As readers of this blog know, I’m not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which pretty much defines neo-conservative foreign-policy orthodoxy and is probably the movement’s single-most influential and effective proponent in the elite U.S. media. If you accept certain of its assumptions — sometimes explicit, sometimes [...]]]>
As readers of this blog know, I’m not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which pretty much defines neo-conservative foreign-policy orthodoxy and is probably the movement’s single-most influential and effective proponent in the elite U.S. media. If you accept certain of its assumptions — sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit — the editorials, columns, and op-eds the Journal produces usually make the most coherent case for a neo-conservative position, especially as regards anything having to do with Israel and its ruling Likud Party, as any other publication, including the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and Commentary’s Contentions blog. As tendentious and bizarre as these pieces often are, they also usually offer some degree of intellectual integrity.
In that respect, the “Wonderland” column published last Thursday by the Journal‘s deputy editor of the editorial page Daniel Henninger struck me as particularly lacking. I don’t read Henninger’s column very frequently; on foreign policy, he seems to be a lightweight compared to his colleague Bret Stephens, who writes the Tuesday “Global View” column. But I read this one, entitled “Rand Paul’s Reagan,” because its title raised a favorite interest of mine — the ongoing battle between the neo-con/aggressive nationalist and the paleo-con/libertarian wings of the Republican Party.
Of course, you should read the whole thing, but the part that really jumped out at me was his juxtaposition of the “Weinberger Doctrine” and his confident depiction of Ronald Reagan as a staunch and unflinching advocate of a hawkish foreign policy:
While there was never a formal Reagan Doctrine, Ronald Reagan himself said enough and did enough to know where he stood. In his 1985 State of the Union, Reagan said, “We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that’s not innocent.”
Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” aligned his own policy toward Soviet Communism with the idea of “rollback,” stood at the Brandenburg Gate and cried, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” increased U.S. defense spending, deployed Pershing 2 ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in Europe amid world-wide protests in 1983, invaded Grenada the same year, and gave U.S. support to anticommunist movements in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola and Latin America—with many congressional Democrats in a towering rage of eight-year opposition to nearly all of it. The words Reagan used most to support all this were “freedom” and “democracy.” He ended four decades of Cold War.
Well, aside from the fact that Henninger seems to take great pride in U.S. support for such “anticommunist” and freedom-loving movements represented by the mujahadin (and future Taliban) in Afghanistan, the Khmer Rouge (de facto) in Cambodia, the witch-burning Jonas Savimbi in Angola, and the Somocista-led contras in Nicaragua (not to mention the murderous armies and security forces of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala — the three main sources of all those children on the southern border now — in Central America), I find this litany of “where (Reagan) stood” in the context of any discussion of the Weinberger Doctrine quite remarkable for what it omits. More precisely, Henninger fails to devote a single word to the events that gave rise to Weinberger’s enunciation of the doctrine that bears his name: the disastrous deployment of U.S. marines at the Beirut airport and the Oct 23, 1983, bombing of their barracks in which 241 servicemen were killed.
Of course, what is relevant here was Reagan’s reaction. You would think from Henninger’s depiction of “The Gipper” that he not only would have shrugged off what was the worst one-day loss of life of U.S. servicemen since World War II. He would also have spared no effort to hunt down the perpetrators*, bombed the hell out of their suspected sponsors wherever they were to be found, and then quadrupled the number of troops deployed to Lebanon in order to demonstrate to all the world his determination to “stand” his ground in the face of terrorist threats and outrages, and defeat them.
In fact, however, Reagan did nothing of the kind. Two days after the disaster, his administration launched the invasion of tiny Grenada partly, no doubt, to divert the public’s attention from Beirut. Meanwhile, most of the surviving marines were immediately deployed offshore, and by February, they had been withdrawn entirely from Lebanon, albeit not before the USS New Jersey fired off dozens of VW Bug-sized shells at Druze and Syrian positions east of Beirut. (Neither is believed to have had anything to do with the bombing.) Weinberger, who had opposed the original deployment and had wanted to lay out the principal lessons that he thought should be learned from the debacle shortly after the withdrawal, waited until November 1984 to devote a speech to the subject. One year later, that same tough-guy Reagan, who, as Henninger recalls, warned against playing “innocents abroad,” authorized the arms-for-hostages deal that formed the basis of the Iran-Contra scandal …and then claimed that he had no idea that he was indeed trading arms for hostages. This is Henninger’s Reagan.
