Why Rand Paul is Right: Republican hawks DID create ISIS

Kentucky U. S. Sen. Rand Paul's recent indictment of foreign policy hawks in his own party for "creating ISIS" has the neoconservatives in deep denial about their role in creating the mess which is now the Middle East. And of course their apologists were deployed this weekend to the news shows to explain how "strange" and "delusional" were Sen. Paul's remarks.

The normally lucid Charles Krauthammer said, "You know, sometimes, Ron Paul’s ignorance really astonishes me." [He meant "Rand"]

So, first, let's ask ourselves this question: "If George Bush II had not invaded Iraq (at the behest of Republican hawks) for what we now know were completely specious reasons, would ISIS exist?"

If you answer "Yes" to this question, then you are delusional: Your answer is strange and your ignorance should astonish even yourself.

If you answer "No," then you are in complete touch with reality.

Now of course, the particular part of Paul's remarks his critics are honing in on is the remark about where ISIS got many of its arms: “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party, who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS,” he said.

I think that's true too. But if you look at the full context of this remarks, you will see that his indictment is more far reaching than this and is directed at the failed policy of Republican neoconservatives that goes back "for twenty years."

I remember well the evolution of the Bush administration's position after 9/11 and in the months leading up to the Iraq War: The campaign started out as an effort to punish the people who perpetrated the attack on the Twin Towers and those harboring those who perpetrated it. That's why we went into Afghanistan.

Then, the agenda got much bigger: The Bush administration then decided it would go after all terrorists everywhere, whether they had been involved in 9/11 or not. In fact, by early 2001, so bloated did the administration's cause become that he announced in his State of the Union speech: "My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers."

Seriously. Go back and read the whole thing. Ridding the world of evil-doers. All of them.

And then there was the missionary cause of democracy which we were going to force everyone else in the world to acknowledge as superior. Or else. No one said it outright, but if you parsed the rhetoric of the time, you could have concluded that we were waging war on non-democratic forms of government as well.

It was this absurdly broad target that put Saddam Hussein in the cross-hairs. Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. Nothing. But he was an evil-doer. One of the many in the world whom we were going to destroy. So we did.

And that action created the modern Middle East crisis.

Someone on one of the Sunday programs attempted the argument that Paul had the chain of causation wrong. Okay, here's the chain of causation, and it isn't even terribly complex: The elimination of a strong and stable (if evil) government in Iraq, produced an unstable and weak government (if morally benign) in a Iraq. An unstable and weak government in Iraq was both the necessary and sufficient condition of the terrorist groups that began to thrive thereafter in Iraq. One of these groups is ISIS.

QED.

If there is a flaw in this chain of reasoning, could someone please point it out to me?

Since the "victory" in the Iraq War, it has all been downhill, with the possible exception of the Surge. But the other night, Fox's Meghan Kelly, claimed that we had "won" after the Surge. And she's criticizing Rand Paul for not making sense? That is about as bone-headed a comment as I can possibly imagine. The only way the benefits of the Surge would have lasted is if we had kept Surging into perpetuity―at a huge cost in money and manpower.

That may have kept Iraq stable for a while. But winning means you get to come home. If we had "won" with the Surge, then why wasn't it okay for Obama to bring the troops home?

The very fact that people like Kelly criticize Obama for giving away what we gained with the Surge is an indication that whatever we gained through the Surge was hardly permanent and certainly could not be described as a military victory.

So now we have a race for the presidency that features Democrats who were in favor of the Iraq War who now realize it was a mistake and Republicans who were in favor of the Iraq War who now realize it was a mistake.

What a choice.

And the only exception to that is Rand Paul. On the biggest issue of the past in regard to the Iraq War―whether it should have happened in the first place―Rand Paul is the only one who was right―just as his father (and presumably he too) was the only was who was right on the economic crisis of 2008 (He was the one congressman who accurately predicted the result of the housing bubble. His prediction was spot on).

That doesn't mean I'm going to vote for Rand Paul for president (I'm going to vote for the candidate who is the least cowardly in their defense of traditional marriage), but it does mean that the people who are now criticizing him on his remarks about ISIS (Krauthammer, National Review, Commentary magazine―former Iraq War cheerleaders all) are the very people who were wrong on the biggest issue in relation to the Iraq War―whether is should have happened in the first place.

If you didn't get that right, you forfeit your right criticize Rand Paul on anything related to the Iraq War. Go away. Find someone to criticize who has a worse track record than you on the issue, not a better one.

