The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: hawks
Cheney Urges House GOP To Support A Hawkish National Defense

Cheney Urges House GOP To Support A Hawkish National Defense

By Lisa Mascaro and Michael A. Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney, often considered the brain behind President George W. Bush’s war strategy in Iraq, gave a pep talk to House Republicans on Tuesday highlighting the value of a hawkish national defense.

As Congress is weighing President Barack Obama’s strategy for fighting Islamic State militants, Cheney’s visit lends new influence to the interventionist wing of the GOP — traditional defense-aligned Republicans who have increasingly been at odds with the emerging isolationist wing of tea party lawmakers.

The mood inside the private morning meeting at Republican Party headquarters across from the Capitol was one of “rapt attention,” according to one congressman. Cheney was accompanied by his daughter, Liz, who had briefly run for Senate from their home state of Wyoming.

Cheney “reiterated to us the importance of the Republican Party standing strong on national defense,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a former Air Force pilot and one of the few veterans in Congress of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“It was a great message — and something we needed to hear and hopefully it sticks with a lot of my colleagues who kind of had this creep towards isolationism,” Kinzinger said. “Hopefully this is an awakening that we have to be very strong and very serious.”

Cheney “highlighted how Americans want a check and balance on this disengaged commander in chief,” according to a GOP aide who did not want to be identified discussing the private session.

Not all lawmakers emerged inclined to support new military intervention in Iraq or Syria. As violence from Islamic State militants escalates, including the videotaped slaying of two captive U.S. journalists, the president is set to announce the administration’s strategy Wednesday.

“I still remain skeptical,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). “I don’t think two beheadings justifies a war. I think justice is warranted, but I don’t think war is warranted over two YouTubes.”

The visit from the former vice president, who is also scheduled to speak Wednesday at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think thank, was at the invitation of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s campaign arm.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Interested in U.S. politics? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Rand Paul Faces Challenge In Opposing GOP War Hawks

Rand Paul Faces Challenge In Opposing GOP War Hawks

Kentucky senator Rand Paul is a curious vehicle for reformation of the Republican Party. He’s not a font of creative ideas; he’s hobbled by intellectual contradictions; he’s viewed skeptically by his party’s establishment. Still, Paul brings a refreshing view of the limits of warfare to a GOP that has spent the last several decades enthusiastically embracing military interventions across the globe.

So here’s to the senator’s efforts to help his party lay down its battle armor and beat its swords into plowshares. The country needs no more Dick Cheneys and far fewer John McCains.

Paul won’t easily transform the Republican Party’s views on military might. Earlier this month, Texas governor Rick Perry wrote an opinion essay criticizing him as “curiously blind” to the threat represented by international jihadists. “Viewed together, Obama’s policies have certainly led us to this dangerous point in Iraq and Syria, but Paul’s brand of isolationism (or whatever term he prefers) would compound the threat of terrorism even further,” Perry wrote in The Washington Post.

As much as anything, that’s a sign that Perry is considering once again seeking the GOP nomination for president and sees Paul as a significant rival. One way to knock off Paul, Perry believes, is to play to the GOP’s armchair hawks, who haven’t tired of sending other people’s sons and daughters to war.

Paul immediately fought back with an op-ed of his own, published in Washington-based Politico. “Unlike Perry, I oppose sending American troops back into Iraq. After a decade of the United States training Iraq’s military, when confronted by the enemy, the Iraqis dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and hid. Our soldiers’ hard work and sacrifice should be worth more than that,” he wrote.

While Paul’s views are closer to those of the American people, there is still a significant partisan divide — a challenge for the senator. Half of Americans now say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, while only 38 percent say it was the right decision, according to the Pew Research Center. (The rest are undecided.) But a closer look at polling shows that 52 percent of Republicans still believe toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.

That may simply reflect the reluctance of Republican voters to admit the failings of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. And GOP leaders know there is a lot of political fodder in knocking President Obama’s foreign policy, even if few of them present alternatives. They denounce the president’s international leadership as feckless, weak and naive — red-meat rhetoric that fires up the base.

That means Paul will have to be not only smart but also courageous if he is to help his party find a more reasonable response to a complex world. The impulse to bend the globe to our will ought to be resisted, as should the instinct to continue to feed the military-industrial complex by draining the national treasury.