I should stress right away that, unlike both Paul and Henninger, I’m definitely not a defender of Ronald Reagan whose presidency, I believe, was an unmitigated disaster for the country (exceeded only by George W. Bush’s, of course), not to mention the many tens of thousands of innocent people who died or were killed by the application of the “Reagan Doctrine” in Central America, southern Africa (remember, Reagan’s support for apartheid South Africa), and Indochina. And, while I agree with Henninger that “Ron Paul’s Reagan” is not an entirely accurate rendition of the 40th president’s foreign policy, Henninger’s depiction is no less flawed. In fact, I believe it is fundamentally dishonest. After all, if you’re going to attack Paul’s central point about Reagan’s alleged adoption of the Weinberger Doctrine, the very least you can do is mention the events that gave rise to it: the ill-thought-out commitment of U.S. troops into a civil-war situation and their subsequent ignominious withdrawal. As noted by none other than Reagan’s own Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman (also a member of the 9/11 Commission), ”There’s no question it [Reagan's withdrawal] was a major cause of 9/11. We told the world that terrorism succeeds.” Of course, that particular Reagan obviously doesn’t exactly fit Henninger’s idealized and highly misleading version.
* One of the great ironies is that an alleged key planner of the 1983 barracks bombing, as well as other attacks against U.S. officials in that period, was an Iranian intelligence officer, Ali Reza Asgari, who, according to Kai Bird’s recent biography of Robert Ames (the CIA officer who was killed in the suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut six months before), was granted asylum in the U.S. during the George W. Bush administration in 2007 in exchange for sharing his knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program. According to Bird, Asgari has been living here under the CIA’s protection since his defection. You can find Augustus Richard Norton’s review of Bird’s book for LobeLog here.
Photo: Caspar Weinberger meeting in 1982 with then-Israeli Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon Credit: public domain
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by Jim Lobe
As an update to the post I wrote Thursday, it appears the White House is toughening its rhetoric against the Kirk-Menendez Wag the Dog Act, as more Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. There are now a total of 59 co-sponsors, including 43 of the 45 Republicans [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
As an update to the post I wrote Thursday, it appears the White House is toughening its rhetoric against the Kirk-Menendez Wag the Dog Act, as more Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. There are now a total of 59 co-sponsors, including 43 of the 45 Republicans (Sens. Jeff Flake and Ron Paul are the hold-outs), and 16 of 55 Democrats and Independents. These latest developments come amidst word from Geneva that an agreement on the implementation of the Nov. 24 accord between Iran and the P5+1 could be announced this weekend.
The White House issued its strongest statement to date Friday via a statement provided by National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan to the Huffington Post:
This bill is in direct contradiction to the Administration’s work to peacefully resolve the international community’s concerns with Iran’s nuclear program. We know that this proposed legislation would divide the international community, drive the Iranians to take a harder line, and possibly end negotiations. This bill would have a negative bearing on the sanctions regime too. Let us not forget: sanctions work because we convinced our partners to take the steps that we seek. If our partners no longer believe that we are serious about finding a negotiated solution, then our sanctions regime would suffer.
If Congress passes this bill, it will be proactively taking an action that will make diplomacy less likely to succeed. The American people have been clear that they prefer a peaceful resolution to this issue. If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so. Otherwise, it’s not clear why any member of Congress would support a bill that possibly closes the door on diplomacy and makes it more likely that the United States will have to choose between military options or allowing Iran’s nuclear program to proceed [Emphasis added].
The President has been clear that he has a responsibility to fully test whether we can achieve a comprehensive solution through diplomatic means, before he pursues alternatives. Passing new sanctions legislation right now will undermine our efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution.
The question now is whether the White House can hold nervous Democrats, particularly Majority Leader Harry Reid who controls the calendar for floor votes, in line. As I suggested yesterday, the fact that the co-sponsorship has become so heavily and conspicuously Republican — and is now, thanks to the Foreign Policy Initiative (AKA the Project for the New American Century) so closely associated with neoconservatives and other Iraq war advocates — could make that work easier. That may be one reason why anonymous Hill staffers linked to AIPAC are claiming to CNN and other outlets that the lobby group has rounded up 77 commitments to vote for the bill if it comes to the floor, making it immune to a promised White House veto if Reid lets it come to a vote.
