Tag: neoconservatives
Trump May Name Iraq War Propagandist John Bolton As Top US Diplomat

Trump May Name Iraq War Propagandist John Bolton As Top US Diplomat

The dark comedy that will all too soon officially become the Trump administration is still in previews, but already we’re learning that the cosmic joke is on every American who believed whatever the man we must call “president-elect” said. That beautiful big border wall? It’s probably going to be a fence. Those 11 million deportations? That number has been cut by about 80 percent, down to roughly what the Obama administration is doing to rid the country of non-citizen criminals now. Draining that Washington swamp of reptilian lobbyists? They’re in charge of his transition.

And did you believe Donald Trump’s claim that he was against the war in Iraq, as he falsely claimed over and over again? Did you assume that he opposed the neoconservative policies of the Bush administration? Did you think he would be more cautious about foreign intervention than Hillary Clinton, as Trump promised when he blamed her for misadventures in Iraq, Libya, and Syria?

During the past year plenty of crackpots, on the left as well as the right, declared a preference for Trump over the “globalist” Clinton on national security and foreign policy issues, citing her Iraq war vote and her vaguely hawkish demeanor. But that brand of analysis was exposed as pitifully naïve on Nov. 14, as credible rumors began to circulate that one of the top two candidates for Secretary of State is John Bolton, who served as UN ambassador during the George W. Bush administration.

Yes, that’s the same John Bolton who demanded last year that the United States bomb Iran.

If Trump were serious about “draining the swamp,” Bolton would be among the first to be flushed down the ditch; instead, he is evidently preparing to redecorate the top office at Foggy Bottom. He has dwelled deep in Washington’s fetid conservative bogs since the Reagan administration, when he toiled as a flack in the disreputable Justice Department headed by Edwin Meese — an attorney general so steeped in ethical stink that his top deputies, lifelong Republicans, resigned in protest. But Meese’s misconduct didn’t trouble Bolton.

In subsequent years Bolton attached himself to the neoconservatives as an “arms control expert.” That didn’t mean he knew anything about nuclear arms or controlling their perilous spread, but merely that he would regurgitate belligerent right-wing pap about why we didn’t need any arms treaties — not even to safeguard the old Soviet Union’s “loose nukes.”

During his tenure at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Bolton committed many offenses against common sense and international security that led actual foreign policy experts to despise him. He tried to destroy the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Bioweapons Convention, and every other document that has made the world slightly safer over the past 75 years. But surely Bolton’s most reckless project was to sabotage vital cooperation between the US and Russia to keep nuclear weapons from disappearing into the clutches of rogue states and terrorist groups.

Never a deep thinker, Bolton proved to be an eager instrument of the neoconservative cabal associated with Vice President Dick Cheney during the Bush years. Not only did he support the scheme to attack Iraq — and remake the Mideast through aggressive war — but actively promoted the official lies and propaganda that led to the US invasion. From his perch in the State Department, Bolton helped to promote the forged documents supposedly proving that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger — a fraud that spawned multiple scandals, including the exposure of the identity of patriotic CIA agent Valerie Plame, who had worked covertly against nuclear proliferation.

On other fronts, Bolton was also an advocate of the absurd claim that Iraq was behind the original World Trade Center bombing by jihadi terrorists in 1993. He actively barred analysts who questioned the faked intelligence from participating in policy meetings on Iraq, presumably on orders from Cheney. In short, he was among the geniuses who cost the United States and Iraq many thousands of lives, while wasting trillions of dollars on a war that ultimately empowered a pro-Iran Shia regime.

Actually, Bolton was among the original signatories to the Project for A New American Century letter in 1998 urging an American invasion of Iraq — and reportedly believed that the US should subsequently overthrow the regimes in Syria, Iran, and North Korea too. According to neocon theory, the installation of a friendly government in Baghdad would lead inexorably to the transformation of the Mideast as the dominoes fell in Damascus, Tehran, and elsewhere.

In 2005, Bush and Cheney named Bolton US ambassador to the United Nations, an organization to which he had often declared hostility in the style of the paranoid far right. His record was so dismal, including attempts to mislead the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that former Secretary of State Colin Powell took extraordinary steps to derail his nomination. With the help of several wavering Republican Senators, the Democrats succeeded in mounting a filibuster of his nomination and forced Bush to install him as a recess appointment.

Perhaps that entertaining drama will be reprised soon in a fresh confirmation hearing, where Bolton can explain the Niger uranium scandal, the horrific outcome of the Iraq war, how he misled Senators in 2005, and why he is so eager now to spark yet another bloody conflict in the Mideast. Or perhaps Trump will instead nominate Rudy Giuliani, whose only foreign policy experience consists of telling tall tales about his role in the investigation of the Achille Lauro terrorist attack. But even considering Bolton indicates the essential phoniness of Trump’s “cautious” campaign pose.

Trump Likes Snub From Republican Elite

Trump Likes Snub From Republican Elite

From on high they have spoken to us, we the people.

