Roguish Lawyer
12-03-2015, 13:22
I am interested in thoughts on the following editorial in today's Wall Street Journal:
Ted Cruz’s bid for the GOP’s presidential nomination has always rested on the proposition that he is the only “real Republican” in the race. So why is the junior Senator from Texas advocating a Syria policy that seems to have been drawn from President Obama’s situation room?
“In my view, we have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war,” Mr. Cruz said Monday in a Bloomberg interview. “If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neo-cons, they have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.”
Mr. Cruz’s salvo was aimed at GOP rival Marco Rubio, who has cut a strong foreign-policy profile in a race increasingly defined by security anxieties. The Florida Senator, Mr. Cruz claimed, is with Hillary Clinton in advocating a policy in Syria that would give weapons to “the so-called moderate rebels” and impose no-fly zones over parts of the country. The two “are repeating the very same mistakes they made in Libya. They’ve demonstrated they’ve learned nothing.”
This is disingenuous even by Mr. Cruz’s standards. At a rally in South Carolina last month, the Texan outlined an anti-Islamic State strategy that had two main planks: use “overwhelming air power” to bomb the group into the stone age, while arming the Kurdish peshmerga to fight it from the ground.
“[The Kurds] are right now fighting against ISIS every day, but their weapons are vastly outclassed because ISIS has American equipment they seized in Iraq,” Mr. Cruz said. As to whether the U.S. should deploy GIs, the Senator replied: “We have boots on the ground. The Kurds are our boots on the ground.”
Where have we seen this before? It sounds close to the lead-from-behind approach adopted by the Obama Administration for Libya: air strikes but no troops, a de facto alliance with moderate local forces to do the ground fighting, and no follow-up. The approach at least succeeded in ending the Gadhafi regime, but it failed as a policy because the U.S. and NATO abandonment of Libya after Gadhafi’s fall allowed jihadist groups to flourish as the country descended into chaos. If anyone hasn’t learned the lessons of Libya, it’s Mr. Cruz.
The Texan’s defensiveness might have something to do with his opposition to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephony metadata collection programs, which looks dangerous as policy and politics after the terror attacks in Paris. Mr. Cruz was a cosponsor of the legislation last summer that killed the program over Mr. Rubio’s opposition, and one of Mr. Cruz’s campaign lines is to encourage audiences to turn on their cell phones so President Obama can listen in.
This is an especially demagogic line that misrepresents what the NSA was doing—tracing suspicious patterns of who’s calling whom but not listening to random phone calls. Mr. Cruz is spreading the same myths that Edward Snowden does.
On Syria Mr. Cruz’s “no dog in the fight” line is a way of doubling down on his 2013 opposition to enforcing a chemical red line in Syria by bombing the Assad regime. That bipartisan failure to enforce President Obama’s red line sent a disastrous signal that U.S. threats were empty and encouraged much of the mayhem that has followed—from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Islamic State’s capture of Mosul. Mr. Rubio also opposed military strikes, but he seems to have learned from the mistake.
U.S. inaction in Syria has strengthened the worst actors there—ISIS and the Nusra Front on the one side; Hezbollah, the Assad regime, Iran and Russia on the other—while creating the refugee crisis Mr. Cruz seems to think is the gravest crisis to U.S. security. Mr. Cruz might want to stop Syrians at the Mexican border, but opposing immigration and refugees is not a foreign policy.
Several GOP candidates have laid out a far better Syria strategy than Mr. Cruz’s imitation of Mr. Obama. It starts with a much faster destruction of Islamic State in its strongholds in eastern Syria and northern Iraq through air power, the Kurdish peshmerga and what remains of the Free Syrian Army, and former General Jack Keane’s recommendation of perhaps 6,500 more U.S. ground forces than the 3,500 already there.
The effort would include creating and enforcing no-fly and no-drive zones in Syria on the model of the 1991 intervention in northern Iraq. Sustaining such safe zones is the only immediate remedy for the refugee crisis, but it can also help establish new borders in a country that no longer exists. The strategy would also require the destruction of the Assad regime’s air bases—to stop it from barrel bombing civilians and signal to Syria’s Sunni majority that our anti-ISIS campaign is not part of a U.S. conspiracy against the Sunnis.
