions are either defensible on their own terms or they aren’t. The brutality of your enemy makes no difference in that judgment. It wasn’t acceptable for the Bush administration’s defenders to say (as many did) that torturing prisoners was justified because Al Qaeda beheads prisoners, which is worse. And our judgment of Hamas’s lobbing of hundreds of rockets toward civilian areas tells us nothing about whether Israel’s actions in Gaza are right or wrong.
According to this tally from the New York Times, as of Wednesday, Israeli strikes had killed 214 people in Gaza, most of whom were civilians. One Israeli has been killed by a Hamas rocket over the same period. Yes, Hamas would kill many more Israelis if they could. But if the question you’re asking is what kind of moral responsibility Israel bears for the choices it makes, that fact is irrelevant.
Nor does saying “Hamas is a terrorist organization!” tell you how to judge Israel’s actions. While it doesn’t appear that the group ordered the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli teenagers that started this conflagration, Hamas is quite happy to provoke Israel with rockets and watch its own people die in response; I suppose its leaders believe that the more terrible Israeli actions toward Gaza are, the better it is for their position there. Had Palestinians chosen to wage a campaign of nonviolent resistance against Israel, they could have had their own country a decade or two ago. But today, Hamas and Israeli hard-liners, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are partners in maintaining this ghastly status quo, both happy to see Gaza drown in blood and despair so long as a two-state solution never comes to pass and they can both maintain power.
But if you consider yourself a friend of Israel, the next time a bomb kills four kids playing soccer on a beach or buries a family under the rubble of their house, you have a few options. You can condemn it, or you can say it was just an accident, or you can say that regrettable things happen in war and there’s nothing anyone can do. But what you can’t say is that it’s OK because Hamas are terrible people. Israel is responsible for its own actions, just as Hamas is, and everyone else is, and nothing the other side does changes that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 18, 2014
“The End Of The Russian Fairy Tale”: A Nihilistic Disregard For Human Life
Before there is any further discussion of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it’s important that one point be made absolutely clear: This plane crash is a result of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, an operation deliberately designed to create legal, political, and military chaos. Without this chaos, a surface-to-air missile would not have been fired at a passenger plane.
From the beginning, the Russian government did not send regular soldiers to Ukraine. Instead, it sent Russian mercenaries and security service operatives such as Igor Strelkov—the commander in chief in Donetsk and a Russian secret police colonel who fought in both Chechen wars—or Vladimir Antyufeyev, the Donetsk “deputy prime minister” who led the Latvian KGB’s attempt to overthrow the independent Latvian government back in 1991.
With the help of local thugs, these Russian security men besieged police stations, government offices, and other symbols of political authority, in order to delegitimize the Ukrainian state. In this task, they were assisted by the Russian government and by Russia’s state-controlled mass media, both of which still constantly denigrate Ukraine and its “Nazi” government. Just in the past week, Russian reporting on Ukraine reached a new pitch of hysteria, with fake stories about the supposed crucifixion of a child and an extraordinary documentary comparing the Ukrainian army’s defense of its own country with the Rwandan genocide.
Into this ambiguous and unstable situation, the Russians cynically funneled a stream of heavy weapons: machine guns and artillery, and eventually tanks, armed personnel carriers, and anti-aircraft missiles. In recent days, the separatist forces were openly using MANPADS, and were also boasting of having taken down large Ukrainian transport planes, clearly with Russian specialist assistance. Indeed, Strelkov on Thursday afternoon boasted online of having taken down another military plane, before realizing that the plane in question was MH17. He removed the post. In late June, several different Russian media sources published photographs of BUK anti-aircraft missiles, which they said had been captured by the separatists—though they were probably outright gifts from Russia. These posts have also been removed.
This is the context within which a surface-to-air missile was aimed at a passenger plane: A lawless environment; irregular soldiers who might not be so good at reading radar; a nihilistic disregard for human life; scorn for international norms, rules, or standards. Just for the record: There weren’t any Ukrainian government-controlled anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine, because the separatists were not flying airplanes.
