Fiorina didn't offer a solution, but she did offer some great slogans: "I am a proud pro-life woman. ... I believe science is proving us right everyday!" (Hey, don't knock junk science until you've tried it, right?) She also echoed a feminist line when she said, "All issues are women's issues."
5 Things the U.S. Can Actually Do Instead of Complaining About the New Iraq War
August 13, 2014
American culture is stuck in perpetual rewind: the Clintons, Ninja Turtles, Buzzfeed. Now comes a much more serious affair – Iraq War 3: Revenge of the Jihadi. Like all horror-movie sequels, this one has a new cast but the same basic plot line, plus the threat of an even bloodier ending at the hands of a new masked enemy.
Audiences can shout the obvious at the protagonists—“Don’t go in the house!”—but in the forever conflict that is the Middle East and North Africa in the 21st century, former anti-war candidates and generals don’t hear us like they did in the 20th. There is no turning off a war that has no end. Not that we shouldn’t try; it’s just that we can’t act as if we know exactly how to do it.
So it’s been grimly amusing, over the past few days, to see some conservatives make almost the same retroactive case against Obama for striking ISIS in northern Iraq that they did against Bush for his still-radioactive hot mess across the entire country, even as they temper criticism of the strikes with politically required pro-war flourishes. Lindsey Graham warned of terrorists in the White House but failed to offer his own plan for keeping them out. Hillary Clinton reverted to pre-invasion support, only to express doubt about continued action.
But right now, people are dying. People are trapped. Even if some, at last, are being saved.
“There is no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq,” the president said on Monday evening. “The only solution is Iraqis coming together and forming A unified government.” (HIs own efforts at non-military regime change show that the president is also apparently in favor of Americans coming together and forming Iraq’s unified government.)
Well, here’s a solution we can start working on back home: hold the administration and the military accountable in real time, because there is no such thing as a limited military engagement anymore. If the price of freedom is constant vigilance, the price of constant war is constant investigation, perpetual skepticism.
War critics and advocates alike need to skip the backward-looking fault-finding and point-scoring and do some forward-looking fault-finding instead. These are some domestic steps Congress could take right now:
1. Demand a real authorization of the use of military force.
Ted Cruz’s stopped clock has the right time on this, as does Rand Paul’s. What used to be a CodePink-ish position is now, if not mainstream, then at least talked about on both sides of the stream. The idea that the president needs to regularly ask permission to continue military engagement is such a good idea even Obama agrees with it! Officially, his administration backs the repeal of the 2002 AUMF. Practically, it has rolled right along, telling Congress, “He didn’t feel he had any need for authority from us.”
The idea of regular review of military action is actually a part of the War Powers Act (remember that?); it specifies a report every 60 days. You should expect one any day now.
2. Present your own plan, earlier rather than later.
Calling for Obama to have a plan for what unfolds next is great, but it took four years for congressional Democrats to present “A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq.” Of course, trying to plan an invasion years in advance doesn’t work, either: The GOP platform in 2003 called for the “liberation” of Iraq .. though that wasn’t really a plan so much as wishful thinking.
That you can be both too late and too soon in your strategy speaks to the importance of settling into the reality of action as it happens. It’s arguable the combination of the GOP’s premature optimism about the invasion and the Democrat’s premature optimism about withdrawal that created the fractured political environment for ISIS' surge forward, after all.
Perhaps the answer is to avoid the temptation to think your own favored solution is one that will lead to hearts and flowers and happy endings.
3. Make all military and foreign aid as transparent as possible.
Last year, Tea Party representatives and Oxfam lobbied together in favor of a bill legislating such transparency; it had bipartisan co-sponsors in senators Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin. The bill went beyond the administration’s voluntary releases about humanitarian aid – it codified that policy, and it required transparency about “security assistance.”
Security assistance accounts for $25 billion of our $48 billion foreign aid budget, and includes direct military aid (like buying fighter jets) and equipping local police. Now, it was hardly an attempt to make the CIA live-tweet its actions; the bill sought to allow lawmakers and voter evaluate what actions involving “the use of force” might already have been taken. The administration successfully opposed it.
4. Enforce standards on contractors who do our dirty work.
Candidate Obama promised to extend the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Enforcement Act to civilians; President Obama has yet to. This is a question of policing both behavior and costs, and acknowledging the reality of an outsourced war. It shouldn’t be easy to send a for-hire replacement army. On the financial side, the Department of Defense spends almost three times as much when it hires a civilian to do the same job that could be done by military personnel.
For anyone skeptical about Obama’s promise that boots won’t be back on the ground, the boots for hire still might be.
5. Admit we’re going to be at war for a very, very long time.
The worst mistakes in modern warfare seem to be made when we mistake the least wrong action with the best action. It’s politics that push people from cautious endorsement to blinding enthusiasm; realism means planning for less violence, but perhaps not peace.