In light of Amb. Hunter’s post about the important constitutional implications of Obama’s decision to seek an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) from Congress, I wanted to make a few quick observations about the move and some of its possibilities.
1) This could set the stage for a [...]]]>
In light of Amb. Hunter’s post about the important constitutional implications of Obama’s decision to seek an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) from Congress, I wanted to make a few quick observations about the move and some of its possibilities.
1) This could set the stage for a long-overdue debate about the role of the United States in the post-Cold war, post-Iraq War world. Poll after poll has shown a great ambivalence in public opinion over whether the U.S. should act as the world’s policeman (no) and whether it should sustain its military dominance and its ability to act unilaterally if its security is threatened (yes). As Amb. Hunter pointed out, a serious debate would also address Washington’s “indispensability” and what that means, as well as whether the U.S. is willing to act, unilaterally if necessary, to uphold what it regards as “international norms.” These are huge questions that began to be debated in Congress over the Libya intervention but never captured public attention in a major way, in part because a) Obama, as commander-in-chief, never felt obliged to seriously engage in it; and b) the UN Security Council had authorized military action, thus giving it an international legitimacy which, at least at this point, action against Syria is very likely to lack.
2) The coming debate is likely to expose and exacerbate deepening fissures in the Republican Party over Washington’s role in the world. With the exception of Ron Paul and John Huntsman, all of the Republican primary candidates in the 2012 election ran on what might be called a neo-conservative/aggressive-nationalist foreign-policy platform which today is best embodied by Sens. McCain and Graham, the mainstream media’s go-to Republican foreign-policy spokesmen. It’s significant that in a statement issued shortly after Obama’s announcement today, the duo suggested they could not support “isolated military strikes in Syria that are not part of an overall strategy that can change the momentum on the battlefield, achieve the President’s stated goal of Assad’s removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict…” By taking such a position, they clearly invite opposition from a pretty broad range of their fellow-Republican lawmakers (especially in the House) associated with the non-interventionist (some would say neo-isolationist) positions associated with Ron Paul, and the realist stance represented by someone like Sen. Corker, as well as fiscal conservatives associated with the Tea Party. (Not that these three groups are entirely discrete factions.) The debate could really turn into a battle royal among the Republicans over who speaks for the party when it comes to foreign policy.
3) Similarly, Democrats are likely have a difficult time bringing their ranks into line. Many of them will be torn between their loyalty to Obama and the White House (and their historic fear of being called soft on the enemy of the day) on the one hand, and anti-war forces on the other. The latter have time to mobilize their troops against military action in a major way and, in any event, play a much stronger role in the party at the grassroots level (to which House members, in particular, have to pay attention), than inside the Beltway.
4) One other point worth noting. The proposed AUMF includes an intriguing “whereas” clause that suggests an important change of position with respect to Iran’s participation at Geneva 2.0, if it should come to pass:
Whereas, the conflict in Syria will only be resolved through a negotiated settlement, and Congress calls on all parties to the conflict in Syria to participate urgently and constructively in the Geneva process…”
Of course, the invitation for Iranian participation is not made explicit, but Obama hinted at this during his PBS interview last week, as pointed out by Barbara Slavin.
Photo Credit: Brookings Institution
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The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is a black hole in the federal budget into which hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have been sucked and billions more seem destined to vanish.
The most recent reminder came in an April 1 UPI article about the retirement [...]]]>
The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is a black hole in the federal budget into which hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have been sucked and billions more seem destined to vanish.
The most recent reminder came in an April 1 UPI article about the retirement of Executive Vice President and JSF General Manager Tom Burbage from Lockheed Martin:
After spending 12 years fronting the Lockheed Martin F-35 program, Burbage retired Monday on an optimistic note but still far from clear about the aircraft’s ultimate cost and delivery schedule.
Burbage was named head of the F-35 program less than three weeks after the company beat Boeing to develop the aircraft. Then valued at $220 billion, the contract aims to build thousands of F-35 for the U.S. military and hundreds more for international partners…”The fundamental airplane is going to be there,” Burbage told reporters, Defense News said. “It’s going to be late, it’s going to be more expensive than we thought to do the development, but it’s still going to be there, which I think that’s the ultimate metric.”