Cheney vs. Obama: A plague on both their houses

Dick Cheney is right about Obama, Rand Paul is right about Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney is wrong about Rand Paul.

When, in his recent Wall Street Journal column, Dick Cheney said "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many," he was right about Obama. The problem is that the exact same thing could be said of Cheney himself. Cheney belongs on the stool right next to Obama over in the political corner there with a dunce cap similar to the one he's prescribing for Obama.

Rand Paul is absolutely right in saying that the Bush administration, with Cheney in the supporting role, is more guilty than Obama for what is now going on in Iraq.

There was no good reason for going into Iraq in the first place. The reasoning started out as part of the response to the Twin Towers disaster, but when the Bush administration could not make that plausible (mainly because Saddam Hussein, for all his other faulths, had nothing to do with it), it changed its excuse midstream and claimed the reason for going in was because of WMDs.

And we know how that turned out.

Is Obama incompetent in foreign policy? Of course he is. But Cheney is the last person to put out there to criticize him. He unwisely helped make the war Obama is fecklessly trying to get out of. It's the pot and the kettle thing.

Cheney and his neoconservative cronies really believed that we could just go in to Iraq and install an American-style democracy, hand over power to it, and ride off into the sunset. But no reasonable person even at the time thought this was plausible.

Saddam Hussein was obviously no friend of the U. S., but he at least kept Iran in check. The older U.S. policy was to play Iran and Iraq off against each other, never letting one get the clear upper hand. Then had their hands full with each other, making it less likely they would bother other countries.

But, thanks to the war for which Cheney is now partly responsible, we now we have a situation where the balance of power in the Middle East favors Iran, always more of a threat to the U.S. than Iraq. In fact the Shiites now have majority control in Iraq. By one account, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki was literally hand-picked in Khamenei's office!

We go into Iraq, sacrifice thousands of American lives to hand over Iraq to Iran as a client state?

If Cheney is going to have any credibility on this issue at all, he should explain in what way the decision to go to war with Iraq (his policy) was successful.

Until then, he is in no position to criticize either Obama or Rand Paul.

The Obama Doctrine

You almost have to try, as the President of the most power country on earth, to make yourself irrelevant in global politics, but this seems to be the chief achievement of Obama's foreign policy. We have observed before on this blog the specifics of Obama's economic policy, which consists of the following principles:

Principle #1: ????????????????????????????
Principle #2: ????????????????????????????

And, last but not least, his most unforgettable economic axiom:

Principle #3: ????????????????????????????

Which leads us to Obama's foreign policy, which contains only one basic rule, which goes as follows:

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This is why, in the contest now with Russia over the control of the Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin is hunkered down in the Kremlin, trembling at the very thought of the following action by the United States, aimed right at the heart of Russia's aspirations in Eastern Europe:

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Wait. Just a second. That's not trembling. That's ... that's ... Putin ... doubled over laughing at the incompetence of the current administration in Washington.

Not Just Vintage Political Theater: Why the Randstand matters

The Drudge Report called it the "Randstand" and the "Randpage." Whatever you want to call it, it got people's attention. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky did something that few people think of doing anymore: finding some stunt so old and forgotten that people mistake it for something new.

Paul got up on the U. S. Senate floor and conducted an old-fashioned filibuster (the only kind of filibuster worthy of the name) in an attempt to attract attention to his objection to the use of drones for use against American citizens. It worked. In fact, it worked so well it may go down as the political stunt of the year.

This little piece of political street theater, which ended after midnight last night--over 13 hours in all, was the talk of the political world today.

You've got to hand it to Paul, he knows how to get attention. But the thing about him that is so unlike most other politicians today is that he not only knows how to get your attention, but once he gets it, you find out that he actually has something to say.

One of the constant refrains amidst the buzz that followed his marathon talk was that he was actually saying something worth listening to. There were numerous reports of people tuning in to C-Span 2 and listening for several hours.

When was the last time you heard of somebody willingly listening to a politician talk for hours? When was the last time you heard of a politician talking for hours? In fact, when was the last time you heard of anyone watching C-Span 2?

I know. There are actually people who watch C-Span 2. And to them I say: Get a life.

But it is not only Paul's creativity in attracting media attention that is remarkable--or, more importantly, his willingness to stand up for what he believes in. Those things are admirable enough. It is his message on issues like this.

Unlike many so-called "conservatives," Paul actually believes we should follow the Constitution. And when was the last time you heard of anyone actually reading that? Certainly not any judges we know of.

