10/18/10

As Tom Brokaw points out in yesterday's New York Times, America remains at war, though the political debate has ignored this fact.  This weekend, we learned that Congressman Joe Wilson has just discovered the enmity between Sunni and Shia - while a Senator who opposed the New GI Bill called one who helped pass it "the most anti-defense Senator in the U.S. Senate."  Against this backdrop, Washington braced for another rumored "Wikileak" of documents shining further light on Bush administration abuses and missteps in Iraq.  Yet the intra-conservative split that Pat Buchanan calls the "Tea Party vs. War Party" - has resulted in a lack of meaningful debate on any of the national security issues we face. 

Confusion, ignorance reign in a weekend detached from reality.  The weekend's campaign coverage offered a disheartening array of extremist and uninformed rhetoric on national security:

Buckpedaling:  This week on Meet the Press, Colorado senatorial candidate Ken Buck had only a non-answer to a question on Afghanistan.  The Denver Post editorialized on Buck's positions on the war this weekend writing: "Buck's critics now call his tap dance ‘Buckpedaling.' ... His position on Afghanistan has morphed so much it's almost incoherent."  [Denver Post 10/15/10]

News flash: Sunni and Shia don't get along.  Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) - best-known for yelling "you lie" during last year's State of the Union - this weekend revealed that conservatives have learned little from the past decade, demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of Iraq:  "It was like my fifth visit to Iraq that I found out something that was really horrifying. And that is that the Sunnis and Shias consider each other infidels worthy of killing. Um, I did not realize that. I thought that they were just different parts of the same religion. ... I did think it was just different denominations." [Joe Wilson, 10/15/10]

Crossing a line that was never crossed:  Senator John McCain (R-AZ) called Barbara Boxer, another sitting Senator, "the most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today."  This led CBS's Bob Schieffer to say, "I can remember a time when sitting senators would not even campaign against senators of the other party if they were also in the Senate. It was just something that -- a line you never crossed."  Boxer's opponent Carly Fiorina later said about Boxer, "This is not a senator who is a friend of America's heroes and it is something we must hold her accountable for on November 2^nd."  Yet it is McCain who voted against the new GI Bill, which Boxer supported; and McCain who has joined Sharron Angle and Ken Buck in offering proposals that Paul Krugman and others said "privatize and, in effect, dismantle the V.A." [John McCain and Carly Fiorina, via CNN, 10/17/10. Bob Schieffer, Face the Nation, 10/17/10. Paul Krugman, NY Times 4/4/08]

"A complete non-issue": In an interview with the National Review, Rand Paul said that, as he campaigns, he's "not thinking about Afghanistan; foreign policy is really a complete non-issue." [Rand Paul, National Review, 7/14/10]

[Sharron Angle, Washington Post, 6/14/10. Delaware Senate Debate, 10/13/10]

With America at war, conservatives "steadfastly ignoring" national security.  In today's  New York Times, Tom Brokaw wrote: "Notice anything missing on the campaign landscape? How about war? The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history."  As Peter Baker writes in Foreign Policy Magazine, the Tea Party movement itself - which has captured so much of conservative energy this year - specifically ignores national security:  "The question for the movement is whether it can maintain its own uneasy coalition. And for now, at least, that means steadfastly ignoring foreign-policy declarations of any sort.  When nearly half a million Tea Party supporters voted online to define their campaign agenda, not a single one of the 10 planks they agreed on had anything to do with the world beyond America's borders."   But the broader conservative movement has little to offer either.  The conservative "Pledge to America" released last month by House conservatives outlining their legislative priorities fails to address the wars we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorism, energy security and other key national security issues we face.  Max Bergmann, a national security analyst at the Center for American Progress, wrote "All the ‘pledge' tells us therefore, is that the House GOP will support war in perpetuity and that it has no concrete ideas about what America's foreign policy should be."  When the issue does come up, conservatives resort to the polar extremes: neoconservative interventionism and extreme isolationism.  As Pat Buchanan described it, it's the "Tea Party vs. War Party."  [Tom Brokaw, 10/1810. Peter Baker, Foreign Policy, 10/10. Max Bergmann, Wonk Room, 9/23/10. Pat Buchanan, 10/1/10]

Rumored WikiLeaks Iraq release highlights continuing fallout from a misbegotten, mishandled war. Spencer Ackerman writes on Wired magazine's Danger Room blog, "The Afghanistan war logs were just the beginning. Coming as early as next week, WikiLeaks plans to disclose a new trove of military documents, this time covering some of the toughest years of the Iraq war. Up to 400,000 reports from 2004 to 2009 could be revealed this time - five times the size of the Afghan document dump." The release is expected to document many of the most grave and contentious issues of the war, including the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the rise of roadside bombs and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. Politico's Gordon Lubold says, "The documents include ‘unit-level' perspectives on tactics and strategy from some of the worst days of the conflict. Like the data dump earlier this year on the Afghan war, the documents could reveal methods and potentially endanger military sources, Pentagon officials say." As policymakers, the media and the public analyze and debate these important issues, conservative candidates show little understanding of the issues surrounding war fighting - and little concern for taking care of veterans once they come home. [Spencer Ackerman via Danger Room, 10/15/10. Politico, 10/18/10]

What We're Reading

The Pentagon said on Sunday it had a 120-member team prepared to review a massive leak of as many as 500,000 Iraq war documents, which are expected to be released by the WikiLeaks website sometime this month.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has arrived in Tehran for talks with the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, among other officials.

The Obama administration has concluded that Chinese firms are helping Iran to improve its missile technology and develop nuclear weapons, and has asked China to stop such activity, a senior U.S. official said.

The African Union's recent decision to call for a "troop surge" in Somalia raises a number of questions.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping was promoted to vice chairman of a key Communist Party military committee on Monday in the clearest sign yet he remains on track to take over as the country's future leader within three years.

Iran participated in a high-level meeting on Afghanistan on Monday after the United States said it has no problem with its participation.

Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together, a senior NATO official said.

Pirates are increasingly attacking ships in the South China Sea and Indonesian waters, but fewer incidents off Somalia have caused the worldwide total to fall slightly this year, a maritime watchdog said Monday.

Turkey's ongoing foreign-policy reorientation will not only reshape its region, but could also change the broader geopolitical landscape.

A major military operation involving hundreds of American troops, U.S. Special Forces and heavy bombers dropping 2,000-pound bombs on Taliban command and control centers wrapped up last week, concluding a critical phase in the campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan's southern Kandahar province.

Commentary of the Day

The New York Times thinks Vice President Dick Cheney would be proud of how aggressively the 2010 Republican Senate candidates are denying and avoiding the existence of man-made climate change.

Fareed Zakaria argues that we should be more concerned with the disentigration of the North Korean state than with its small nuclear stockpile.

Paul Krugman writes about why we should be concerned about Chinese economic power.