Out of the “War on Terror”
The 9/11 attacks prompted the Pentagon in 2001 to push for a substantial increase of approximately $20 billion or more in its 2003 budget. Military officials expressed confidence that support for the “war on terror” would translate into recognition of the need to revitalize and rebuild the US armed services. Although Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had hoped to reduce the size of the US armed forces and cut back on big-ticket items, the Pentagon’s comptroller, Under Secretary of Defense Dov Zakheim, argued that spending had to go up because the military would need to build tanks, warships and tactical fighter jets. The already projected budget deficit with which the first year of the Bush administration had managed to eradicate the budget surplus of the Clinton presidency, and the cost of the war in Afghanistan (initially estimated to be $1 billion a month), was being funded through supplemental congressional allocations which weren’t even in the budget.
Six weeks after 9/11, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon had awarded “the largest military contract in American history to Lockheed Martin to build a new generation of supersonic stealth fighter jets for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corp.” Describing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as “more Chevrolet than Porsche,” the Times noted that according to the over $200 billion contract, Lockheed would build “more than 3,000 of the relatively low-cost aircraft over the next two decades.”
Costs, Congress and the Pentagon
The price tag for these “relatively low cost aircraft” has now skyrocketed to $400 billion, according to Time Magazine. The Pentagon admits the overall cost of the F-35 program will reach at least $1.4 trillion dollars over the next 5 decades.
The F-35 has been plagued by problems caused by the contradictory and unprecedented demands made of a single aircraft. In a Foreign Policy article from last year headlined as “The Jet That Ate the Pentagon,” Center for Defense Information analyst Winslow Wheeler, a long time F-35 skeptic, wrote “A review of the F-35′s cost, schedule, and performance — three essential measures of any Pentagon program — shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.”
Asked how far behind schedule the F-35 program was, Lockheed’s Burbage referred to a restructuring of the program in 2010, adding, “I would argue the program post-2010 is not the program pre-2010, modified slightly. It’s really a new program.” That’s apparently enough to justify over a decade of development and the hundreds of billions of dollars that have already been expended on the “old” JSF.
So why aren’t the cheerleaders of fiscal austerity in our deficit-driven Congress demanding an immediate halt to this exorbitant project whose cost has skyrocketed while the problems with it have multiplied?
One actually has, Congressmen Ron Paul, who dared to use the F-word in a Texas Straight Talk commentary on March 3 about the sequester. It has received zero attention outside his fan base:
…the entire $1.2 trillion dollars that the sequester is supposed to save could be realized by cutting one unneeded, wasteful boondoggle: the $1.5 trillion F-35 fighter program. The F-35, billed as the next generation all-purpose military fighter and bomber, has been an unmitigated disaster. Its performances in recent tests have been so bad that the Pentagon has been forced to dumb-down the criteria. It is overweight, overpriced, and unwieldy. It is also an anachronism: we no longer face the real prospect of air-to-air combat in this era of 4th generation warfare. The World War II mid-air dogfight era is long over.
What’s most remarkable about this astute, candid and scathing criticism of the F-35 program is that Paul is from Texas. At least a quarter of Texas Congress members are strong supporters of the F-35, since a major portion of the work is being done in Ft. Worth. Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), the organizer and fairy godmother of the 48-member Joint Strike Fighter Caucus in the House, declared in a 2011 speech to Lockheed Martin that the JSF was sacrosanct budget-wise and “absolutely, absolutely essential to our national defense.” Not surprisingly, Granger and her JSF caucus receive twice as much in campaign contributions as other members of Congress, according to the Dallas Morning News, with Granger topping the list.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn is also among the staunchest defenders of the F-35 in the Senate. This explains in part Cornyn’s vehement opposition — and that of Texas junior Senator Ted Cruz — to the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. Before and during his nomination hearings, Hagel made no effort to hide his doubts about whether the F-35 was worth what it was costing the Pentagon, soaking up limited resources with no apparent end in sight. The alternative nominees for Secretary of Defense proposed by Hagel’s critics were supportive of the F-35
Ashton Carter, who heads acquisition for the Pentagon, certified to House Armed Services Committee Chair Ike Skelton in June 2010 that the development of the F-35 was “essential to national security”; that there were no acceptable alternatives to the F-35 that would provide “acceptable” capability at a lower cost; that the Pentagon’s Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation considered the F-35′s cost to be “reasonable”; and that the JSF was of a higher priority than other Pentagon programs that might have to be cut in order to fund it.
