Empire

What to do about Ted Cruz: Insist that he speak to possible American complicity in genocide

Ted Cruz is now raising money off his appearance deliberately provoking a crowd of Arab Christians. He is raising money off a speech that insulted the leaders of persecuted Middle Eastern churches, and Washington’s Cardinal Wuerl, by suggesting they don’t know how to follow Christ.

If you haven’t been following along, here are some links:

  • Tristyn at TheDC broke the story.
  • Jon Coppage with the transcript and a longer write-up.
  • Another account from the room.
  • Michael Brendan Dougherty and Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry at The Week; Dougherty touches on what at least appears to be coordination with the Free Beacon. Cruz attended a breakfast with Free Beacon reporters and his national security advisor earlier that morning, just before Alana Goodman’s story smearing some of the clerics in attendance as “pro-Hezbollah.” She also got the interview right after Cruz got offstage. It’s been alleged that the neocons have stage-managed stunts like this before.
  • And my great thanks to David Benkof, an Orthodox Jew and strong supporter of Israel, for writing this for us, and adapting his piece for the Times of Israel.
  • Update: Here’s Ross Douthat

The senator must think his constituents and donors are stupid; that his remarks are playing well with the evangelicals back home, and this will all be glossed over in time, with anyone who brings it up being treated as disloyal and possibly anti-Semitic. Here’s what to do to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Cruz is officially against arming the Syrian opposition, but you’d think a supposed conservative firebrand like him wouldn’t hesitate to mention the fact that we already are, and have been since probably 2012. As covered here last week, it is far from a remote possibility that weapons collected in Benghazi and transferred to Syria by way of Turkey have ended up in the hands of ISIS, meaning the United States are complicit in the genocide of Middle Eastern Christians.

This has the added bonus of undermining the neocon argument, which in spite of the chaos engulfing the region they have largely stuck to, that Assad must be toppled above all else, because it shows the consequences of that kind of monomania. Look at how the Free Beacon chides these persecuted people for daring to side, out of sheer necessity, with the autocrat who might at least keep them safe.

This should be Obama’s Iran-Contra, but sadly I think neither Cruz nor Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi Select Committee have any interest in investigating what we were doing there; they’d rather establish timelines about the night of the attack and continue to build a case for the administration’s mismanagement. Ted Cruz should not be allowed to get through a single interview without being asked about what he’s going to do to get to the bottom of whether American-trafficked weapons have ended up in the hands of ISIS. The constituents of Cruz, Gowdy, et al, and conservative groups must be prepared to hold their feet to the fire on this question. If it is true, and Cruz et al are uninterested in talking about it so as not to undermine the case for further involvement in the region, that demonstrates a moral obtuseness that even CUFI might be able to see through.

If Cruz were to demonstrate a good-faith effort to investigate this matter, then perhaps he could be forgiven for the unspeakable insult to the church that he delivered this week. He was on the warpath over weapons trafficking to Mexican gangs, and this should be no different. But pressure will need to be brought to bear: Texans who are concerned about the possibility that America, however covertly or inadvertently, aided ISIS savagery, now is the time to stand up.

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It doesn’t matter if Rand Paul is a squish on foreign policy

That goes for whether you’re a closet isolationist or a Toby Keith-listening Straussian. Here’s why.

Watch how Bill Kristol makes his argument here, first laying out that he believes the president has the authority to strike ISIS unilaterally, before suggesting, despite Rand Paul having said more than a week earlier that he would support legislation to “destroy ISIS militarily,” that Rand Paul would be a ‘no’ vote if Obama is taking it to Congress. He’s just blatantly misrepresenting Paul’s position. Make no mistake, that’s the message that the hawks want to send, to be for “leadership” or “peace through strength” means disregarding Congress’s prerogatives.

Last night featured a report by Tim Mak that both Paul and John McCain are asking the president to put it to a vote, though McCain claims the president doesn’t need to.

