David Warsh: U.S. party politics in our more perilous times
"Anti-Drone Burqa,' by ADAM HARVEY, in the show "Permanent War: The Age of Global Conflict, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through March 7.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Why is the race for the Republican presidential nomination shaping up the way it is? On Friday Mitt Romney ended his bid to return to the lists after only three weeks. It’s clear why he got out: the Republican Establishment that supported his candidacy in 2012 has switched to backing Jeb Bush.
But why did he get in? We know something about this, thanks to Dan Balz and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post.
One issue that seemed to weigh on Romney was the Jan. 7 terrorist attack in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo publication. Romney talked about the issue with close advisers the night before he declared he would seriously consider running. “Paris was the biggest of all the factors,” the Romney associate said. “It was a tipping point for him about how dangerous the world had become.”
That sounds more than plausible. Romney spent more than two years as a Mormon missionary in France in the late 1960s.
We don’t know much yet even about the reasons that Jeb Bush has stated privately for deciding to enter the race, despite, for instance, this illuminating examination of his involvement in public-education issues in Florida, where he was governor for eight years. It seems a safe bet that his motives eventually will turn out be similar to those of Romney, stemming from his family’s long involvement in US foreign policy.
If you listen carefully, you can hear tipping going on all around.
For my part, I was deeply surprised to find myself thinking aloud in December that, as a centrist Democrat, I might prefer Bush to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016. I expect to read several books and chew plenty of fat over the next few months figuring whether that is really the case.
It’s not simply that I expect that the path to the nomination would require Bush to rein in the GOP’s Tea Party wing – all those space-shots meeting late last month in Iowa – an outcome to be devoutly desired, but not enough in in itself to warrant election. More important, it is possible that Bush would promise to bring the Republicans back to the tradition of foreign-policy realism that was characteristic of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and George H.W. Bush, and bring future Democratic candidates along with him. That would be something really worth having.
To the end of thinking about what is involved, I have been reading Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Harvard, 2014), by Michael MacDonald, professor of international relations at Williams College. It is a brilliant reassessment of the opinion-making forces that led to the American invasion of Iraq, an aide-mémoire more powerful than Madame Defarge’s knitted scarf for all its careful comparisons, distinctions and citations.
The conventional wisdom has become that George W. Bush all but willed the invasion of Iraq singlehandedly. There is, of course, no doubt that the president was essential, says MacDonald. For one reason or another, Bush positively hankered to go to war. But he had plenty of help.
For one thing, there were the neoconservatives. By 2000, they more or less controlled the Republican Party. MacDonald put the emphasis less on policy makers such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld than on the extensive commentarial behind them: Journalists Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan at the Weekly Standard and the New American Century think tank, the long-dead political philosopher Leo Strauss (nothing neo about him) his and latter-day acolyte Harvey Mansfield, of Harvard Law School, and Bernard Lewis, an historian of Islamic culture, to name the most prominent.
For another, there were the Democratic hawks. The Democratic Party itself divided into three camps: opponents (Sen. Edward Kennedy, former Vice President Al Gore, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi); cautious supporters (Senators John Kerry ,Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton); and passionate supporters (Senators Joseph Lieberman, Diane Feinstein, and Evan Bayh). Former Clinton adviser Kenneth Pollack made the argument for war in The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.
MacDonald discounts the theory that the oil companies argued for war, with a view to obtaining control of Iraqi reserves. But he credits the argument that Israel and the Israeli lobby in the United States strongly supported regime change. And the pundits, ranging from Thomas Friedman of The New York Times to Michael Kelley of The Atlantic to Max Boot of The Wall Street Journal, as well as the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate. Economic Principals, whose column you are reading now, was a follower in this camp.
At first the war went well. The U.S. captured Baghdad, Saddam fled, and Bush staged his “Mission Accomplished” landing on an aircraft carrier. But after the apparent victory began to melt away, MacDonald writes, those who had supported the war for whatever reason united in what he calls the Elite Consensus designed to shift the blame.
The war should have been won but it was poorly planned. There weren’t enough U.S. troops. Defense chief Rumsfeld was preoccupied with high-tech weaponry. Administrator Paul Bremer was arrogant. The Americans never should have disbanded the Iraqi army. The Iraqis were incurably sectarian. The Americans lacked counterinsurgency doctrine. The whole thing was Bush and Cheney’s fault. And, whatever else, the Elite Consensus was not at fault.
In fact, writes MacDonald, the entire intervention was based on the faulty premise that American values were universal. Regime change would be easy because Iraqis wanted what Americans wanted for them: democracy, individualism, constitutional government, toleration and, of course, free markets. Some did, but many did not.
Breaking the state was easy; liberating Iraq turned out to be impossible. Instead, MacDonald notes, the always precarious nation has turned “a bridge connecting Iran to Syria.” Meanwhile, Russia is annexing eastern Ukraine, over its neighbor’s attempts to break away from Russian influence and enter the economic sphere of the European Community. It has become a much more dangerous world.
Hence the dilemma facing Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, if either or both are to become presidential candidates in 2016. Can they back away from the proposition that has been at the center of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War – as Michael MacDonald puts it, that we are the world, and the world is better for it?
