John McCain: Ever Confused, Always for War
Sen. John McCain has exhibited personal courage, but his geopolitical judgment is uniformly awful. Over the last 30 years there has been no war or potential war that he has opposed. In 2008 he wanted to confront nuclear-armed Russia over its neighbor Georgia, which started their short and sharp conflict. It would have been ironic had the Cold War ended peacefully, only to see Washington trigger a nuclear crisis in order to back Georgia as it attempted to prevent the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from doing what Kosovo did with U.S. military aid: achieve self-determination (by seceding from Georgia).
Now Senator McCain is banging the war drums in Libya. But he seems to have trouble remembering who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
Although now crusading against Moammar Qaddafi, two years ago he joined Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham in Tripoli to sup with the dear colonel. There the three opponents of tyranny whispered sweet nothings in the dictator’s ear, offering the prospect of military aid. After all, the former terrorist had become a good friend of America by battling terrorists.
Andrew McCarthy reported on the sordid tale from the WikiLeaks disclosures:
A government cable (leaked by Wikileaks) memorializes the excruciating details of meetings between the Senate delegation and Qaddafi, along with his son Mutassim, Libya’s “national security adviser.” We find McCain and Graham promising to use their influence to push along Libya’s requests for C-130 military aircraft, among other armaments, and civilian nuclear assistance. And there’s Lieberman gushing, “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.” That’s before he opined that Libya had become “an important ally in the war on terrorism,” and that “common enemies sometimes make better friends.”
Obviously, that was then and this is now. Along the way Senator McCain and his fellow war enthusiasts realized that Qaddafi wasn’t a nice guy after all. Who knew? I mean, he had only jailed opponents, conducted terrorist operations against the United States, and initiated a nuclear weapons program. So earlier this year they demanded that the United States back the rebels, the new heroes of democracy.
Until now, anyway.
More from McCain on ‘Isolationism’
Over at World Politics Review, Justin Logan and I collaborated on an article about the supposed rise of ”isolationism” within the GOP.
The charges come mainly from Sen. John McCain, though presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty copped that line yesterday, drawing praise from the editors of The Weekly Standard.
McCain directed his “isolationism” fire late yesterday at West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, one of 27 senators who signed a letter to the president calling for a substantial troop reduction in Afghanistan. On the floor of the Senate, Manchin explained his reasoning: “I believe it is time to for us to rebuild America, not Afghanistan.”
According to McCain, Manchin’s comments “characterize the isolationist withdrawal, lack of knowledge of history attitude that seems to be on the rise in America.”
But McCain needs to reconnect with recent history, and contemporary reality. Nation building is a fool’s errand: costly, counterproductive, and unnecessary. We could continue to hunt al Qaeda with far fewer troops in Afghanistan. A smaller presence would provide us with sufficient flexibility to deal with other challenges elsewhere — and help us to put our own house in order. McCain is OK with spending over $100 billion a year in a country with a GDP of around $16 billion, while our economy suffers.
Domestic Military Detention Isn’t Necessary
I make the case that domestic military detention for all terrorism suspects isn’t necessary in this piece over at the Huffington Post. Legislative proposals by Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) would mandate military detention instead of criminal prosecution for all those suspected of international terrorism. I oppose this policy change for reasons both principled and practical:
If the civil rule of law handles terrorist threats adequately, then invoking military jurisdiction is a counterproductive overreaction.
That was the case with one of the handful of domestically detained enemy combatants, Ali al-Marri. Al-Marri was an honest-to-goodness Al Qaeda sleeper agent masquerading as an exchange student. The FBI indicted him on charges that could have carried a 115-year maximum sentence. The government requested that the judge dismiss its charges with prejudice, meaning that they could not be levied again, and moved him to a naval brig.
The Supreme Court ultimately agreed to hear al-Marri’s case, but the government mooted the case when it removed al-Marri from military custody and charged him with material support of terrorism. Al-Marri pleaded guilty and received a sentence of eight years and four months.
Al-Marri’s case was a missed opportunity. The government should have put him away for life.
This isn’t the first time McKeon and McCain have proposed treating all terrorism suspects like al-Marri and Jose Padilla. I criticized a similar proposal a year ago, as did Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution. Wittes’ criticisms of this year’s bad ideas are here and here. Given the excellent track record of federal courts in prosecuting terrorism cases and the recent death of bin Laden, now is not the time to roll back the civil rule of law.
The Senate’s Interventionist Caucus and Libya
An interesting window into the politics of the Obama administration’s war in Libya may open this week, when Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) reintroduce a resolution expressing the sense of the Senate “that it is not in the vital interests of the United States to intervene militarily in Libya,” and calling on NATO member states and the Arab League, two parties who are directly threatened by the violence in Libya, to provide the necessary assets to the mission.