One of the reasons we ended up on a misguided mission in Iraq was that Democrats failed to put up enough resistance to the neocons who were then firmly in charge of the GOP. The doomed Vietnam War (though prosecuted by Democratic presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) had left Democrats labeled wimps and cowards — a reputation they couldn’t shake. As a result, too many who should have known better, including then-senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, voted to give Bush the authority to oust Saddam.

It took Obama’s victory — he campaigned as a critic of the Iraq invasion — to help leading Democratic pols find the courage to resist a “dumb war.” There are still military interventionists in the Democratic Party, but there are far fewer who would support a war in hopes of appearing strong on the national stage.

The Republican Party hasn’t yet managed that transition. Its neocons have learned nothing from their years of folly, with Cheney and the entire cohort of Iraq War cheerleaders refusing to admit their mistakes. But if Paul can win enough support from his party’s base, he can help the GOP come to terms with a world America cannot rule.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Obama’s Drama Critics Must Miss ‘Excitement’ Of The Bush Years

Obama’s Drama Critics Must Miss ‘Excitement’ Of The Bush Years

Some of you may feel that the cormorant does not play an important part in the life of the school, but I would remind you that it was presented to us by the corporation of the Town of Sudbury to commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British.

–from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When it comes to foreign policy, everybody’s a drama critic. Particularly on cable TV, the world outside U.S. borders is presented as an ongoing melodrama on moralistic themes.

Since melodrama requires conflict, there’s a built-in bias toward “crisis” narrative. Foreign countries, indeed entire continents, can vanish from the American imagination for decades, only to emerge as the putative flashpoints of history. (Syria! Ukraine! Nigeria!) Something must be done, or all is lost.

If they agree on nothing else, politicians and pundits who derive great self-importance from pronouncing on world affairs share a bias toward the appearance of action, often in military form.

It follows that a president whose nickname is “No-Drama Obama” has been getting very mixed foreign policy reviews. What’s more, it’s not only the Bombs-Away Caucus led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham complaining.

“President Obama is being pummeled at home and abroad for his international leadership,” editorializes The New York Times. “The world sometimes seems as if it is flying apart, with Mr. Obama unable to fix it.”

Partly, it’s a matter of style. The president’s ostensible allies at The Times can’t stand Obama’s “maddeningly bland demeanor,” lamenting that the president’s lack of ideological zeal leaves him “too resigned to the obstacles that prevent the United States from being able to control world events as easily as it may once have done.”

Read that last bit again. Try to imagine editors waving it into print. Previous to World War II, I Americans pretty much left ruling the world to those plucky lads of Sudbury and their brethren among European colonial powers who gallantly gave their lives to keep China British, Vietnam French, Indonesia Dutch, etc.

But post-war Pax Americana notwithstanding, I’m unable to think of a time since 1945 when the U.S. controlled world events “as easily” as it does today. From the Berlin Air Lift of 1948 through the ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003, you name me a president; I’ll name you a foreign policy debacle: Budapest, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Prague, Vietnam, Iranian hostages, Lebanon, the Persian  Gulf War, Serbia, 9/11, Afghanistan…

President Obama, not so much. Indeed, for an awful lot of his critics, crisis avoidance seems to be the big problem. He’s making it look too easy, and that scares people. The Times again: Not the reality, “but the perception—of weakness, dithering, inaction, there are many names for it—has indisputably had a negative effect on Mr. Obama’s global standing.”

The Washington Post’s Fareed Zakaria nails it: many of Obama’s “critics want the moral and political satisfaction of a great global struggle. We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington’s elites — politicians and intellectuals — miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely and the challenges were stark, moral and vital.”

In another way of putting it, for purely theatrical purposes they’d be happier with a posturing ideologue like George W. Bush, of whom comedian Stephen Colbert observed “no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”

Even Zakaria wishes that President Obama brought more flair and passion to his role as what used to be called Leader of the Free World. Still, his larger point strikes me as unexceptionable: having inherited two ill-advised, poorly prosecuted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has all but finished the job of ending both without plunging into another. As of 2014, the U.S. will finally heed President Dwight Eisenhower’s advice to stay out of land wars in Asia.

Maybe he’s not Mr. Excitement, but Obama’s made no big mistakes.