Michele Flournoy, the Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy between 2009-2012, whose name was also floated and cheered by Hagel’s opponents, co-authored a report by the Center for New American Security (which she co-founded), that recommended the Navy reduce the number of F-35Cs it planned to purchase by half and the Air Force cut its acquisitions of the JSF by about a third. The savings would then be applied to other acquisitions. It did not, however, call for scrapping the F-35.
The Israeli Tie-In and Sequester Silence
Which leads us to another under-reported aspect of congressional support for the F-35 that explains why Ron Paul is unique in his loud criticism of the program and certain pro-F-35 senators keep diverting media attention to Hagel’s alleged antagonism toward Israel during televised confirmation hearings. One of the justifications used by Lockheed and its partners for the problem-prone JSF is that its stratospheric cost will be offset by sales to US allies including Canada, Japan and, oh yes, Israel.
Since the inception of the JSF program, Israel made it known that it not only wanted to purchase the F-35, but be part of its development too. Israeli participation in discussions was briefly suspended in 2005 to reflect US disapproval of Israel selling advanced military technology to China, although Washington made it clear that this would not ultimately affect the sale of F-35s, which Israel hoped would begin arriving in 2012. By 2009, it was clear that the F-35s could not be delivered until 2014.
Much of the debate in Israeli military circles over whether and when Israel should attack Iran has explicitly or implicitly hinged on the JSF, with those advocating restraint arguing that Israel should wait until it has the enhanced military capabilities of the F-35 before striking. When Israel signed an agreement in October 2010 to purchase a squadron of F-35 fighters which would be received in 2015 and 2017, Israel’s Ambassador to the US Michael Oren strongly hinted that an impending confrontation with Iran was the primary reason for the agreement. “It will be capable of sneaking in, penetrating defenses and pulling additional forces after it,” enthused Amir Oren in Haaretz, making the case for restraint until the F-35s were delivered. “The armed, in-flight refueling, flying computer will be the aircraft of the next war. And that is another reason to postpone the date.”
In July 2012, just prior to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s visit to Israel, the Pentagon also reached an agreement with Lockheed Martin to integrate Israeli electronic warfare equipment and Israeli-unique systems into the JSF. Israeli technology is a design component of the F-35′s augmented reality helmet, the cost of which is estimated at between $1-$2 million each. The Israeli Air Force is counting on the F-35 to maintain its qualitative edge, still eagerly anticipating and preparing for the delivery of its squadron.
There is a significant overlap among members of the House and Senate from both parties who have been most supportive of the F-35 (many of whom are also ironically “deficit hawks”) and those from both parties who claim they are Israel’s staunchest and most unwavering defenders. Not all “pro-Israel” members of Congress approve of the F-35, however. Arizona Sen. John McCain has expressed serious reservations, calling the program a “scandal” and a “tragedy” in 2011. Nonetheless, it’s Ron Paul — perceived as so anti-Israel that he alone among the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination was not invited to make his case to the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2012 — who can speak bluntly about killing the F-35 in ways that others won’t. In contrast, John Cornyn complained to AIPAC’s Policy Conference in March, “I’m so disappointed that our delivery of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft keeps getting delayed. The F-35s are remarkably sophisticated planes that will dramatically enhance Israel’s security.” (At least one Jewish news organization interpreted this as a swipe against the Obama administration.)
The problems with the F-35 aren’t going away. Two months ago, the Pentagon called for all F-35s to be grounded when a crack on a turbine blade in the Pratt and Whitney jet engine was discovered during a routine inspection of a test aircraft in California. Despite the promises of retiring Lockheed EVP Burbage about how the F-35 will eventually ”be there,” Pierre Sprey predicts the Pentagon will “kill the program after 500 airplanes.”
In the meantime, don’t count on hearing this F-word anytime soon during all the squawking about the sequester.
Photo: The US Navy variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C.