Such resolutions almost never have a direct impact on the conduct of military operations. Hutchison-Manchin isn’t even the first attempt to constrain President Obama’s ability to wage war in Libya. A resolution offered by freshman Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and cosponsored by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), went well beyond the question of whether the war advanced vital U.S. national interests, and attempted to reassert the legislature’s control over the warpowers generally. Borrowing from something that then-Senator Barack Obama said in 2007, the resolution read “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” This language, which likely strikes most Americans as eminently sensible, managed to garner just 10 votes, all from Republicans.
Still, the prospect of a vote on a much narrower resolution must worry the war’s advocates. At a minimum, an up or down vote on Libya will test the strength of the still-vocal interventionist caucus in the U.S. Senate.
These reliably pro-war members took to the Sunday shows to make the case for escalation. On CNN’s State of the Union, Sen. Lindsey Graham called on the Obama administration “to cut the head of the snake off. Go to Tripoli [and] start bombing Qaddafi’s inner circle.” Worries that the uprising might provide cover for al Qaeda to expand its operations in the Maghreb were unfounded, John McCain asserted. McCain’s long-time friend Sen. Joseph Lieberman agreed, explaining on the same program, “We’re in the fight and the political goal is to get Qaddafi out and to help the freedom fighters achieve their own independent Libya. You can’t get into a fight with one foot. You got to get into it.”
How many others in the Senate subscribe to the interventionists’ interpretation of what America’s role in Libya should be is unclear. I have never understood why Republicans would scramble to follow foreign policy advice from a Democrat, and Al Gore’s running mate, no less. Senators McCain and Graham hold more sway among their GOP colleagues, but their outspoken support for a number of other ill-considered ventures, including especially the war in Iraq, likely gives pause to some. Graham’s fellow South Carolinian Jim DeMint, for example, voted in favor of the Paul-Lee resolution, and has otherwise shown no great enthusiasm for adding to the U.S. military’s already full plate. The Boston Globe’s Theo Emery reports today that Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown isn’t yet ready to endorse an escalation of the war. Meanwhile, Maine’s Susan Collins told Emery that the U.S. military’s role in Libya should be limited to intelligence, logistics, and other capabilities that U.S. allies lack.
Who else might vote for Hutchison-Manchin? Presumably those within the Democratic caucus who still think that war is generally a bad thing, even when it is waged by a Democratic president. No Democrat voted for Paul-Lee, but Senator Manchin’s co-sponsorship of this much more narrowly worded resolution should provide cover for centrists, as well as progressives who once reliably opposed wars of choice.
One thing is clear with respect to the war in Libya: politics favors the skeptics. There is no groundswell of public opinion calling for yet another armed nation-building mission in a strategic backwater. Though the costs of the war are small relative to the gargantuan military budget, most Americans can be counted on to oppose wars that do not clearly advance U.S. national security interests, regardless of how much or how little they cost. They are doubly skeptical given that the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have vastly exceeded even the most pessimistic of predictions, and have not delivered the security that the advocates for war claimed.
It is a truism that politics doesn’t generally drive foreign policy. People who celebrate America’s role as the world’s policeman don’t expect to reap great political rewards for taking such an unpopular stand. McCain, Graham and Lieberman have always stood apart in that regard. Recall, for example, that John McCain bragged that he would rather lose an election than lose a war. He never appeared to consider that both eventualities were possible. Perhaps some of his fellow senators will.
Monday Links
- “Sadly, in Egypt’s case, a freely elected civilian government may prove powerless in the face of the deeply entrenched and well-organized military.”
- “Washington politicians from both parties, and bureaucrats, have for decades successfully decreased our freedom and liberties as they have regulated more and more of our lives, including our retirement.”
- “The Ryan proposal correctly focuses on achieving debt reduction through spending cuts, but this very gradual debt reduction schedule is a weakness that could lead to its downfall.”
- “Nearly two years ago Sen. McCain, along with Senators Graham and Lieberman, was supping with Qaddafi in Tripoli, discussing the possibility of Washington providing military aid.”
- Cato media fellow Radley Balko joined FOX Business Network’s Stossel recently to discuss your right to make video recordings of police, and why exercising that right frequently is vital to liberty:
The ‘Privacy Bill of Rights’ Is in the Bill of Rights
Every lover of liberty and the Constitution should be offended by the moniker “Privacy Bill of Rights” appended to regulatory legislation Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced yesterday. As C|Net’s Declan McCullagh points out, the legislation exempts the federal government and law enforcement:
[T]he measure applies only to companies and some nonprofit groups, not to the federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users’ personal information–in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge.
The real “Privacy Bill of Rights” is in the Bill of Rights. It’s the Fourth Amendment.
