By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Seems like Rand Paul always goes too far.
He could have made a perfectly respectable argument that
the NSA’s metadata program is illegal because it exceeds the Patriot Act’s
authority. Instead he speciously insists that the Patriot Act shreds the Fourth
Amendment and the program is akin to Nixon-era “domestic spying.”
He could also have made a perfectly respectable — I would
say, irrefutable — argument that there was strong bipartisan support for some
reckless policies that significantly contributed to the rise of the Islamic
State — the jihadist organization that now controls much of Iraq and Syria.
Instead, the Kentucky Republican speciously claims that “hawks” in his own
party “created” ISIS.
ISIS is a creation of Islamic-supremacist ideology, which
is drawn directly from Muslim scripture. Part of the reason that Senator Paul
is no improvement over the Republicans he often derides is that he is just as
wrong as they are about the threat we face.
In their infatuation with Muslim engagement, Beltway
Republicans imagine a monolithic, smiley-face Islam — a “religion of peace”
that seamlessly accommodates Western liberalism . . . except where it has been
“hijacked” by “violent extremists.” Indeed, long before President Obama came
along, it was the Bush administration that endeavored to purge terms like
“jihadism” from our lexicon, even assuring us: “The fact is that Islam and
secular democracy are fully compatible — in fact, they can make each other
stronger.”
Thankfully, Senator Paul does not seem to have gulped
that Kool-Aid. Yet, his anti-government populism leads him to maintain — just
as his father did in less guarded rhetoric — that it is American policy, not
Islamic-supremacist ideology, that induces jihadists to attack the United
States.
Paul appears to grasp that jihadism is evil, rooted in
Islamic doctrine, and anti-American. The conclusion he draws from this premise,
however, is that it should be given a wide berth rather than confronted and
defeated. This is not materially different from the “blame America first” cast
of mind that Jeanne Kirkpatrick diagnosed and Barack Obama instantiates. Nor is
it far from the mindset that blames Pamela Geller or Charlie Hebdo when
Islamists respond to mere taunts with lethal violence — as if sharia gives
Muslims a special mayhem dispensation that American law must accommodate.
All that said, if Paul’s point was that Republican policy
contributed to the Islamist bedlam now exploding across the Middle East and
northern Africa, that ought to be undeniable.
Because the senator hyperbolically claimed that the GOP
“created” ISIS, the indignant rebukes raining down on him from Republican
leaders and sympathizers focus on Iraq. It was there that the organization was
born as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), eventually rebranding as ISIS upon breaking
away from the mother ship and declaring its caliphate.
Selectively mining facts, the Republican establishment
claims that, thanks to the 2007 troop surge, President Bush annihilated AQI
before there ever was an ISIS. The latter arose, so the story goes, because
Obama reversed Bush’s policies and refused to keep a residual force in Iraq
after 2011. In point of fact, the GOP fingerprints on the sweeping Middle East
disaster transcend Iraq. But even if we just stick to Iraq, the Republican
story is woefully incomplete.
Having been created by Islamic supremacism, AQI/ISIS was
nurtured by Iran. Notwithstanding the internecine bloodletting that now pits
Sunnis against Shiites across the region, Shiite Iran has been the key
supporter of both Shiite and Sunni jihadist groups since its revolutionary
incarnation as “the Islamic Republic” in 1979. It has backed Sunni al-Qaeda and
Hamas, as well as Shiite Hezbollah and a network of Shiite terror cells in
Iraq. Its only requirement has been that jihadists of whatever stripe advance Iran’s
interests by taking the fight to the U.S. and Israel.
In that vein, Iran harbored al-Qaeda operatives after the
9/11 attacks and facilitated the anti-American insurgencies in Afghanistan and
Iraq. This involved collaboration with Abu Musab Zarqawi, the formative figure
of AQI who was eventually killed by U.S. forces in Iraq after he had fomented
civil war there.