Mr. Cruz’s Syria and NSA gambits seem intended to signal to Rand Paul and Donald Trump supporters that he should be their number two choice. Perhaps it will work as primary politics. But the positions—and opportunism—don’t speak well of his judgment as a potential Commander in Chief.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ted-cruzs-syria-dog-1449102321
Ted Cruz’s bid for the GOP’s presidential nomination has always rested on the proposition that he is the only “real Republican” in the race. So why is the junior Senator from Texas advocating a Syria policy that seems to have been drawn from President Obama’s situation room?
“In my view, we have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war,” Mr. Cruz said Monday in a Bloomberg interview. “If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neo-cons, they have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.”
Mr. Cruz’s salvo was aimed at GOP rival Marco Rubio, who has cut a strong foreign-policy profile in a race increasingly defined by security anxieties. The Florida Senator, Mr. Cruz claimed, is with Hillary Clinton in advocating a policy in Syria that would give weapons to “the so-called moderate rebels” and impose no-fly zones over parts of the country. The two “are repeating the very same mistakes they made in Libya. They’ve demonstrated they’ve learned nothing.”
This is disingenuous even by Mr. Cruz’s standards. At a rally in South Carolina last month, the Texan outlined an anti-Islamic State strategy that had two main planks: use “overwhelming air power” to bomb the group into the stone age, while arming the Kurdish peshmerga to fight it from the ground.
“[The Kurds] are right now fighting against ISIS every day, but their weapons are vastly outclassed because ISIS has American equipment they seized in Iraq,” Mr. Cruz said. As to whether the U.S. should deploy GIs, the Senator replied: “We have boots on the ground. The Kurds are our boots on the ground.”
Where have we seen this before? It sounds close to the lead-from-behind approach adopted by the Obama Administration for Libya: air strikes but no troops, a de facto alliance with moderate local forces to do the ground fighting, and no follow-up. The approach at least succeeded in ending the Gadhafi regime, but it failed as a policy because the U.S. and NATO abandonment of Libya after Gadhafi’s fall allowed jihadist groups to flourish as the country descended into chaos. If anyone hasn’t learned the lessons of Libya, it’s Mr. Cruz.
The Texan’s defensiveness might have something to do with his opposition to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephony metadata collection programs, which looks dangerous as policy and politics after the terror attacks in Paris. Mr. Cruz was a cosponsor of the legislation last summer that killed the program over Mr. Rubio’s opposition, and one of Mr. Cruz’s campaign lines is to encourage audiences to turn on their cell phones so President Obama can listen in.
This is an especially demagogic line that misrepresents what the NSA was doing—tracing suspicious patterns of who’s calling whom but not listening to random phone calls. Mr. Cruz is spreading the same myths that Edward Snowden does.
On Syria Mr. Cruz’s “no dog in the fight” line is a way of doubling down on his 2013 opposition to enforcing a chemical red line in Syria by bombing the Assad regime. That bipartisan failure to enforce President Obama’s red line sent a disastrous signal that U.S. threats were empty and encouraged much of the mayhem that has followed—from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Islamic State’s capture of Mosul. Mr. Rubio also opposed military strikes, but he seems to have learned from the mistake.
U.S. inaction in Syria has strengthened the worst actors there—ISIS and the Nusra Front on the one side; Hezbollah, the Assad regime, Iran and Russia on the other—while creating the refugee crisis Mr. Cruz seems to think is the gravest crisis to U.S. security. Mr. Cruz might want to stop Syrians at the Mexican border, but opposing immigration and refugees is not a foreign policy.
Several GOP candidates have laid out a far better Syria strategy than Mr. Cruz’s imitation of Mr. Obama. It starts with a much faster destruction of Islamic State in its strongholds in eastern Syria and northern Iraq through air power, the Kurdish peshmerga and what remains of the Free Syrian Army, and former General Jack Keane’s recommendation of perhaps 6,500 more U.S. ground forces than the 3,500 already there.
The effort would include creating and enforcing no-fly and no-drive zones in Syria on the model of the 1991 intervention in northern Iraq. Sustaining such safe zones is the only immediate remedy for the refugee crisis, but it can also help establish new borders in a country that no longer exists. The strategy would also require the destruction of the Assad regime’s air bases—to stop it from barrel bombing civilians and signal to Syria’s Sunni majority that our anti-ISIS campaign is not part of a U.S. conspiracy against the Sunnis.
Mr. Cruz’s Syria and NSA gambits seem intended to signal to Rand Paul and Donald Trump supporters that he should be their number two choice. Perhaps it will work as primary politics. But the positions—and opportunism—don’t speak well of his judgment as a potential Commander in Chief.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ted-cruzs-syria-dog-1449102321