]]>Number of times the following words were mentioned:
War: 52
Iran: 45
Israel: 35
Nuclear: 31
Afghanistan: 30
Pakistan: 28
Syria: 20
China: 13
Mexico: 10
Iraq: 7
Egypt: 5
Yemen: 0
While last night’s Republican debate offered few surprises as the primary field wrapped themselves in the legacy of Ronald Reagan and roundly denounced the Obama administration’s fiscal, foreign, and social policies, Ron Paul stood out with his unique views on the border fence endorsed by [...]]]>
While last night’s Republican debate offered few surprises as the primary field wrapped themselves in the legacy of Ronald Reagan and roundly denounced the Obama administration’s fiscal, foreign, and social policies, Ron Paul stood out with his unique views on the border fence endorsed by Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain. Paul said:
Watch it:
Paul’s embrace of extreme right-wing conspiracy theories about a U.S. government which enslaves its citizens is even more visible in his disgust with FEMA and his answer to a question at the Ames Straw Poll about whether “HR 645 [The National Emergency Center Establishment Act] could lead to detainment camps for American citizens during martial law.” He responded:
The belief that FEMA, or various other government agencies, might be planning to restrict the movements of Americans or turn sections of the U.S., if not the entire country, into a detainment camp is traced back to the 1950s and, in the 1990s, the far-right “Patriot”/militia movement.
Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, told ThinkProgress:
While the “American concentration camp” meme has been debunked numerous times as a conspiracy theory coming out of various extremist movements, the sinister anti-government rumors dating back as much as 60 years seem to have found a spot at the table at last night’s Republican debate. Berlet doesn’t see much hope for an end to the FEMA roundup conspiracy theory, telling ThinkProgress:
Rep. Allen West (R-FL) quickly declared Paul’s remarks to be evidence that Paul was “not the kind of guy you need to have sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” West insisted that the sort of deterrence that obtained between the U.S. and the USSR during the Cold War was “out the window with Iran. If they get a [nuclear] device, they’ve already told us what their intentions are.”
Hailing West’s comments, conservative Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey helpfully explained that deterrence wouldn’t work against Iran, because “The mullahs’ strategic goals are metaphysical; they want their Messiah to arrive and establish a global Islamic rule. According to their view of Islam, that will come at the end of a great conflagration, and there isn’t a much better way to start one of those than by lobbing nukes at Israel, the US, or both.”
It’s tempting to dismiss this as simply the raving of Congress’s leading anti-Muslim hysteric, accompanied by the usual noise from the right-wing blogosphere. But similar assertions about Iran’s supposedly suicidal tendencies have been made by other conservative leaders. Indeed, the belief that Iran is some sort of “martyr state,” and therefore uniquely immune to the cost-benefit calculations that underpin a conventional theory of deterrence, seems to have become something of an article of faith for many Iran hawks.
Read his entire article here.
]]>By Juan Cole
One of the places foreign policy emerged in the GOP Iowa debate last night was an exchange between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum on Iran, as right wing analyst Thomas R. Eddlem has explained in detail.
Chris Wallace of Fox [...]]]>
By Juan Cole
One of the places foreign policy emerged in the GOP Iowa debate last night was an exchange between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum on Iran, as right wing analyst Thomas R. Eddlem has explained in detail.
Chris Wallace of Fox News asked libertarian Rep. Ron Paul why he was soft on Iran and opposed economic sanctions on Tehran. Paul replied that Iran is small potatoes as a threat, compared to what we went through with the Soviet Union, and that anyway it would be perfectly natural for Iran to want a nuclear deterrent, given that it is surrounded by nuclear-armed powers, including Russia, Pakistan, Israel, etc.:
… That makes it much worse. Why would that be so strange if the Soviets and the Chinese had nuclear weapons, we tolerated the Soviets. We didn’t attack them. And they were a much greater danger. They were the greatest danger to us in our whole history. But you don’t go to war with them.”
…. Just think of how many nuclear weapons surround Iran. The Chinese are there. The Indians are there. The Pakistanis are there. The Israelis are there. The United States is there. All these countries … why wouldn’t it be natural if they might want a weapon? Internationally, they might be given more respect. Why should we write people off? In the Fifties, we at least talked to them. At least our leaders and Reagan talked to the Soviets. What’s so terribly bad about this? And countries you put sanctions on you are more likely to fight them. I say a policy of peace is free trade, stay out of their internal business, don’t get involved in these wars and just bring our troops home.”
Ron Paul was representing the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party. It is not exactly isolationist (note the desire for international trade), but opposes the military-industrial complex. As Right anarchists, they want the least government possible, and see government as a distraction for businesses, who succumb to the temptation to use the government to distort the eufunctional free market. In essence, government is a scam whereby some companies are seduced by the possibility of manacling the invisible hand that ought to be magically rewarding enterprise and innovation. A significant stream within libertarianism theorizes war as the ultimate in this racket, whereby some companies use government to throw enormous sums to themselves by waging wars abroad and invoking patriotic themes. This analysis is remarkably similar to that of Left anarchists such as Noam Chomsky.