Until now, these unorthodox methods have worked well for the Russians. They unnerved and distracted the Ukrainian government while at the same time allowing foreign governments, and European governments in particular, to turn a blind eye. Because the war was not a “real” war, it could be described as “local,” as “containable,” it could remain a low priority for European foreign policy or indeed for anybody’s foreign policy.
If it has done nothing else, the crash of Flight MH17 has just put an end to the “it’s not a real war” fairy tale, both for the Russians and for the West. Tragically, this unconventional nonwar war has just killed 298 people, mostly Europeans. We can’t pretend it isn’t happening any longer, or that it doesn’t affect anyone outside of Donetsk. The Russians can’t pretend either.
Without the fairy-tale pretense, some things are about to become clear. For one, we are about to learn whether the West in 2014 is as united, and as determined to stop terrorism as it was 26 years ago. When the Libyan government brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the West closed ranks and isolated the Libyan regime. Can we do the same now—or will too many be tempted to describe this as a “tragic accident,” and to dismiss what will inevitably be a controversial investigation as “inconclusive?” It is insufficient to state, as President Obama has now done, that there must be a “cease-fire” in Ukraine. What is needed is a withdrawal of Russian mercenaries, weapons, and support. The West—and the world—must push for Ukrainian state sovereignty to be reestablished in eastern Ukraine, not for the perpetuation of another frozen conflict.
We will also learn something interesting about the Russian president. So far there is no sign of shock or shame in Russia. But in truth, this tragedy offers Vladimir Putin an opportunity to get out of the messy disaster he has created in eastern Ukraine. He now has the perfect excuse to denounce the separatist movement and to cut its supplies. If he refuses, then we know that he remains profoundly dedicated to the chaos and nihilism he created in Donetsk. We can assume he intends to perpetuate it elsewhere. And if we are not prepared to fight it, we should be braced for it to spread.
By: Anne Applebaum, Slate, July 18, 2014
“The Gall Of Dick Cheney”: His Whole Legacy Is Wrapped In Wrong And Written In Blood
The situation in Iraq is truly worrisome, as militants threaten to tear the country asunder and disrupt the fragile, short-lived period absent all-out war there.
We have strategic interests in preventing Iraq from unraveling, not least of which is that we don’t need the country to become a haven for terrorists, particularly those who might see America as a target.
And of course, there is the uneasy subject of oil: Volatility in the region has already sent global oil prices soaring. On Wednesday, militants were said to have taken control of Iraq’s largest oil refinery.
We have to tread carefully here. There are no saints to be seen in this situation. Everyone’s hands are bloody. And, we don’t want to again get mired in a conflict in a country from which we have only recently extricated ourselves.
As we weigh our response, one of the last people who should say anything on the subject is a man who is partly responsible for the problem.
But former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in the administration that deceived us into a nine-year war in Iraq, just can’t seem to keep his peace.
In an Op-Ed published with his daughter, Liz, in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, the Cheneys write:
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
This, from the man who helped lead us into this trumped-up war, searching for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, a war in which some 4,500 members of the American military were killed, many thousands more injured, and that is running a tab of trillions of dollars.
During the lead-up to the war, Mr. Cheney said to Tim Russert: “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.” Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Even if it were indeed rare to be “so wrong,” as Mr. Cheney puts it, he was vice president in an administration that was much more tragically wrong. His whole legacy is wrapped in wrong.
At one point in the article, the Cheneys state:
“Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing.”
Mr. Cheney must think that we have all forgotten the scene from “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary, in which President George W. Bush, brandishing a club on a golf course, looks into the camera and says,
“I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you.”
That is quickly followed by, “Now, watch this drive,” and a shot of Bush swinging at the ball.
In fact, on one of the rare occasions that Mr. Cheney was actually right, in 1994, he warned about the problems that would be created by deposing Saddam Hussein:
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire.”
That was quite prescient. And yet, the Bush administration pushed us into the Iraq war anyway, and the quagmire we now confront.
That’s why it’s so galling to read Mr. Cheney chastising this administration for its handling of the disaster that Mr. Cheney himself foresaw, but ignored.
I know that we as Americans have short attention spans, but most of us don’t suffer from amnesia. The Bush administration created this mess, and the Obama administration now has to clean it up.
The Cheneys wrote: “This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies,” Mr. Cheney seemingly oblivious to the irony.