The neocon foreign policy elite vigorously embraced and enforced President George W. Bush starting three wars going into the 21st century: Afghanistan, Iraq and the global “war on terror.” Detainees, drones and now ISIS in Syria are tearing apart the Middle East. Now these wise men are warning us against Donald Trump, 13 years after they swung the wrecking ball, many as W’s aides and appointees.

Nice. Thanks, guys.

Fifty Republican national security experts have graced us with a letter stating that Donald Trump is a threat to our national security. They say Trump would be the “most reckless president” in American history, in part because of his volatile temperament, poor understanding of diplomacy and NATO, and chumminess with the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.

My, how they’ve grown.

But not a word about the Iraq War, which they supported to a man, with false “intel” on weapons of mass destruction and ties to 9/11.

Many served in the George W. Bush administration at high levels, such Michael V. Hayden, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

So do go on.

Eight of the 50 signers belong to the Aspen Strategy Group, which meets every summer, breathing lofty summer air in Aspen, Colorado. Nicholas Burns, head of the Group, is another prominent former Bush official. He is virtually alone among them to endorse Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, as he makes the public case against Trump.

Why should we care?

Here’s what one anti-war political scientist says: “If this crowd (read: white-collar warmongers) is worried about Trump using force, that’s powerful.

“Then they find him a scary individual. They’ve learned since the war began.”

She — my mother, Professor Judith Stiehm — thinks the letter gives a green light to upper-middle-class Republicans to vote against Trump. They need a polite shove, official permission to dissent from their party nominee. And it might make a difference in a battleground state such as Ohio, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

What about Trump’s base?

The letter will not change a thing among the Trump loyalists. In fact, the more elites talk, the less they listen.

The Republican letter might actually help Trump by egging him on. He shrewdly thanked the signers for coming forward so “the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” The elites have not sent their sons (and daughters) to Iraq and Afghanistan in the all-volunteer military. On the contrary, it’s Trump’s white male voters who are more likely to know the lines of fire, with a clearer picture of the futility of the mission(s).

Anti-intellectuals in Trump’s core base of white, working-class men feel completely left out of the conversation President Obama has been conducting for seven or eight years as he reluctantly re-started the Bush wars he hoped to lay to rest. A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Obama has also picked up the pace of drone warfare — a terrible way to wage war — and failed to close Guantanamo jail, a massive human rights stain in the world’s eyes. The irony runs rich. The 21st century, if it were a Broadway show, would have closed by now.

Very few people have sat in the “room where it happens,” in the tight Obama White House Situation Room or the Oval Office, where he reviews picks for the “kill” list. The president’s top-secret Osama bin Laden raid in Pakistan did not signal an end to it all. But it gave the lie to Bush’s foolhardy strategy of sending the Army into the desert storm after one man to avenge 9/11 – an operation carried out by 19 hijackers.

To his credit, Obama never said he was a “war president,” a phrase Bush deployed. He also dislikes the phrase “War on Terror.” He has repaired a lot of the damage Bush has done, at home and abroad. Except for a functioning secular Arab state where women played a part in education and the professions. Iraq has been crushed into a wasteland with more civilian casualties than we care to count — more than 50,000. The Pentagon did what it does: Followed orders. The Army has carried the weight of a war that few can tell us: What for? More than 7,000 soldiers laid down their lives and too many have lost limbs. Bush never seemed to have lost a sound night’s sleep on it.

Just because the establishment has spoken does not mean people will listen.

If the 50 Republicans experts express regret for past wars or hopes for a future peace under Hillary Clinton, then let us praise them.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

Photo: Former U.S. President George W. Bush delivers a speech at Warren Easton Charter High School one day before the ten year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, August 28, 2015.  REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman

The Unpolarized Moynihan

The Unpolarized Moynihan

WASHINGTON — The problem with most discussions of political polarization is that they reach quickly for technical causes and solutions. Our politics are polarized, we are told, because of gerrymandered districts, the rise of opinionated media sources and party primaries closed off to independents or voters in the other party.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking about such things, but all the mechanical fixes in the world will not overcome a brute fact about the United States in 2015: We really do have profound disagreements with each other that are intellectual, moral, partisan, and ideological.

Because the facts are clear on this, it’s always important to note that our polarization is asymmetric: Republicans are much more conservative as a group (close to two-thirds of them) than Democrats are liberal (about one-third). Still, if our divisions are intellectually rooted, who has ideas that might bring us together?

One name comes to mind when you try to think of someone who managed to live on both sides of the ideological divide and still kept his own thinking coherent. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked for both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He opposed the Vietnam War but was not wild about anti-war protesters. He was often called a neoconservative but thought of himself as a liberal. He was a Democratic senator from New York for 24 years and managed to get votes from just about everybody. In his last re-election race in 1994 — a bad year for Democrats — he won by 14 points.