It’s time to put aside your philosophical reasoning about the moral quality of Obama’s decision to begin bombing Iraq. Not because “politics stops at the water’s edge,” exactly, but because once we start the war machine —and Obama has surely turned the key—you need to know how to steer it more than stop it.
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Paul Ryan's 'Inner City' Comment Might Mean He's Racist, But He Sure is Classist
Poor Paul Ryan, in trouble again for saying something stupid about poverty. If only Paul Ryan knew more actual poor people.
Yesterday, in an interview on Bill Bennett’s radio show, Ryan unselfconsciously asserted the insight that conservatives seem to believe is theirs alone: work offers people dignity. Ryan, with an equal lack of thoughtfulness, went onto diagnose “generations of men” in the “inner cities” as “not even thinking about working or learning the value and culture of work”.
It’s this last bit that’s gotten Ryan in the most trouble, stirring up accusations of intentional (if subtle) racism. The logic is transitive and not direct: by “inner cities” Ryan meant black; by describing black men as not “learning” the “value and culture of work” – and since Charles Murray has called poor people “lazy” – Ryan was saying black men were lazy. So: “inner cities” = black people; “inner cities” = not valuing work; not valuing work = “lazy”; therefore what Paul Ryan really meant is “black people = lazy”.
Racism is such an explosive accusation that it’s distracted people from the first half of Ryan’s rationalization for welfare reform: that being poor makes one lazy.
“[W]e want people to reach their potential and so the dignity of work is very valuable and important and we have to re-emphasize work and reform our welfare programs, like we did in 1996,” Ryan told Bennett. Nevermind that welfare “reform” actually has thrown more people into deep poverty – and, by Ryan’s own logic, struck a further blow to their dignity: his romanticized view of the 1996 law shows just how deeply he holds his wrong-headed theory of poverty’s causes and effects.
Paul Ryan may also believe that black people are inherently lazy. Citing Charles Murray is strong evidence that Ryan has some nagging sense of superiority linked to race. That’s wrong and stupid and reprehensible. But to my mind, that’s not as detrimental to policy as the assumption that any human being would have to be taught the value of work.
Ryan can protest that he’s not talking about race – as he did last night and today. And he may even believe that he’s not. That doesn’t make his comments any less condescending and destructive.
Ryan and his ilk flatter themselves to think that promoting dignity through hard work is controversial, that liberals and critics object to welfare “reform” because we don’t value work. But no one questions that having work can lead to greater self-respect. What’s insulting is how Ryan indicates that falling into the social safety net is the opposite of “work” and thus has the opposite effect on one’s sense of self. He may not believe only work can inculcate dignity, but in a defense of his “inner cities” comments, he called it the “best”:
The thing about this perspective is that it reveals a belief in the converse: that the main reason people are poor is because they choose not to work.
Ryan’s believes a community’s economic circumstances shape the choices of its members. That’s not entirely misguided. To be sure, when generations of a community don’t have “real” jobs, it can reinforce the attitude that a day job is optional. I mean, just look at the children of the rich.
But Ryan, most likely, does not assume that those with inherited wealth need to be taught about the value of work. I’d also guess that if those people put their life to some purpose that wasn’t a stable, good-paying job – say, giving away their money – he’d think that was a pretty dignified pursuit.
Paul Ryan needs to expand his vision of human nature – that the content of one’s bank account does not automatically determine the content of their character – to the poor. His words and his approach to policy (see his recent perversion of poverty studies) show that Paul Ryan believes generations of poverty make the poor intrinsically different from, say, Paul Ryan. Or Paul Ryan voters.
From that perspective, it matters less if Ryan himself is racist or not – what matters is that his statements and actions don’t do anything to challenge or change racism in other people. It’s arguably a greater tragedy if Ryan, in his heart of hearts, is not racist, or doesn’t intend to be. When he diagnoses impoverished communities, that are often black, as having rejected the values of his constituents, he re-inscribes whatever lingering animosity already exists. He teaches those already inclined to agree with him that black communities aren’t just poor, but inferior. And those voters get to believe that it’s the poverty they’re judging, not race.
This assumption of fundamental, genetic, intrinsic differences in any disadvantaged population is the underlying bias for a lot of the worst GOP policies: the belief that gay people don’t have or want the same kind of relationships as straight people, that it’s possible for a woman to be cavalier about obtaining an abortion, that Muslims can’t navigate the tensions between their religion and other loyalties and values – something with which, historically, fundamentalist Christians seem to have a lot more trouble.
We need to worry less about whether Paul Ryan or any other conservative policy maker has explicit prejudices – “black people are lazy”, “gays want to turn children gay” – than about the way his policies reinforce those assumptions. This distinction is worth making because it’s the only way we can hope to change anyone’s mind.
If Paul Ryan was forced to work from the assumption that poor people – including poor black people – have the same basic values and desires as he does, he could no longer diagnose the dysfunction of those communities as dependence on handouts. He’d have to come up with some other reason that poor people are trapped in a cycle of poverty – it might have something to do with systemic racism – and another solution to it. And almost anything would be better than the one he has now.