The difference is that for anarcho-syndicalists like Chomsky, the good guys of history are the workers and ordinary folk, whereas for Libertarians, it is entrepreneurs. Both theories depend on a naive reading of social interest. Right anarchists seem not to be able to perceive that without government, corporations would reduce us all to living in company towns on bad wages and would constantly be purveying to us bad banking, tainted food, dangerous drugs, etc. I mean, they behave that way when they can get away with it even when there is supposed government oversight, usually by capturing the government oversight agency that should be regulating them and then defanging it (e.g. BP and the Minerals Management Service). On the environment, private companies would never ever curb emissions without government intervention because of the problem of the commons. (Tellingly, Ron Paul calls global climate change a “hoax.”)
And, what makes the Libertarians think that if there were no governments or only weak governments, the corporations would not just wage the wars themselves? The East India Companies of Britain and the Netherlands behaved that way. India was not conquered by the British government, but by the East India Company. Likewise what is now Indonesia was a project of the Dutch East India Company. Libertarians have difficulty imagining warmongering corporations who pursue war all on their own without any government involvement. But governments have often been more timid than corporate men on the spot. In late 18th century Britain, the civil government was very nervous about the EIC conquests in India and worried about corporate corruption, which is one reason Warren Hastings ended up being tried.
Likewise, the anarcho-syndicalist tradition makes workers unions more saintly and disinterested than they typically actually are, though since they are looking out for the interests of the majority (workers), they typically have more equitable positions than the narrower business elites idolized by Libertarians.
Paul’s Libertarian-pro-peace approach to the Middle East (he not only wants an end to the US confrontation with Iran but also a complete US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan) evoked a sharp response from Neoconservative Rick Santorum:
Santorum has long had a fixation on Iran, and his statement here is typical of the lies he tells about that country. He knows very well that the United States is not at war with Iran, that the conflict between the two countries has been nothing like the Afghanistan or Iraq Wars. In the past, Santorum has said that the US is at war with a radical Islam, at the center of which Is Iran. Santorum does not know that Iran is a Shiite power, whereas most Muslim radicals like the Taliban are, let us say, committed Sunnis and have bad relations with Iran. His last statement, that Iran is an “existential threat” to Israel, telegraphs his motivation in this war propaganda, which is to attract campaign contributions from the Israel lobbies.
When Paul replied,
Santorum responded by defending the CIA coup against the elected government of Iran in 1953, and asserted that the oppressive dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was an era of liberty for the Iranian people!
Ron Paul concluded:
Ron Paul’s “peace through trade” approach to geopolitics and skepticism of overbearing imperialism does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming the foreign policy of the United States. He represents small-town entrepreneurs who see the wars and their expense as a burden and a block to trade opportunities. They are a significant segment of the Republican Party, but I’d put them at 15% at most.
The Republican Party is a coalition of seven or eight distinct groups in American society. These include Evangelicals, the majority of whom are typically imperialist in their foreign policy emphases, Wall Street (which includes both hawkish concerns like Boeing and dovish groups like the bankers), Midwestern farmers, suburban and exurban professionals, and the 15% or so of Jewish Americans on the political Right (who, however, account for nearly 200 of our 400 billionaires and whose prominent position in retail business gives them both a reason to be deeply involved in politics and the wherewithal to contribute to campaigns). The preponderance of the party will be with the Santorums and the Bachmanns on a militaristic foreign policy.
Journalism often reports the views of politicians and stops there, and concentrates on personal clashes and personalities. But social historians see politicians as representatives of large social groups, and politics as the victory of some interests over others. Neither Paul nor Santorum will likely ever be president, but the groups they appeal to will have to be won over by the ultimately successful candidate. Unfortunately, the Republican Party’s various constituents add up to a party of Islamophobia and warmongering (munitions corporations, Big Oil and Gas, right wing Evangelicals, Right wing Zionists, white nationalists). The anarcho-syndicalist theory that capitalism naturally produces wars and imperialism is too broad, but certainly some groups within capitalist society will plump for those opportunities. Paul is likely right about the sixth war looming.
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