10/14/10

Tonight's Nevada Senate debate between Harry Reid and Sharron Angle offers a chance to check how some favorite Tea Party planks stand up to national scrutiny.  Heated rhetoric around some divisive and discredited policies - privatize the Veterans' Administration, withdraw from the UN, climate change denial, outlandish claims about Shariah law in American cities - deserves examination. Sharron Angle - and any candidate for our preeminent deliberative body - should be asked his or her opinions on the following national security topics:

Keep our promise to veterans - or privatize the VA? In an interview with a Nevada NPR affiliate on May 19, Angle said "it's proper that the VA isn't covering her father's prescription drugs ‘if' we ‘are working towards a privatized system.'"

Angle should be asked how she would guarantee that promises made to our veterans are kept. VoteVets President Jon Soltz has observed, "the Bush administration underfunded the VA by billions, leading to backlogs and some real horror stories." Sharron Angle would go even farther and privatize veterans' care completely. Neglecting or contracting out the promises America has made to our veterans would be a disaster. It would betray the "sacred trust" America has with its fighting men and women - to take care of them when they're fighting as well as when they come home.  [Sharron Angle, via Nevada Public Radio, 5/19/10. Washington Post, 6/14/10. Jon Soltz, 8/20/09]

Rhetoric that unites Americans - or gives talking points to terrorists?  Sharron Angle: "First of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas, are on American soil, and under Constitutional law. Not Shariah law. And I don't know how that happened in the United States.  It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States."

The mayor of Frankford, Texas, was unavailable to comment because the city ceased to exist 35 years ago, when it was annexed by Dallas. The mayor of Dearborn, Jack O' Reilly, said Angle "doesn't know what she's talking about." Angle should be asked whether she is aware of how jihadi recruiters use this sort of rhetoric against us. As terrorism analyst at the New America Foundation Brian Fishman says about this sort of anti-Islamic rhetoric: "‘I know people in this debate don't intend it, but there are consequences for these kinds of remarks.'  He said that Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric hiding in Yemen who has been linked to several terrorist plots, has been arguing for months... that American Muslims face a dark future of ever-worsening discrimination and vilification. ‘When the rhetoric is so inflammatory that it serves the interests of a jihadi recruiter like Awlaki, politicians need to be called on it,' Mr. Fishman said." [Sharron Angle, via the Plum Line, 10/8/10. CBS News, 10/13/10. Brian Fishman, via NY Times, 8/20/10]

"Fraudulent science" - or a secure energy future? Calling climate change a "fraudulent science," Sharron Angle's approach towards energy policy is simply to "deregulate": "We have oil reserves and petroleum reserves that we should tap into. And that's a policy that we really need to look at as a nation. How do we deregulate enough to invite our industries to come back into the United States and quit outsourcing their business?"

Angle should be asked how she squares her views with those of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen, who yesterday predicted that "the number one national security challenge in the 21st century would be climate change."  He went on to say, "We in the Defense Department have a role to play here - not solely because we should be good stewards of our environment and our scarce resources but also because there is a strategic imperative for us to reduce risk, improve efficiencies, and preserve our freedom of action whenever we can." [Sharron Angle, 6/9/10. Adm. Michael Mullen, 10/13/10]

"Withdraw from the United Nations" - or work constructively with senior GOP figures such as Richard Lugar?   Before her campaign website was scrubbed, a large portion of Angle's foreign policy and national security platform revolved around withdrawing from the United Nations:  "The U.N. has been captured by the far left and has become ineffective and costly. The U.N. continually threatens U.S. sovereignty, with endless rhetoric and treaties and it has now become the ‘umpire' on fraudulent science, such as global warming. The United State needs to withdraw from the United Nations and work solely with America's willing allies." In an interview with a CBS affiliate, 8 News Now, Angle further asserted, "The United Nations resides on our soil and costs us money. We are -- I don't see any place in the Constitution with those priorities about the United Nations. So when we start talking about cutting programs, five percent per year, I think the United Nations fits into that category, yes," she said.

No serious national security figure believes that the U.S. should unilaterally withdraw from the UN.  As Politico reported, "Sharron Angle may quickly find that some of her more controversial views won't fly in the Senate GOP Conference if she becomes Nevada's next senator - even with some of the most conservative Republicans in the upper chamber." One of the Senate's leading Republican figures, Sen. Richard Lugar, (R-IN) rebuked Angle's suggestion that the United States should withdraw from the United Nations, saying, "Some candidates from time to time, perhaps attempting to show a sense of anger, outrage or whatever, express what I would characterize as very extreme views that do not have much basis in either practicality or what is going to occur in the evolution of our country."  [Sharron Angle's website via Huffington Post, 7/1/10. 8 News Now, 8/21/10. Politico, 6/15/10]

What We're Reading

The painstaking process of hoisting 33 miners trapped nearly a half-mile below ground for more than two months in northern Chile was completed.

While Western diplomats and sanctions-enforcers ply their trade to pressure Iran into stopping its uranium enrichment, Arab states are building their arsenals.

United States-led forces are permitting the movement of senior Taliban leaders to attend initial peace talks in Kabul, the clearest indication of American support for high-level discussions aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan, senior NATO and Obama administration officials said.

A decade after a U.S. military intervention to rescue Kosovo, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited this fledgling nation Wednesday and prodded it to begin talks with its wartime enemy, Serbia.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Lebanon is adding pressure for Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to withdraw his government's support for the UN investigation into who killed his father - Lebanon's previous leader - in a 2005 car bombing, Western analysts say.

After returning from Sudan, George Clooney called for freezing assets held by Sudan President Omar al-Bashir following a meeting President Obama.

A group of former Communist Party officials has weighed in on a debate over political reform, censorship and China's premier, bluntly criticizing the party's Central Propaganda Department as an "invisible black hand" powerful enough to censor the prime minister and calling for an end to government control of media outlets.

Responding to an offer by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to extend a freeze on building West Bank settlements if Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, a top Palestinian official said that such recognition could be granted to Israel within its 1967 borders, without the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

In its most extensive death tally of the Iraq war, the U.S. military says nearly 77,000 Iraqi civilians and security officials were killed from early 2004 to mid-2008 - a toll that falls well below Iraqi government figures.

In Syria, ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off in the area known as the fertile crescent.

Commentary of the Day

Nicholas Kristof argues that the success of Oman, thanks mostly to its educational system improvements, should be studied as a model for avoiding future conflicts in impoverished nations.

Jim Arkedis writes that the attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole 10 years ago, and recent attacks on fuel trucks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, show the battlefield necessity of moving away from fossil fuels to a greener military.

Timothy Ash suggests that the recent Nobel Peace Prize given to Liu Xiaobo, and the subsequent harsh Chinese reaction, have rekindled a debate about how the West should promote its values as Chinese power grows.