Paul is one of the people who really gets the idea that (as Pat Buchanan rightly points out) we are a republic, not an empire. But while Paul and his little band of rebels were articulating Constitutional principles on the Senate floor, John McCain and Lindsay Graham were over playing patty cake with the Emperor. After sleeping off last night's big dinner with Obama, McCain took to the Senate floor today and assailed Paul, saying, "I don't think what happened yesterday is helpful to the American people."

Well, um, neither is getting killed by a drone.

I almost expected McCain to say something on the order of, "Now, young Skywalker, you will die."

For the last 25 years or so, the national Republican Party has been in the clutches of people who view the world in starkly imperial terms. The Iraq invasion is only the most egregious example of this. They are "Patriot Act" conservatives who think they have struck a blow to the enemies of America every time we frisk a little old lady at the airport.

I think of them every time I go through the airport security scanner.

Note the difference between the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan on the one hand, and the foreign policy of most modern Republicans (and, increasingly, Democrats, who at least have the excuse of being members of the party that got us into every major war over the last 100 years except the last one): Reagan knew that the way to handle such situations was to go get the bad guys and get out. The neoconservatives who still call the shots among Republicans will nod at the first part (get the bad guys), but have a hard time understanding the second part (get out).

Hopefully, Paul's leadership on issues like this will bring a little sobriety to a national Republican party that for   over two decades has been drunk on internationalism.

It's no coincidence that McCain and Graham both gave their little lectures after drinking with the President the night before.

Why NOT politicize Benghazi?

We heard once again in last night's debate that the Romney campaign should not politicize the terrorist attack in Benghazi that was not a terrorist attack then, but which is now that we know more, even though we still don't have a complete enough investigation into what happened there to say exactly what it was even though that didn't stop us from saying that it was a protest over a movie.

Okay, well let's just say Romney is politicizing the issue. The first question then is how Mr. Romney is politicizing the issue any more than people in Obama's administration already politicized it when they portrayed it as some sort of popular protest over a movie in order to make it agree with the Obama political narrative about the improved U.S. relations in the Middle East.

The second question is what moral rule we are employing here to say that anyone shouldn't politicize it. Is the rule that we shouldn't politicize any incident in which Americans are being killed overseas? Where were the Democrats who are saying that now when George McGovern ran an entire campaign over the Vietman War, an incident in which many, many more people were dying than died in Benghazi.

In fact, where were these self-righteous Democrats when they themselves were criticizing George Bush over the Iraq War? Weren't people dying there?

The Democrats (and the Republicans, for that matter) politicize everything that it is to their advantage to politicize. So why not politicize this?

Obama's courage (relative to the people who actually have to pay the price for his inaction)

Mark Stein, on Obama's foreign policy--or lack thereof:

In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you. 

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. In other words, while America’s clod vice president staggers around pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Read the rest here.

Obama's note to self on Egypt

Obama's Note to Self: Don't give lectures to Mitt Romney on the importance of foreign policy experience on the same day you declare that Egypt is not an ally.

Additional Note: Get Debbie Wasserman Schultz to explain that it never happened.

Quaddafi is dead. Long live progressive leadership.

There's not much to say about the reported death of Qaddafi, longtime Libyan tyrant. I will just mark his end by recounting my first awareness of him.

I was in 7th grade at Dapplegray Middle School in Rolling Hills Estates, California in the early 1970s. We (all of us students) were herded into the gym, where we saw a film on the incredible economic miracle taking place in an African country most of us had never heard of. And this was all taking place, we were told by the film's narrator, under the rule of a progressive new leader.

The country was Libya, and the progressive leader was Quaddafi.

Public schools. You gotta love 'em.

Obama: He's still the One

Charles Krauthammer:

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president's various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration -- excuse me, outreach and understanding -- is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come.

Read more here.

Obama & Hillary mute in the face of criticism of the U. S.

Let's hope Obama doesn't run the military this way:

For 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua delivered his diatribe, charging America with a century of terrorist aggression in Central America.

After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Fidel Castro's Cuba, Obama was asked his thoughts.

"I thought it was 50 minutes long. That's what I thought."

Hillary Clinton was asked to comment: "I thought the cultural performance was fascinating," she cooed.

Pressed again on Ortega's vitriol, Hillary replied: "To have those first-class Caribbean entertainers all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space. I was overwhelmed."

Thus the nation that won the Cold War, contained the cancer of Castroism in Cuba, liberated Grenada, blocked communist takeovers of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, and poured scores of billions in aid into this region was left undefended by its own leaders at the Summit of the Americas.