When Paul endorsed destroying ISIS, progressive writers reacted by calling him a flip-flopper, Republican hawks treated him like an errant schoolboy who’s finally coming around, Jennifer Rubin reacted by extruding another pile of snide bullshit, to all of which Paul responded in Time saying he’s not an isolationist.

However, he did have a piece in the Wall Street Journal on August 27 about how the U.S. abetted the rise of ISIS, which is one of those facts everybody knows is true but violates the America-never-does-anything-wrong ideologues’ catechism.

La Rubin, for example, calls this reasoning “perverse,” and quotes Elliott Abrams:

“In fact we’ve done in Syria exactly what Rand Paul always wants to do–nothing–and we see the result. It’s the steady growth of a murderous, barbarous terrorist group that now threatens even the homeland.”

Christian Whiton has been pushing this “next to nothing” in Syria line too. And Rick Moran suggests that Paul is reading too much Alex Jones. They’re all ignoring the facts or being intentionally misleading.

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Political influence, in Virginia and ‘all creation, U.S.A.’

Bob McDonnell, governor before today’s Clinton satrap, became the first chief executive of Virginia to be convicted of a crime last week, being found guilty on 11 of 14 corruption-related charges. Now he faces prison time for his connections to Jonnie Williams, the now-retired CEO of Star Scientific, a chemical company operating somewhere close to the line between pharmaceuticals, supplements, and various other things — they were among the first to develop dissolvable tobacco lozenges (here is a picture of Lindsay Lohan at the launch party for them).

According one of the better articles on the relationship, by Peter Galuszka, that was actually an attempt to shore up the business in the midst of a patent battle with R.J. Reynolds, regarding what is claimed to be a way to process tobacco to be less carcinogenic when smoked, the invention of which reportedly involved Williams microwaving tobacco in his kitchen.

Needless to say, he’s an adaptable man, and much as George Washington switched to wheat when he proved to be an inept tobacco planter, at the time the scandal broke Star Scientific was marketing a new product said to be in part for smoking cessation, which is currently tied up by the FDA.

It behooves someone in an industry that straddles so many different types of regulatory regime to have powerful friends. When besieged rich people get political, sometimes bad things happen.

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‘I intend to make [Gaza] howl’: Victor Davis Hanson’s thirst for ‘humiliation’

There’s that great Faulkner quote about every Southern boy being able to imagine himself at will into Pickett’s charge:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago…

By contrast a neoconservative columnist is able to, in similar fashion, imagine himself torching homes in Columbia with General Sherman.

*****

On November 9 2012, news broke of the Paula Broadwell/David Petraeus affair, ending the career of America’s top celebrity-general and immediately putting a stop to rumors regarding his plans to run for office, possibly on a presidential ticket in 2016. Our Caesar of counterinsurgency was not to be, and Victor Davis Hanson was so shocked he had trouble believing it. He wrote that Petraeus’ resignation was “bizarre” in his column that month, and asked the sort of questions that would get him called a fifth columnist or truther if he’d been asking them about 9/11 or the Iraq war: “How and why did the FBI investigate the Petraeus matter? To whom and when did it report its findings? And what was the administration reaction?”

The next month he wrote a “short history of amorous generals” to make sure we knew that it’s OK, because lots of generals do this kind of thing.

Finding out one of one’s saviors is a philanderer is understandably shocking; and as of November 8, Hanson, reportedly one of Dick Cheney’s favorite dinner guests, had already decided to include Petraeus as one of the five “Savior Generals” covered in his book by the same name, which would appear in May 2013. He first applied the term to Petraeus in 2009, calling him the “maverick savior of Iraq,” and despite the failures of his COIN strategy and the chaos engulfing the north of the benighted country today, the Petraeus myth remains key to the conservative argument that everything was going fine in Iraq until perfidious Obama withdrew. Needless to say, Sherman is another one of Hanson’s saviors (and is also treated here).

