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October 30 - November 14, 2018
Illegal immigration was condemned for taxing government services, harming local communities, and hurting American workers.
The same politicians and intellectuals who had once acknowledged a need to enforce the border and protect workers now disavowed their old views and suggested those who still held them were racist.
The Democratic Party had given up trying to represent the working class, in favor of investors and welfare recipients—and by 2016, illegal immigrants.
Twenty years after Bill Clinton told Americans they had the right to be upset about illegal immigration, his wife scolded the country for enforcing border controls.
Once Trump won, it was Ryan’s job to translate the new president’s campaign promises into workable legislation. Unfortunately for Trump and the voters who supported him, Ryan had no intention of doing that.
“This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation.”
For all his failings, Carter made good on his promise to keep U.S. troops out of harm’s way. Depending on how you measure it, Carter may have been the only president in American history not to preside over a war. Only eight American servicemen
died in action during his administration, killed accidentally during a failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran.
On an unexceptional June morning in 1914, a second-string Austrian nobleman was murdered by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo. In response, Austria prepared to attack Serbia. Russia in turn decided to defend Serbia, Germany supported its ally Austria, France supported Russia, Great Britain somehow became involved, and soon a small war over a single nobleman’s death had sucked in every European great power.
would be home before the leaves fell from the trees. Instead, the continent was shredded by four years of mass killing. More than 16 million people died.
By the time World War I ended, four great empires with centuries-old monarchies had been destroyed. Wholly invented countries had risen in their place.
Republicans accused liberals of being effectively pro-Soviet, and some of them were. Yet decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm Muslim extremists waging a holy war in Southwest Asia. Both Osama bin Laden and Taliban founder Mohammed Omar got their first taste of warfare in the Afghan mujahideen.
America had played a leading role in training its own enemies,
If there’s a single lesson of the Iraq War, it’s that chaos is worse than dictatorship.
The establishment applauded. Obama’s overthrow of the Gaddafi government, declared the New York Times, was “an historic victory for the people of Libya who, with NATO’s help, transformed their country from an
international pariah into a nation with the potential to become a productive partner with the West.”
The triumphant tone evokes another famous Times dispatch, from Cambodia in April 1975. The headline: “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.” That story ran in the paper four days before the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh an...
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Obama’s destruction of Gaddafi simply created a new failed state.
beyond the boundaries of the Bush years. After two terms, Obama had ordered the killing of nearly four thousand people by drone attacks, most of them in “non-battlefield” areas like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Some of the people killed were American citizens, struck down as “enemy combatants” despite being far away from U.S. troops, in countries the United States was not at war with.
Syrian president Bashar Assad was undoubtedly a cruel, authoritarian figure, but he also was not a clear threat to the United States, and it was impossible to know who might replace him should he fall.
On Election Day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of U.S. politics, American troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations.
Barack Obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
Donald Trump gave speech after speech attacking the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the idea of nation building more broadly. Hillary Clinton was still defending the decision to kill Gaddafi.
Trump argued it would be in America’s interest to make common cause with the Russian government
when possible, especially in the fight against Islamic extremism. Liberals, who for decades defended Russia when it was run by the Soviets, dismissed the idea out of han...
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how did we know for certain the Syrian government ordered the chemical attack? Didn’t the Syrian rebels have chemical weapons, too? Couldn’t the decision have been the work of underlings rather than top commanders?
In 1965, liberals viewed the bombing of North Vietnam as a moral atrocity. Thirty years later, they applauded Bill Clinton’s bombing of Bosnia as a means of protecting the rights of a vulnerable minority group, the local Muslim population.
Want to save children? Bomb their country.
When moral certainty meets indifference to detail, anything can happen. You can overthrow a secular dictator, watch as he’s replaced by bloodthirsty religious nuts who make everything worse, and then attempt the very same thing somewhere else, expecting different results. And never feel bad about it.
The signature characteristic of America’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. No matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about
“We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq War was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but
true.
Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that.
Kristol came to Washington in the mid-1980s to work for the Reagan administration, after several years of teaching at Harvard. In 1995, he founded the Weekly Standard. I joined the Standard as a reporter that year, about a month before the magazine launched, and stayed until early 2001.
A lot of what Buchanan predicted in the 1990s turned out to be true.
One of the few things Paul and Buchanan had in common was opposition to more war in the Middle East.
Kristol believed the United States
should be bombing and invading countries throug...
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In 1998, Kristol, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Kagan, signed a letter to Clinton calling for “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”
In November 2001, Kristol and Kagan wrote a piece in the Weekly Standard alleging that Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was
actively collaborating with Saddam’s intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.
No evidence was ever found tying Iraq to the 9/11 attacks.
Kristol had no such concerns. He mocked those who did. “If we want to be popular in the Arab world, we should liberate the people of Iraq from Saddam,” he said during a Fox News appearance in April 2002. In November 2002, he predicted that removing Saddam would have a positive “chain reaction” effect across the Middle East. The following February, he declared that “if we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world . . . and I think we will be respected around the world.”
As U.S. troops entered the country, Kristol told C-SPAN, “This is going to be a two-month war, not an eight-year war.”
To those concerned about the possibility of ethnic conflict within Iraq, Kristol waved his hand. “There has been a certain amount of pop sociology,” he explained a month after the invasion, “that the Shi’a can’t get along with the Sunni. There’s almost no evidence of that at
all.” It’s a measure of how little experts in Washington actually know that Kristol kept getting invited to speak as an authority on the Middle East. No evidence the Shia and Sunnis might fight each other in Iraq? Your averag...
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Time has proved Kristol spectacularly wrong on Iraq,
Kristol lapsed into a kind of public nervous breakdown, once coming close to tears on television,