It takes a lot of gall to put the moniker “Privacy Bill of Rights” on legislation that reduces liberty in the information economy while the Fourth Amendment remains tattered and threadbare. Nevermind “reasonable expectations”: the people’s right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures is worn down to the nub.
Senators Kerry and McCain should look into the privacy consequences of the Internal Revenue Code. How is privacy going to fare under Obamacare? How is the Department of Homeland Security doing with its privacy efforts? What is an “administrative search”?
McCullagh was good enough to quote yours truly on the new effort from Sens. Kerry and McCain: “If they want to lead on the privacy issue, they’ll lead by getting the federal government’s house in order.”
George Will on Libya
President Obama’s incomprehensible “kinetic military action” in Libya has driven George Will to distraction, and to mordant wit:
At about this point in foreign policy misadventures, the usual question is: What is Plan B? Today’s question is: What was Plan A?
Not to mention literary allusion:
Perhaps the CIA operatives should have stayed home and talked to some senators who seem to know what’s what. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) refers to the Libyan rebels as part of a “pro-democracy movement.” Perhaps they are. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) must think so. Serving, as usual, as Sancho Panza to Sen. John McCain’s Don Quixote, Graham said last Sunday (on “Face the Nation”), “We should be taking the fight to Tripoli.”
No to No-Fly Zones
My Washington Examiner column this week is on the growing drumbeat for military action in Libya. That allegedly serious people are proposing, as Defense Secretary Gates puts it, “the use of the US military in another country in the Middle East,” ought to be appalling. If the last ten years haven’t convinced you that a little prudence and caution might serve us well in foreign policy, what would?
Recently Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), the Bobbsey Twins of knee-jerk interventionism, chastised Obama for dragging his feet on the path toward war. They called for arming the rebels and implementing a no-fly zone, for starters.
“I love the military,” Sen. McCain complained “but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can.” Alas, “can’t is the cancer of happen,” as Charlie Sheen reminded us recently.
Even so, I argue in the column, there are good reasons to resist the call for this supposedly “limited” measure.
But let’s stipulate that NATO warplanes (mainly U.S. fighters, of course) could deny pro-Gadhafi forces the ability to deploy air power. That would not impede their ability to murder on the ground. What then?
NATO flew more than 100,000 sorties in Operation Deny Flight, the no-fly zone imposed over Bosnia from 1993 to 1995, yet that wasn’t enough to prevent ethnic cleansing or the killing of thousands of Bosnians in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
It did, however, help pave the way for a wider war and a 12-year nation-building mission. In for a penny, in for a pound — intervention tends to have a logic of its own.
This is a good occasion, then, to reflect on a fundamental question: What is the U.S. military for? Humanitarian interventionists on the Left and the Right seem to view it as an all-purpose tool for spreading good throughout the world — something like the “Super Friends” who, in the Saturday morning cartoons of my youth, scanned the monitors at the Hall of Justice for “Trouble Alerts,” swooping off regularly to do battle with evil.
Our Constitution takes a narrower view. It empowers Congress to set up a military establishment for “the common defence … of the United States,” the better to achieve the Preamble’s goal of “secur[ing] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Armed liberation of oppressed peoples the world over wasn’t part of the original mission.
Funny enough, when he first got to Washington, John McCain occasionally appreciated the virtues of foreign policy restraint. As Matt Welch recounts in his book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick: “In September 1983, as a freshman congressman and loyal foot soldier of the Reagan revolution, John McCain voted against a successful measure to extend the deployment of US Marines in war-torn Lebanon.” In a speech on the House floor, McCain argued that “The fundamental question is, what is the United States’ interest in Lebanon?…. The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave.”
Later, Welch writes that, in 1987, when President Reagan reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, offering them “US Navy protection against a threatening Iran, McCain was livid.” He took to the pages of the Arizona Republic to complain that the move was “a dangerous overreaction in perhaps the most violent and unpredictable region in the world…. American citizens are again be asked to place themselves between warring Middle East factions, with…. no real plan on how to respond if the situation escalates.”
It’s been a long time since Senator McCain made such good sense on foreign policy.
How Dare Conservatives Stand athwart ObamaCare Yelling, Stop!
In a column for Kaiser Health News, Michael L. Millenson, President of Health Quality Advisors LLC, laments that conservatives in the U.S. House are approaching ObamaCare like, well, conservatives. He cites comments by unnamed House GOP staffers at a recent conference:
The Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services? “An innovation center at CMS is an oxymoron,” responded a Republican aide…”Though it’s great for PhDs who come to Washington on the government tab.”
There was also no reason the government should pay for “so-called comparative effectiveness research,” another said.
“Everything’s on the chopping block,” said yet another.