David Warsh, a longtime business journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.c0m
Llewellyn King: If only Nader had stayed at his post
Ralph Nader is to blame. It's that simple. I'm not talking about the election of 2000, when his candidacy was enough to hand the presidency to George W. Bush and all that has followed. I’m talking about when Nader went AWOL as the nation’s consumer conscience.
In the space of a week, three U.S. flights have been diverted because of passenger disturbances over reclining seats. Would this have happened if Nader of old were on the case?
In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Nader was the nation’s bulwark against corporate excess. He may have gotten it wrong -- as many have claimed -- about the safety of the Corvair, the rear-engine compact car, manufactured by the Chevrolet division of General Motors, that was to have rivaled the Volkswagen Beetle. No matter. Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, launched him as the consumer's knight in shining armor.
For nearly a decade, we felt that Nader was on our side and that such big, faceless monsters as insurance companies, banks, airlines, consumer-credit outfits and appliance manufacturers could be brought to heal by invoking the one name that would strike fear, trembling and rectitude into the hearts of the titans of corporate America: Nader.
It was a halcyon time for those who wanted, like actor Peter Finch in the 1976 film Network, to shout, and be heard, “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!”
Nader was a figure of mythical omnipotence. You didn’t have to take your troubles with a faulty car or broken contract to Nader, you simply had to threaten; the words “cc Ralph Nader” at the bottom of a letter were enough. Corporations quaked, the earth moved, and restitution was forthcoming.
We delighted in learning little details about Nader the aesthete, who lived in one room somewhere in Washington, had no creature comforts, partners, or trappings, but always wore a suit. People happily believed he slept in it, ready to rush to court to slay a dragon of corporate excess.
Journalists loved Nader. We learned that he kept a secret office in the venerable National Press Building in Washington and would sneak up to the National Press Club on the 13th floor to peruse the press releases, which were then displayed near the elevators. One presumed he was looking for evidence of consumer abuse in false corporate claims.
The Vietnam War was raging, and the nation was divided on every issue except the wonder of the man who was called “consumer advocate.” The nation had never had one before and we loved it.
Oh, yes, love is not too strong a word. We went to bed at night knowing that if the mattress wasn't what had been promised by the Divine Mattress Company, Nader would fix it.
Jimmy Carter promised that when he was elected president, he would have a direct telephone line to St. Nader. That was the zenith of Nader’s consumer-advocacy power.
But Nader and his acolytes, known as Nader’s Raiders, had already begun to pursue broader political aims and to embrace the extreme reaches of the environmental movement. Nader, our beloved consumer advocate, saintly and virtuous, was becoming a partisan -- a partisan of the left.
It was an extreme blow for those who had followed along behind Nader’s standard because we believed that he was the unsullied, virtuous supporter of the individual against the institution. The voice that could be heard when, as often, politics had failed.
Over the years, I had battles with Nader. We argued most especially over nuclear power and a raft of related energy issues. I and the late physicist Ralph Lapp, together with the great mathematician Hans Bethe, put together a group of 24 Nobel laureates to support nuclear. Nader assembled 36 Nobel laureates against, and won the argument on numbers. He has always been a tough customer.
Poor Ralph. He had it all – and so did we -- when he fought for the common man against the common enemy: those who stole our money or shortchanged us.
Deep in my heart, I think he is to blame for high bank fees, pay-day loans, tiny aircraft seats, high Amtrak fares, and that corporations won’t speak to us – they have machines do that. Ralph, it could have been so different if you had just stayed at your post.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle" on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.
Ike, LBJ and GWB also didn't act
March 7, 2014
Milder today, with even a touch of the sweet melancholy of spring. I think that when spring (that you can feel) really arrives, maybe next month, there will be an usually exuberant explosion of green. And maybe a particularly hot summer. The meteos predict much warmer weather starting later this year as El Nino gets cooking. Good, this year's heating bill have just about bankrupted us.
First, a reminder that Eisenhower did not do a thing when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 and killed about 30,000 people; Johnson didn't do anything when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, and George W. Bush didn't do anything when Russia invaded and stole part of Georgia.
Fascist Russian dictator Putin still occupies Crimea and it looks at this point that not much will be done about it, at least in the short term. The Europeans fear that Putin will turn off their gas supplies; they have also essentially disarmed. This shows yet again how being dependent on fossil fuel from dictators is a dangerous thing. The more local, renewable energy you can get, the safer you are.
Will Obama continue to look and act weak in the face of this thug? Or now that he has learned that sweet talk doesn't work with tyrants, maybe all of a sudden get tough, as happened when the scales feel from Jimmy Carter's eyes about the Soviets in 1979, when they invaded Afghanistan (helping to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980)?
Obama's retaliation so far is a joke -- suspending some visas and freezing some assets of people who weren't really in charge of the invasion of Crimea. In fact, this was all done at the order of Putin. It is the assets of Putin and the people around him, including the economic oligarchs of the astonishingly corrupt current version of the Russian Empire, that need to be frozen.
By the way, one reason that Putin decided to seize Crimea is that the Soviet/Russian port there has been used to constantly resupply with armaments his fellow dictator Bashar Assad and other thugs around the world.
But reminder in all this: Eisenhower did not do a thing when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 and killed about 30,000 people and Johnson didn't do anything when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.
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