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Four American Anti-Imperialisms

A useful taxonomy from the introduction of David Mayers’ excellent Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise To Power:

Four strands of dissent are discernible amid the personalities, competing ideas, and rival interests that shaped debate on foreign affairs from Louisiana to Korea. These strands can be labeled as prophetic, republican, nationalist, and cosmopolitan. They interlaced even as they wove through the deeper fabrics of American society and polity: capitalist economy, technological change, population growth, racial-ethnic-religious diversity, class stratification, party competition, and regional tugging.

The prophetic is the most venerable of the four strands. It was nourished by the religious temper and puritan core of the colonial/early independence period. More precisely, this orientation originated in the outlook of seventeenth-century New England theocrats such as John Winthrop. Themselves dissenters — from Anglican ecclesiolatry — they feared God’s wrath at creatures who strayed from His edicts or purpose. Pronounced still in the nineteenth century, before the popular success of Charles Darwin’s biology, the prophetic strand stemmed from belief in God (often depicted in anthropomorphic terms) who judges nations no less than individual souls. A number of dissenters, mainly reared in Protestant tradition, accepted in earnest this idea once expressed by the religiously unconventional Jefferson. This deist said (referring to slavery): “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” From such anxiety, resolve could follow to put matters right, evident in voices opposed to enlarging the slave zone via the Louisiana acquisition, evicting Native Americans from their lands, or attacking Mexico in 1846. The idea that God reflexively enlisted on America’s side constituted theological error — blasphemy — for the prophetically minded recusant.

The republican strand sprang from the country’s democratic ethos and distrust of empire, inherited from the 1776 rebellion. This strand of dissent has manifested most frequently and vividly. It gained rhetorical power and influence from America’s being a self-conscious republic — fed by the idea, as self-evident, that representative institutions and liberal values were superior to, also incompatible with, overweening power. In this case, the United States should not substitute the sham of imperium for estimable virtues. Possession of immense power was thought to be disorienting, even disabling. Americans must not lose their way in hubris or worship of imperial idols, against which the 1776 generation had properly mutinied. Republican-minded dissenters thus objected to Louisiana empire, the 1848 Mexican cession, the buying of Alaska, Filipino occupation after the Spanish-American war, and subsequent bids for hegemony. This preference did not recommend national introversion and eschewed sulky isolationism; republican dissenters emphasized instead the power of US example — accountable government, domestic tranquility — as a guarantor of Washington’s influence abroad.

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Strategic leaks, restricted access, and freedom of the press

Freedom of the press usually means no prior restraint.  That is, anyone can publish anything, whether or not the government likes it.  While a lack of prior restraint seems to be a necessary condition for freedom of the press, I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is not a sufficient condition.  It is possible for government to have a significant impact on news by restricting access to reporters who are likely to write favorable stories.  A mild version of this is when disliked members of the press are not invited to news conferences.  A extreme version involves selective leaks to press who will spin a story positively.

The problem was aptly noted by a number of press organizations in an open letter to President Obama.

Over the past two decades, public agencies have increasingly prohibited staff from communicating with journalists unless they go through public affairs offices or through political appointees. This trend has been especially pronounced in the federal government. We consider these restrictions a form of censorship — an attempt to control what the public is allowed to see and hear.

The stifling of free expression is happening despite your pledge on your first day in office to bring “a new era of openness” to federal government – and the subsequent executive orders and directives which were supposed to bring such openness about.

Recent research has indicated the problem is getting worse throughout the nation, particularly at the federal level. Journalists are reporting that most federal agencies prohibit their employees from communicating with the press unless the bosses have public relations staffers sitting in on the conversations. Contact is often blocked completely. When public affairs officers speak, even about routine public matters, they often do so confidentially in spite of having the title “spokesperson.” Reporters seeking interviews are expected to seek permission, often providing questions in advance. Delays can stretch for days, longer than most deadlines allow. Public affairs officers might send their own written responses of slick non-answers. Agencies hold on-background press conferences with unnamed officials, on a not-for-attribution basis.

In many cases, this is clearly being done to control what information journalists – and the audience they serve – have access to. A survey found 40 percent of public affairs officers admitted they blocked certain reporters because they did not like what they wrote.

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