Posted on 11/14/2015 12:41:33 PM PST by Kaslin
The United States has been at war every day since October 2001, when we invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Never in our history have we engaged in hostilities abroad without interruption for so long. But if Americans are weary of it, you can't tell it from our politics.
If they were, Republicans would not be vying to show their willingness to use force against Russia or Syria or the Islamic State. More pertinent still, Hillary Clinton would not be the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Democrats were proud to nominate Barack Obama in 2008 on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War. But anti-war credentials no longer count for anything in Obama's party.
The president himself is partly to blame, having inured his followers to the notion that the United States can't extricate itself from foreign conflicts (see: Afghanistan). But Obama has also refused to be panicked into reckless military action against Syria, Russia or Iran. Compared with what his critics demand, his steps against the Islamic State have been cautious and small-scale.
Obama has been willing to brave criticism for alleged weakness, appeasement and isolationism. As Harvard scholar Stephen Walt wrote for Foreign Policy, he has shown "an appreciation not just of the limits of U.S. power, but also of the limited need to exercise it."
No such restraint can be expected of Clinton. As secretary of state, she pressed for what turned out to be one of Obama's biggest mistakes: the air war against Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, which led to the chaos that has engulfed the country.
She met resistance from then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who told Obama "I don't think we ought to take on another war" and considered resigning over the decision to intervene.
Back when that intervention looked good, her emails reveal, she was eager to ensure that she got credit. Lately, though, the left-wing In These Times noted, "Clinton has tended to lay the decision to go into Libya squarely at Obama's feet." Admitting she was wrong? That's not happening.
Her hawkish approach has been consistent. Clinton was far less committed than Obama to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran -- which was ultimately concluded by her successor, John Kerry. She advocated a bigger surge of troops in Afghanistan in 2011 than Obama finally authorized.
After leaving the State Department, she criticized Obama for not doing more to help the rebels in Syria. She also derided the administration's informal foreign policy motto. "Great nations need organizing principles," she insisted, "and 'don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle."
In his 2014 book, "Maximalist: America in the World From Truman to Obama," Columbia University professor Stephen Sestanovich (an adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton) wrote, approvingly, "Of all those who shaped the Obama administration's international strategy, the secretary of state was most comfortable with the precepts of a traditional maximalism."
Obama's first instinct is to steer clear of foreign conflicts. He can be persuaded to step in, but he needs a good reason. Clinton's first instinct is to intervene, whether through air power or ground troops or weapons. That is often her second and third instinct, too.
Obama sees no compelling reason for the U.S. to remain at war indefinitely. Clinton sees no grounds not to. Her basic approach has a lot in common with that of George W. Bush.
It's a measure of how accustomed Americans are to ceaseless war that this worldview is not a liability in the Democratic presidential contest. Both Sen. Bernie Sanders, who voted against the Iraq War, and Martin O'Malley have criticized Clinton for supporting it. How has that line of attack gone down with the party's rank and file? No. One. Cares.
Either most Democrats are comfortable with her approach or they have concluded that more war is inevitable no matter who occupies the White House. That's a radical change from 2008, when Iraq was the defining issue between Clinton and Obama.
The president has drawn some powerful lessons from Iraq and elsewhere about the costs of war, the perils of plunging into places we don't understand and our modest capacity to shape outcomes in foreign crises.
Clinton has not drawn those lessons. She stated a very different credo in 2010, referring to America's role in the world: "We do believe there are no limits on what is possible or what can be achieved." How long will we be at war if she becomes president? "No limits" is what I heard.
Hillary is only interested in HILLARY!
You break it you but it and Hillary has never been called out for her support with the military intervention in Libya. No questions about the aftermath of such actions, or any plan with dealing with the blowback.
What a load of BS. They’re trying to cleverly paint Hillary as someone who will be willing to go fight terrorism. She will do no such thing, since her base would not allow it.
no, Streve
the USA has been at war since the Muslims attacked New York City and attempted to attack Washington DC
Afghanistan was not the beginning of the war, and your implication that USA started the war is false
Hillary heard from the grapevine that men are much more likely to be killed than women.
Far from wanting to wage war against Russia,
plenty of Republicans are cheering Putin on.
This article is crippled with partisanship.
Naturally.
They? Who’s they?
The US will be in permanent war so long as the US is regarded by its enemies as weak and faltering in its responses to aggressive moves.
The Muslim world, or at least parts of it, declared war on us. We can pretend that is not the case and try to ignore them but that won’t stop them from trying to destroy us.
Hillary supporters in the MSM and the "establishment".
oh okey, thanks
For him Hillary probably is too hawkish.
Probably for some Democrats too.
HRC's "base" (and her husband's) may not be the same as Obama's.
“You break it you but it and Hillary has never been called out for her support with the military intervention in Libya. No questions about the aftermath of such actions, or any plan with dealing with the blowback.”
This seems to have been buried. Libya certainly was far from perfect before, but the increase in misery there is spectacular after Europe and the US “won” against basically a third world country. And that misery will come back to bite them.
“They’re trying to cleverly paint Hillary as someone who will be willing to go fight terrorism.”
You can bet that is tonight’s “theme” for the Hillary for President commercial, otherwise known as the Democratic debate.
You thought Libya was a good idea? The coup in Ukraine was a good idea?
The days of war=conservatism never were. Unless you think Lindsay Graham is a conservative.
You bet.
"I helped take out Bin Laden. I took out Gadaffi. I helped save billions of women all around the world. I will be tough on terror. Etc.".
Hillary and Obama have a checklist they use for decision making.
Here it is:
1. Does it benefit me?
2. Does it benefit my family and friends?
3. Does it benefit the Democrat Party?
If they can’t answer “yes” to one of those questions, then they don’t care.
Notice that the U.S. isn’t anywhere on that list.
I hate the word "blowback" -- it's ideological 'Ratspeak/Commiespeak </off redundancy mode>, and their slanguage is the enemy of clear thought.
"Entailed consequences" and "ramifications" are what conservatives talk about, and there was plenty of talk in 2003, when George Bush succumbed to the mission-creep advocacy of the national-greatness Republicans (John McCain, exhibit A) and the neoconservatives in the administration (Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Richard Cheney et al.).
There were lots of conservatives in 2003 who advocated "in-and-out": Kill Saddam, kill the "wolf cubs" to destroy regime continuity, break down the regime, break his Republican Guards, and go home. Remember that it was Colin Powell who invoked the "Pottery Barn rule"; his was a minority report, cold rissoles from the 41 administration about a "viable Iraq", that became Bush Administration policy. By contrast, Stephen Decatur and his president, Thomas Jefferson, hallucinated no such obligation toward the corsairs of the Maghreb, and would not have agreed with Powell on the subject of "nation-building".
As for your comment about "no question", George Bush did master the Iranians' Badr Brigade tools and AQI and left Jug Ears a pacified Iraq, which Jug Ears promptly threw away with his self-consequent ideological pronunciamentos that by themselves made everything instantly worse, and then deepened the dissolution of America's gains by simply bugging out and leaving Iraq to become a pawn of Iran and a sectarian battlefield. Bush mastered the bad guys, and Obama sympathized with and fomented them, it's as simple as that.
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