Iran helped Zarqawi even though AQI’s strategy involved
killing Shiites. Of course, the regime in Tehran kills plenty of Iranians, so
it has no qualms about killing Shiites. It helped Zarqawi kill them in Iraq
because its interests were advanced by chaos in Iraq, which enabled the mullahs
to spread their influence and their Shiite terror network.
Although this was obvious, as was the fact that Iran was
behind the killing of thousands of American troops, the Bush administration
treated Iran as if it had an interest in Iraqi stability. The Republican
administration ignored Iran’s fueling of the jihad; negotiated with Iran
(ostensibly through intermediaries) on its nuclear-weapons program; and
disaggregated the nuke negotiations from Iran’s terror promotion — just as
Obama has done — despite the fact that the United States was Iran’s top terror
target. Bush even backed as Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a pro-Iranian
Shiite Islamist who, predictably, drew Baghdad ever closer to Tehran while
exacerbating the rift with Iraqi Sunnis. This increased an already teeming
recruiting pool for AQI and, later, ISIS.
The surge did indeed tamp down on the violence and
inflict withering losses on AQI. Still, it is a gross exaggeration to claim, as
Republicans do, that the surge “won” the war in Iraq. If we judge matters by
Bush’s stated objective — a stable, democratic Iraq that would be a reliable
American counterterrorism ally — Iraq was already a failure by 2007. The surge
killed many jihadists and gave the warring Iraqi factions yet another
opportunity to reconcile. But it was always known that (a) our jihadist enemies
backed by Iran were a regional (in fact, a global) threat, so the war could not
be won in Iraq alone; and (b) the surge was a temporary measure, not a
permanent solution.
The latter problem was exacerbated by the
status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to which Bush reluctantly agreed. In lashing
out against Paul, Republicans and their apologists emphasize that Obama changed
Bush’s policies. This is true, but it conveniently omits mentioning that Bush’s
policies were first changed by . . . Bush.
For years, President Bush envisioned that all our
sacrifice on Iraq’s behalf would yield a permanent working alliance with a
sizable post-war American presence that would help us project power and protect
our interests in the region. But, despite the administration’s
smiley-face-Islam depiction of the Iraqis, they in fact despise infidel
Americans and wanted our forces out of their country — to the point that the
free Iraqi elections our government liked to brag about became contests over
which candidate could spew the most venom about the United States. With the
clock running out on the U.N. use-of-force mandate, Bush agreed with the
Iranian-controlled Maliki to a SOFA that called for all American troops to
leave the country by the end of 2011.
By that point, it was already clear that Barack Obama
would be the next president. There is no doubt that, in driving a hard bargain
with Bush, Maliki leveraged Obama’s strident opposition to the Iraq war and his
vow to pull Americans out. Bush may have hoped that Obama would grow into the
job, be guided by America’s interests instead of his ideological leanings, and
strike a new deal with the Iraqis before the 2011 deadline based on whatever
conditions on the ground were at the time. But hope is not a strategy.
Republicans are now claiming that it was blindingly
obvious in 2011 that pulling out troops was a blunder that guaranteed the
resurgence of jihadists in Iraq. If that is the case — and it surely is the case
— then it was also blindingly obvious in late 2008 that the terms of the SOFA
to which Bush agreed would, if complied with, guarantee the resurgence of
jihadists in Iraq.
This is not to excuse the unmitigated mess Obama made of
things. So determined was he to be done with Iraq, so dismissive was he of all
America had sacrificed to drive our Sunni enemies from Iraq, that he was
heedless of conditions on the ground as he drew our forces down. By 2011, after
a steady draw-down, things were so much worse that Obama could have pressured
Maliki to renegotiate the withdrawal deadline; a sizable presence of American
forces would likely have prevented the advance of ISIS. Obama resisted this
because he was determined to pull out at any cost, and because he calculated
that abandoning Iraq would appease Iran, with which he was (and remains)
desperate to negotiate a nuclear deal.