No government-funded comparative-effectiveness research? The horror! For my money, those staffers (and whoever hired them) should get a medal.
Millenson thinks conservative Republicans have just become a bunch of cynics and longs for the days when Republicans would go along with the left-wing impulse to have the federal government micromanage health care:
After all, the McCain-Palin health policy platform in the 2008 presidential election called for coordinated care, greater use of health information technology and a focus on Medicare payment for value, not volume. Once-and-future Republican presidential candidates such as former governors Mike Huckabee (Ark.), Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Tim Pawlenty (Minn.), as well as ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, have long promoted disease prevention, a more innovative federal government and increased use of information technology. Indeed, federal health IT “meaningful use” requirements can even be seen as a direct consequence of Gingrich’s popularization of the phrase, “Paper kills.”
He even invokes the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, as if Buckley would disapprove of conservatives standing athwart ObamaCare yelling, Stop!
Millenson’s tell comes toward the end of the column, when he writes:
traditional GOP conservatives… [have] eschewed ideas in favor of ideological declarations.
Eschewed ideas in favor of…ideas? My guess is that what’s really troubling Millenson is that congressional Republicans are eschewing left-wing health care ideas in favor of freedom.
Better late than never. Now if only GOP governors would do the same.
Wednesday Links
- John McCain channels Dick Cheney: On March 4, McCain introduced a bill that “would require that anyone anywhere in the world, including American citizens, suspected of involvement in terrorism — including ‘material support’ (otherwise undefined) — can be imprisoned by the military on the authority of the president as commander in chief.”
- President Obama declared passage of a major student-aid reform law yesterday. Will it help? Cato education expert Neal McCluskey calls it a mixed bag.
- Thought experiment: Let’s say for a moment that Congress could actually repeal the health care overhaul. What should they put in its place?
- Should Congress pursue a constitutional amendment that would limit federal spending to one-fifth of the economy?
- Podcast: “Obama’s Intelligence Gathering Needs Oversight” featuring Julian Sanchez.
Supreme Court Ruling on Hillary Movie Heralds Freer Speech for All of Us
Today the Supreme Court struck a major blow for free speech by correctly holding that government cannot try to “level the political playing field” by banning corporations from making independent campaign expenditures on films, books, or even campaign signs.
As Justice Kennedy said in announcing the opinion, “if the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits jailing citizens for engaging in political speech.”
While the Court has long upheld campaign finance regulations as a way to prevent corruption in elections, it has also repeated that equalizing speech is never a valid government interest.
After all, to make campaign spending equal, the government would have to prevent some people or groups from spending less than they wished. That is directly contrary to protecting speech from government restraint, which is ultimately the heart of American conceptions about the freedom of speech.
No case demonstrates this idea better than Citizens United, where a nonprofit corporation made no donations to candidates but rather spent money to spread its ideas about Hillary Clinton independent of the campaigns of primary opponent Barack Obama, potential general election opponent John McCain, or any other candidates. Where is the “corruption” if the campaign(s) being supported have no knowledge, let alone control over what independent actors do? — be they one person, two people, or a large group?
Today’s ruling may well lead to more corporate and union election spending, but none of this money will go directly to candidates — so there is no possible corruption or even “appearance of corruption.” It will go instead to spreading information about candidates and issues. Such increases in spending should be welcome because studies have shown that more spending — more political communication — leads to better-informed voters.
In short, the Citizens United decision has strengthened both the First Amendment and American democracy.
For more background on the case, here’s a primer:
Who Wants to Make Sarah Palin the Leader of the Republican Party?
Could it be the Washington Post? Bannered across the top of the Post‘s op-ed page today is a piece titled “Copenhagen’s political science,” titularly authored by Sarah Palin. I’m delighted to see the Post publishing an op-ed critical of the questionable science behind the Copenhagen conference and the demands for massive regulations to deal with “climate change.”
But Sarah Palin? Of all the experts and political leaders a great newspaper might call on for a critical look at the science behind global warming, Sarah Palin?
What’s even more interesting is that the Post also ran an op-ed by Palin in July. But during this entire year, the Post has not run any op-eds by such credible and accomplished Republicans as Gov. Mitch Daniels; former governors Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson; Sen. John Thune; or indeed former governor Mike Huckabee, who might be Palin’s chief rival for the social-conservative vote. You might almost think the Post wanted Palin to be seen as a leader of Republicans.
I should note that during the past year the Post has run one op-ed each from John McCain, Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty. (And for people who don’t read well, I should note that when I call the people above “credible and accomplished,” that’s not an endorsement for any political office.) Still, it’s the rare political leader who gets two Post op-eds in six months, and rarer still the Post op-eds by ex-governors who can’t name a newspaper that they read.
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