Should the president have talked about a “red line” in Syria if he wasn’t willing to use force? No, but better to look feckless than go to war to save face. The Syrian factions deserve each other; neither is our friend.

In Ukraine, the big American mistake was appearing to take sides in an area of little strategic importance to the U.S. but crucial to Russia. For all the overheated Hitler/Putin talk, a Russian invasion appears increasingly less likely. As for Crimea, those Russian soldiers were already there.

A deal on Iranian nuclear weapons, meanwhile, could be an international game-changer on a Nixon-goes-to-China scale.

Many human beings, alas, do prefer melodrama.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

Will Putin Bring Us Together?

Will Putin Bring Us Together?

WASHINGTON — Vladimir Putin’s grab of Crimea has exposed the paradoxes in American attitudes toward foreign policy.

Congress has been unusually united in condemning the Russian leader’s aggression and calling for his isolation. His belligerent offensive has been denounced by such liberals as Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), and by many conservatives, including Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Ron Johnson (R-WI).

On the other hand, a Pew Research Center poll found that by a margin of 56 percent to 29 percent, Americans said it was more important that the United States “not get too involved” in the Ukrainian situation than to “take a firm stand against Russian actions.”

Support for minimizing involvement spanned party lines: 50 percent of Republicans took this view, as did 55 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents. The survey ran March 6-9, before Russia annexed Crimea, but it nonetheless underscored the nation’s allergy to foreign entanglement, even as Americans also clearly and deeply mistrust Putin.

Annexing territory by force is as unacceptable to advocates of multilateralism as it is to those who believe in go-it-alone assertiveness. The Russian leader’s open mourning over the collapse of the Soviet Union horrifies liberals, who saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for a freer, less bellicose world, as well as conservatives, who always said that Putin’s KGB past was the truest indicator of his worldview and intentions.

But the nearly universal antipathy to Putinism cannot hide our divisions, and they are especially pronounced in the Republican Party. Most of the GOP’s prominent voices preach a hard line against Putin, but a broad anti-interventionist constituency within the conservative movement continues to grow.

Former Rep. Ron Paul spoke for this tendency in a blunt USA Today op-ed article this week. “Why,” Paul asked, “does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?”

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) shares his father’s libertarianism, but his efforts to navigate among competing Republican foreign policy factions during the Ukrainian crisis have led the younger Paul in several directions at once.

Senator Paul sounded like his dad on Feb. 25 when he told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa: “The Ukraine has a long history of either being part of the Soviet Union or within that sphere.” He chastised “some on our side … stuck in the Cold War era” who “want to tweak Russia all the time.” In a March 10 piece for the Breitbart website, he mocked “politicians who have never seen war talking tough for the sake of their political careers.”

But in a March 9 Time magazine essay, Senator Paul himself took a tougher line. “It is America’s duty to condemn these actions in no uncertain terms,” he said, and to be “the strongest nation in opposing Russia’s latest aggression.”

Rand Paul’s delicate dance is a reminder that when President Obama decided to go to Congress last fall to win approval for airstrikes against Syria for its use of chemical weapons, he faced resistance from doves in his own party but also from anti-interventionist Republicans alike. Obama has faced criticism for inconstancy in abandoning military action in favor of a partnership with Russia to remove the Syrian regime’s chemical arsenal. But it’s important to remember that many in the GOP were skeptical of using force from the start.

Those who hope the United States and its allies will take what Durbin on Wednesday called “a good, hard, tough stand” against Putin thus need to consider not only European worries about the impact of sanctions on Western economies but also the sustained backlash against Iraq and Afghanistan. Some who supported those wars now see a chance to challenge “the idol of war-weariness,” as neoconservative commentator William Kristol put it in arguing that a “war-weary public can be awakened and rallied.”

But Kristol’s proposition faces hostility within, as well as outside, his own party. Americans, particularly those bearing the greatest ongoing costs from the economic downturn, will not have much of a taste for activism in foreign policy until their burdens are eased.

We must confront Putin, but this will require a foreign policy consensus that has vanished. A new one will have to be based on principles that predate the Iraq engagement and involve a more measured use of American power.

Thus the final paradox: Putin has given Obama the opportunity to begin rebuilding this consensus — if the president decides to try, and if his critics are willing to help him do it.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

AFP Photo/Maxim Shipenkov