Nevertheless, the road was paved for Obama because of
Bush’s withdrawal agreement. It is disingenuous for Republicans to contend that
remaining in Iraq was the “Bush policy” when the president assented to a SOFA
that unambiguously reads: “All United States Forces shall withdraw from all
Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”
As already noted above, Iraq is not the half of the problem
for the GOP. Why is it, do you suppose, that we do not know by now why our
government had personnel stationed in Benghazi, Libya, one of the most
dangerous places in the world for Americans, when four of them — including the
U.S. ambassador — were massacred on September 11, 2012? After all, the Obama
policy of empowering Islamists to overthrow the Qaddafi regime was spearheaded
by Hillary Clinton, the then–secretary of state who is the Democrats’
presumptive 2016 presidential nominee. The Republicans presumably want to beat
Mrs. Clinton, so why isn’t the Congress they control exploiting what, on the
surface, seems like a powerful political argument against her competence?
Because influential Beltway Republicans were enthusiastic
proponents of this disastrous policy from the start. On Libya, they are joined
at the hip with Clinton and Obama.
The State Department had observed in 2009, when GOP
senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were about to lead a congressional
delegation to Tripoli for meetings with Qaddafi, that “Libya has acted as a
critical ally in U.S. counterterrorism efforts, and Libya is considered one of
our primary partners in combating the flow of foreign fighters.” Yet no one was
more ardent than McCain and Graham in calling for Qaddafi’s overthrow and for
accomplishing that end by arming “rebels” who were known to be rife with top
al-Qaeda figures.
The policy has rendered Libya a failed state in which
jihadists control swaths of territory, a situation ISIS has now exploited,
building a growing presence. The policy also led to an arms windfall for Libyan
jihadists. It is now clear that some of those arms made their way to jihadists
in Syria. What remains murky is whether the United States government
facilitated that arms traffic. The State Department, the CIA, and
administration spokesmen have been cagey about what our government did, and
senior Republican lawmakers have thwarted efforts to probe the issue at at
least one public hearing. But at the very least, American officials knew about
arms transfers from Libyan jihadists to Syrian jihadists.
Of course, back in the first Obama term, before ISIS
became a juggernaut, senior Republicans were keen to arm the Syrian “rebels” in
order to overthrow the Assad regime. In essence, they wanted a redux of the
Libya strategy that they and Hillary Clinton were proud to take credit for . .
. right up until the Benghazi massacre and the disintegration of Libya into a
failed state. But you don’t hear them speak much about overthrowing Assad
anymore, just like you no longer hear much bragging about Qaddafi’s ouster.
That is because it is now clear that the Syrian “rebels,” like the Libyan
“rebels,” prominently included jihadists from al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Muslim
Brotherhood. When Republicans were calling for these anti-Assad “rebels” to be
armed and trained (mainly through Islamist governments), that is where much of
the arming and training was going.
It was no surprise. After all, when the rabidly
anti-American Muslim Brotherhood took over the Egyptian government, Republicans
supported Obama in providing arms and aid for them, too — an initiative that
Senator Paul vigorously but unsuccessfully opposed.
Toward the conclusion of the 2012 presidential campaign,
there was a candidate debate on foreign policy. It was Mitt Romney’s chance, in
the wake of the Benghazi terrorist attack, to separate himself from the
catastrophic, pro-Islamist policies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Instead, Romney permitted little or no daylight between himself and the
president — to the point that it sometimes seemed he was poised to endorse
Obama.
It is fair to say that Romney was simply following a
flawed strategy to narrow the election to a referendum on the economy, on which
he figured Obama was most vulnerable. But Romney was able to follow the
strategy with ease because, on foreign policy, there really wasn’t much
daylight between Beltway Republicans and a president who makes Jimmy Carter
look like Winston Churchill.
If that was what Rand Paul was trying to say, he has a
point.
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