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The two frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination aren’t drinking the neocon Kool-Aid, and this became readily apparent on the stage of the GOP presidential debate.
Donald Trump opposed the Iraq war, thinks we should be happy Putin is taking on ISIS in Syria, and more recently called Charles Krauthammer a “warmonger.”
This last alone would be enough to provoke his excommunication from the ranks of acceptable GOP nominees, but to make matters worse The Donald is horning in on the neocons’ hate-all-Muslims shtick while combining it with heretical “isolationist” views. You can hear the teeth-grinding all the way from Washington and the West side of Manhattan.
Ted Cruz is another highly problematic candidate from the neocon point of view. His major sin in their eyes is his co-sponsoring of the USA Freedom Act, which kinda-sorta (but not really) reined in collection of bulk meta-data by US government agencies.
Aside from that, however, there’s his deviation from the neocon party line on Syria, “democracy” promotion, and the whole “regime change” policy, which has been nothing but a disaster for both the United States and its targets.
What we saw on the stage was prefigured in the days leading up to the debate. In a recent speech to the Heritage Foundation, Cruz said
“More data from millions of law abiding Americans is not always better data. Hoarding tens of billions of records of ordinary citizens didn’t stop Fort Hood. It didn’t stop Boston. It didn’t stop Chattanooga. It didn’t stop Garland. And it failed to detect the San Bernardino plot.”
Neocon favorite Rubio has been running attacks ads aimed at Cruz, claiming his support for the USA Freedom Act has put the nation in peril, but Cruz didn’t back down. And Rand Paul came to his defense:
“Marco gets it completely wrong. We are not any safer through the bulk collection of all Americans’ records. In fact, I think we’re less safe. We get so distracted by all of the information, we’re not spending enough time getting specific immigration – specific information on terrorists.
“The other thing is, is the one thing that might have stopped San Bernardino, that might have stopped 9/11 would have been stricter controls on those who came here. And Marco has opposed at every point increased security – border security for those who come to our country.”
In an election in which protecting the nation’s borders is at the center of the political debate, the Cruz-Paul beat-down of Rubio on this issue has effectively put him out of the running. Rubio can repeat the “radical Islamic terrorism” mantra until he’s blue in the face, but he’ll never get over this huge contradiction.
The argument over regime-change in Syria, Libya and throughout the Middle East was substantial – and resulted in a clear victory for the anti-regime changers, namely Cruz and Paul. Cruz told the audience that we shouldn’t intervene in Syria’s civil war and that “as bad as [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad was and is, radical jihadis controlling Syria would be a significant turn for the worse.” He skewered not only Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on this question, but also “the Washington Republicans,” a trenchant phrase.
The Libyan intervention, says Cruz, was a “disaster,” and replacing authoritarian leaders like Qaddafi and Assad with radical jihadists is inimical to US interests. He challenged Rubio on his support for the Hillary-Obama policy of regime change in Libya – which led to chaos and jihadist dominance of that unfortunate country.
This is not to say Cruz is an anti-interventionist: not by a country mile. He wants to “carpet-bomb” ISIS, and deploy “whatever ground troops are necessary.” However, he also denounces the obsession with “boots on the ground” as “a talismanic demonstration of strength. That is getting the deployment of military force precisely backwards. This is not a game of risk, where politicians move armies around to demonstrate their machismo.”
When he said this in his Heritage speech, this was rightly interpreted as a frontal assault on Marco Rubio, the neocon poster boy, and the reference to “machismo” was – again, rightly – seen as a hit on the chickenhawkish tendency of laptop bombardiers with impeccable neoconservative credentials but no military experience or knowledge. This provoked lots of incoming fire from such worthies
as Bret Stephens, Stephen Hayes, and Max Boot. The neocons are particularly perturbed that Cruz has had the gumption to attack them by name, and their anger was channeled in this piece by Eliana Johnson and Tim Alberta in National Review:
“[W]hen Ted Cruz, on the campaign trail in Iowa and again in an interview with Bloomberg News, recently pointed the finger at ‘neocons’ in an attempt to defend his own understanding of American interests abroad, the response among some conservative foreign-policy experts – many of whom the term has been used to disparage — was of shock, anger, and dismay. ‘He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,’ says Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration National Security Council official and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘It’s an epithet. It’s always used pejoratively. And the main thing I resent about it is, it’s a label, it’s a way of avoiding arguments,’ says Eliot Cohen, a Bush administration State Department official and a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.”
We aren’t allowed to utter the word “neoconservative,” unless of course we’re Irving Kristol, who wrote a whole book about neoconservatism, or unless we’re Eliana Johnson, one of the authors of the article cited above, who last year wrote a piece declaring “the neocons are back”!
We aren’t allowed to talk about the neocons because to do so would expose them for what they are: a political cult that glories in war, and has infused American politics with its toxic ideology of perpetual conflict and unmitigated statism. Talk of “neocons” also brings to the surface the neoconservative institutions that have been key to pushing America into one disastrous military adventure after another.