George W. Bush may well have been a disaster of a president (in a 2010 Siena College Research Institute survey, 238 presidential scholars ranked Bush among the five “worst ever” presidents in American history), but at least he has the dignity and grace — or shame and humility — to recede from public life with his family and his painting, and not chide and meddle with the current administration as it tries to right his wrong.
Mr. Cheney, meanwhile, is still trying to bend history toward an exoneration of his guilt and an expunging of his record. But history, on this, is stiff, and his record is c.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 18, 2014
“Republicans’ Political Theater On Benghazi”: Nakedly Political Goal To Rouse The GOP Base For The Fall Election
Before asking a question at the coming show trial, each self-righteous congressional inquisitor should be required to correctly locate Benghazi on an unlabeled map.
That would shorten the farce. My guess is that some of the House Republicans screaming loudest in faux outrage would be hard-pressed to find Libya, much less pinpoint the city where four Americans were tragically killed.
No, Congressman, that’s Liberia you’re pointing to. Whole different country.
It’s impossible to take seriously a House select committee investigation designed not to unearth relevant new facts but to achieve nakedly political goals: rousing the GOP base for the fall election and sullying Hillary Clinton’s record in case she runs for president.
It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this a new low, and the fact that the ploy will probably backfire on Republicans is scant consolation.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chair of the select committee, tried Sunday to back away from his earlier reference to the proceedings as a “trial.” But his intent to prosecute rather than investigate remains clear.
“Why were we still in Benghazi?” he asked on “Fox News Sunday.” “The British ambassador was almost assassinated. Our facility was attacked twice. There were multiple episodes of violence. We were the last flag flying in Benghazi, and I would like to know why.”
Of all the dumb questions, that may be the dumbest. U.S. diplomats and intelligence agents were in Benghazi because, as Clinton testified before a House committee last year, “we have become accustomed to operating in dangerous places.” It is in these chaotic, violent places where threats to our national interests take shape. Brave public servants volunteer to go into conflict zones to make it safe for partisans at home to question their valor.
Here are the answers to the only questions about Benghazi that matter:
Did the State Department provide adequate security for the consulate? Obviously not. The facility was overrun, sacked and burned; therefore, security was inadequate. It should be noted that Stevens, who was based in Tripoli, thought he could safely visit Benghazi. But ultimately the buck stops with Clinton, who has taken responsibility.
Could reinforcements have arrived in time to save lives? No, according to the Pentagon. The nearest fighter jets and other assets were too far away. They could not have made it to Benghazi in time to make a difference.
That’s it. You’ll notice that I did not mention the question on which Gowdy and his GOP colleagues will probably spend the most time, energy and hot air: “Who edited the talking points?”
Yes, talking points. Incredibly, unbelievably, disgracefully, Republicans are trying to make a full-blown scandal out of who did or did not change the wording in an internal memo — a memo meant to give the administration’s first, vaguest, most cautious, least definitive assessment of what had just happened in Benghazi.
We know, from all the investigations thus far, that CIA officials initially believed the attack was related to a rash of violent anti-American demonstrations in other cities, such as Cairo, over an anti-Islam video. We also know that U.S. personnel on the ground saw a much more organized, well-planned terrorist assault. This disconnect is commonly called the “fog of war.”
U.S. diplomatic, defense and intelligence officials spent the days following the attack in a scramble to make sure our people and facilities in other danger zones were secure. Even if they had focused on the issue of demonstration vs. planned attack, could they have determined the truth in time for Susan Rice’s appearances on the Sunday talk shows? Of course not. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who has ever tried to reconstruct the blow-by-blow of a combat engagement.
And furthermore, as Clinton memorably asked Congress in exasperation, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
What’s the point, exactly, that Republicans are trying to prove? That there are still Islamic terrorists who want to kill Americans? I think this is common knowledge. That deadly violence by a homicidal mob is somehow more benign than deadly violence by an organized group? Honestly, I fail to see the distinction.
The way to honor the Americans who died in Benghazi is to try to make sure nothing like this happens again. The way to dishonor them is to make their deaths the subject of partisan political theater.
Ladies and gentlemen, the curtain is about to rise.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 12, 2014
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