I believe that the next election, 2016, will be primarily a foreign policy election….I know I have said all this before……but all indications and events are sealing it in stone….
The US is facing ISIS, Russia, China and points too numerous to type here….my fingers get tired just thinking about how many countries I could name…..
Clinton will be a war hawk…..I do not care how much she tries to push back from the label….she will be what she is….a war hawk. Bernie…I am not sure how he feels about the whole thing….I know he will be anti-war and that will defeat him with American voters…..O’Malley? Who cares?
Now the GOP candidates……They all will be war hawks…..so if you are a voter who cares about foreign policy then any candidate will do….that is if your answer to every situation is war….
But let us talk about a couple of the more “popular” of the GOP dudes…..Bush and Carson….
Let’s begin with a “not too popular” Jeb Bush……
In a speech at The Citadel, Jeb Bush on Wednesday called for more ground troops to combat the “brutal savagery” of ISIL, and in the aftermath of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, issued a clarion call for new American leadership abroad.
Speaking to more than 100 cadets inside Mark Clark Hall, Bush said that the U.S. and its NATO allies should not delay in taking further action to stop the spread of Islamic State across Iraq and Syria. “Militarily, we need to intensify our efforts in the air – and on the ground,” Bush said. “While air power is essential, it alone cannot bring the results we seek. The United States – in conjunction with our NATO allies and more Arab partners – will need to increase our presence on the ground.”
Bush cautioned that the scope of ground forces should be based on the recommendations of military generals and said that the bulk of them “need to come from local forces that we have built workable relationships with.”
(Politico)
That should remove any doubt about his intentions regarding war….but there is something I need to point out…..He said……”the scope of ground forces should be based on the recommendations of military generals…….”
That is an interesting thing to say when generals are making it clear what they think about more troops for the Middle East…..
They warn military gains quickly evaporate in the absence of political and diplomatic moves to sustain those gains, and see a similar expectation of a sweeping military victory without any real moves to sustain it coming up once again.
(Antiwar.com)
Seems generals are not on the same page as Bush….but that can be remedied….replace the generals with more “yes men”….
Shall we take a look at a on and off front runner for the GOP nomination….Ben Carson?
He has once again slipped behind Trump….time for him to make another platitude that will fire up his support…..but in the meantime some of his team have reservations about the candidate……
Ben Carson is finding it very difficult to get a grasp of foreign policy, according to at least one of the advisers that have been trying to explain it to him. “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” former CIA agent Duane R. Clarridge, who has been advising the candidate on terrorism and national security, tells the New York Times. Clarridge and top Carson adviser Armstrong Williams say they were frustrated by the candidate’s appearance on Fox News Sunday, where he failed to name the allies he would contact first for an anti-ISIS coalition.
Clarridge tells the Times that Carson’s claim during last week’s debate that the Chinese are in Syria appears to have come from a US intelligence source in Iraq who “overleaped.” After the unusually frank interview with the 83-year-old Clarridge appeared, a Carson campaign spokesman told Business Insider that it was an “affront to good journalistic practices” for the Times to “take advantage of an elderly gentleman,” adding that the candidate has more than a dozen foreign policy advisers and receives daily briefings. The Times countered that it was “Williams who recommended that we talk to Mr. Clarridge and described Mr. Clarridge as a ‘mentor’ to Mr. Carson on foreign policy.”
He has a dozen foreign policy advisers and gets daily briefings and he still cannot get it right……if I were a Carson supporter I would have concerns over his lack of knowledge about the single most important issue for 2016…..but then again….I am NOT a supporter.
A writer for the “American Conservative”, Daniel Larison, has put it best……
The bigger problem that Carson’s struggles point to is that almost all of the Republican candidates are woefully unprepared and lacking in foreign policy experience, and the few that have some experience don’t have very much. Carson’s lack of preparation on foreign policy is the most obvious in the field, but most of his competitors have the same weakness. That is what happens when a party simultaneously equates hard-line rhetoric with “expertise” and dismisses foreign policy experience as unnecessary for its presidential candidates.
That leaves the Donald whose big idea is exactly what we are doing now…..”bomb the sh*t out of them”……what can I say…..when in doubt ……state the obvious!
Once again the American citizen is being herded into a rush to war…..the latest poll after the Paris attacks show that Americans support the use of US Troops by 65%…..this should feed the political rhetoric until the next attack….and that GOP rhetoric is starting to sound familiar…..think back 80 years.