Read the rest of Patrick Buchanan's column here.

Is Obama ready to lead the free world?

Little thinks matter when it comes to international diplomacy.

Seven things I still believe

Several websites (several of which are conservative) have printed lists of beliefs they had before the Iraq War that had to be abandoned because of it. A number of blogs, including Eunomia (Daniel Larison's blog), The Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan), Crunchy Cons (Ron Dreher), and In the Agora, have all spoken on what they no longer believe. Being a paleo-conservative skeptical from the outset, here is my list of beliefs that have been confirmed over the course of the War:

1. Western democracy cannot simply be imposed on an eastern culture that has no democratic traditions and no institutions to support it. The idea that we could impose representative democracy on a country with an authoritarian history and a diverse religious population is simply misguided. Iraq was held together by a strongman with dictatorial powers: that is its history, and its future (if it has one) as a single nation. In order to bring about order in Iraq with the Sunni and Shiite factions at each other's throats would require a degree of cruelty that we are unprepared and unwilling to exercise--and rightly so. But we should have known this is what it would require, and, being unwilling to engage in it, we should not have acted as if we were.
2. Democracy should be seen as one of many legitimate forms of government, and should not be viewed as a religion. Just because we are a democratic republic does not mean that everyone else has to be. We should acknowledge Winston Churchill's assertion that democracy is the worst form of government ever devised by man--except for all the others that have been attempted throughout human history. Even if we believe that republican democracy was the best form of government, we are not therefore obliged to demand that every other country practice it. There are other forms of government that we ought to see as acceptable and legitimate, and to think anything else is utopianism. The messianic political rhetoric of the Bush administration in this regard is a recipe for foreign policy disaster.
3. America should strive to be a republic and should avoid thinking and acting like an empire. We are not the world's police force, and we need to get over it. American political leaders should have one objective and one objective only: the interest of the United States. Imposing democracy on the world doesn't accomplish this end and only detracts from it. We should help our friends and penalize our enemies, and when we do the latter, it should take some other form than invading them--unless they are on the verge of invading us. The only way Iraq could have done that to us was with weapons of mass destruction, which they didn't have.
4. Military action should be swift, severe, and short-lived. If there was evidence that someone in Iraq was involved in 9/11, then we should have taken them out and gone home. As it stands, there is little hope of stabilizing Iraq in any short period of time, and we are in the dilemma of either making a long term commitment that is politically unfeasible or leaving the country in chaos and the middle east in instability. When you try to own a country that isn't yours, it ends up owning you.
5. The United States should never try to run another country. We have our hands full trying to run our own. The war has sapped our resources and left us less capable of dealing with problems in our own country--and less able to be flexible in dealing with other foreign policy crises that could easily and quickly arise. North Korea, which is far more of a threat than Iraq could ever have been, might need our attention, and there still exists the possibility that mainland China could attack Taiwan. Our military presence in Iraq renders us incapable of dealing with either of these problems.
6. The American military should be seen as a military, not a political tool. Although some people blame the military for Iraq, they need to remember that it was politicians, not the military, that made the decision to invade Iraq. When you ask a military force to perform a police function, you shouldn't be surprised when it doesn't turn out well, and when it doesn't, you should blame the people who made the decision to use them--not the ones who are being used--in this way.
7. Misguided foreign and domestic policy leadership by the head of a political party can haunt that political party for a whole generation. The previous generation of Americans judged the political parties by two leaders: Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. The identity of Republicans and Democrats was based on the American public's opinion of these two presidents--to the benefit of Republicans and the detriment of Democrats. Whoever is identified with the Democrats (possibly Clinton), this generation will see the Republicans in light of the Bush administration. His hubristic foreign policy, his lack of fiscal restraint, and his abandonment of small government conservatism has squandered the Reagan legacy, and the result could be many years in the wilderness for the Republican Party. Republicans will spend many years trying to reclaim what they have lost. They may be given plenty of time to work on it.
   

These are all views I had before the Iraq War, and events since 2000 have only confirmed them.

How the Romans handled hostage takers

An interesting post containing Machiavelli's account of how the Romans handled hostage situations.

Wall vs. Wall

As David Adams points out, Mexico's president-elect Felipe Calderon compares the 700-mile wall on the U.S. border with his country with the Berlin Wall. He has apparently forgotten that the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in, while the U.S. border wall is to keep people out.

If he doesn't like the wall, he ought to implement policies in his own country that will encourage people not to flee from it--like maybe dismantling socialism.