How did he do this? The question is interesting enough that two volumes were published this year to try to explain the matter. In his gem of a book, The Professor and the President, Stephen Hess, who worked for Moynihan (and is my Brookings Institution colleague), tells the story of the unlikely Nixon-Moynihan political courtship. And Moynihan was an interesting enough thinker that Greg Weiner, a political philosopher himself, treats him as one in American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Weiner’s notion is that Moynihan was undoubtedly a liberal “through and through” because he “believed in government as an agent of social improvement” and thought it capable of doing large and important things. But he shared with Edmund Burke, often seen as the founder of modern conservatism, a skepticism about grand schemes for “wholesale social transformation” and a belief in limits. “Both were conserving reformers who valued traditional systems of authority, most primarily the family,” Weiner writes, and both “interpreted politics in terms of the observable and the concrete rather than the metaphysical and the abstract.”

Weiner argues, and I am inclined to agree, that one reason we miss Moynihan, who died in 2003, is because we have a need for more Burkean liberals and more Burkean conservatives. They would share in common a concern for evidence, an understanding of the limits of human reason, a skepticism about our ability to transform “complex social systems,” and a belief that we can always make things better but will never make them perfect. From these shared assumptions, they could then argue about such matters as how much social generosity to expect from government.

Moynihan’s Burkean nature no doubt made it easier for the lifelong Democrat to work for a Republican president. Hess shows how he was also a brilliant inside player who knew how to get around bureaucratic and human obstacles — and how he appealed to Nixon. Moynihan made him laugh, which wasn’t a common thing in that White House, and also acted as a tutor, which flattered Nixon by taking his intellectual curiosity seriously, whose insecurities ultimately undid him.

Hess details the still astonishing story of how Moynihan got Nixon to propose a truly radical innovation, a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. The Family Assistance Plan was killed in Congress because it was too liberal for Republicans and not generous enough for Democrats. But it was, in its way, a classic Burkean program. Instead of creating intricate and expensive new services for the poor, Moynihan proposed to give them what they definitely needed more of, which was money.

As a skeptic about technical solutions to polarization, I certainly won’t propose that all Americans study their Burke and their Moynihan. But as an antidote to the tendency these days toward the-sky-is-falling rhetoric, we could usefully remember this very Burkean warning from Moynihan: “When situations of considerable but not impossible difficulty are described in apocalyptic terms, responses tend to be erratic, even convulsive.” As Moynihan would never say: Chill.

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

Photo via Wikicommons

To Defeat ISIS, Ignore Partisan Alarmists And Send Smart Diplomats

To Defeat ISIS, Ignore Partisan Alarmists And Send Smart Diplomats

It is entirely appropriate that the appalling crimes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which openly declares genocidal intentions, have inspired demands for forceful action to destroy the terrorist entity. Impatient politicians and belligerent pundits express frustration with President Obama because he isn’t bombing more sites or dispatching U.S. troops to Iraq or expanding the conflict into Syria — or just heeding their urgent advice, immediately.

Now any or all of those policies may eventually prove necessary, after careful consideration and consultation with America’s allies. But the president would be wiser to do nothing than to simply parrot the prescriptions of his neoconservative critics. And he would be wiser still to keep in mind that the past enthusiasms and errors of those critics are the underlying causes of the predicament that he and the civilized world confront today.

The undeniable reality is that there would be no ISIS (and no crisis) if the dubious neoconservative desire to invade Iraq had been duly ignored in 2003.

A jihadi movement capable of winning support from oppressed Sunni Muslims in that ravaged country arose directly from the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the installation, under American auspices, of a sectarian Shiite regime. Not only was that regime unwilling to unite Iraqis into a democratic order, but its political allegiance pointed toward Iran rather than the United States.

For anyone who listened to neoconservative “experts” such as William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, these ruinous developments would have come as a wicked surprise. Soon after the U.S. invasion, after all, Kristol had assured us that religious and ethnic divisions among Iraqis would present no significant problems whatsoever. “There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America,” he told National Public Radio in April 2003, “that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”

And the weapons of mass destruction were just around the corner, and the war would pay for itself with Iraqi oil, and the Iranians would rise up next to throw off the mullahs, while the entire Mideast underwent a miraculous transformation under the benign influence of the Bush doctrine, and blah, blah, blah…

By this point, it seems obvious to nearly everyone just how absurdly wrong all those predictions were. Just as salient, however, is that the Iraq war – and the failure of diplomacy that it represents – was the culmination of an enormous squandered opportunity, whose harmful consequences continue today. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the world rallied around the United States, from Europe to Asia; even the Iranians volunteered to help us defeat Al Qaeda.

Instead of assembling an international coalition to confront Islamist extremism – with diplomacy, technology, information, and humanitarian assistance as well as military force – the Bush administration moved against Iraq. By doing so, it alienated nearly all of our allies, forfeited the world’s sympathy, wasted thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, all to create a divided, failed state that now incubates terror.

So when someone like Kristol urges the president to bomb first and think later, as he did recently, the only sane response is bitter laughter. We need sober diplomacy and smart strategy, which President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have vowed to pursue when the United States takes over the leadership of the UN Security Council this month. And we need the patience to muster at last the broad, invincible alliance we could have led against Al Qaeda from the beginning.

AFP Photo

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