The view from TrumpWorld was that there would be no second ballot, so all of that county convention stuff was unnecessary. In a number of key states, Trump laid off most or all of his staff almost immediately after the voting was over. Doing so was not an inadvertent mistake; it was a strategic decision.
.. Trump even read the AIPAC address from a prepared text, an apparent first for him. Those in his extended circle who had long wanted to see a more presidential Trump cheered. It was, all in all, a sorta statesmanlike performance, providing at least some evidence to back up Trump’s claim that he could become “presidential” any time he wanted.
.. The next morning brought the Brussels terrorist attacks. Trump’s tough reaction to a previous European terrorist incident, in Paris last November, undoubtedly strengthened his appeal to GOP voters. Brussels could have done the same, especially since President Obama was visiting Cuba, appearing unconcerned during a high-profile trip to a baseball game, while Europe suffered.
It was a big chance for Trump to play President Trump. So what did he do, the very next day? He used Twitter to attack Heidi Cruz, not only changing the subject of the campaign but also reinforcing earlier charges that he does not respect women — all while alienating Republican primary voters at the very moment some of them were coming around to the idea of Trump the nominee.
.. a #NeverTrump activist told me via email. “If Trump had really made the ‘strategic pivot’ that some of his apologists claim he is capable of for the general, he would have done it after his March 15 wins and dispatching of Rubio. Instead, he continued the same controversy-stoking, cable-news baiting behavior as before, creating big questions about his electability and buying time for his opponents to demonstrate that there is a path to beating him.”
The Legacy of Obama’s ‘Worst Mistake’
The Libya intervention marked the third time in a decade that Washington embraced regime change and then failed to plan for the consequences. In 2001, the United States toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan but gave little thought about how to stabilize the country. In a memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld early in that campaign, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith argued that Washington “should not allow concerns about stability to paralyze U.S. efforts to oust the Taliban leadership. … Nation-building is not our key strategic goal.”
.. Symbolizing the lack of concern for rebuilding the country, Bush’s pick for Garner’s successor was L. Paul Bremer—a man Bush had never met, who wasn’t an expert on Iraq or post-conflict reconstruction, and didn’t speak Arabic.
.. It was a cheap war for the United States at just $1.1 billion. But these days, it seems, a billion dollars buys you a shit show. Libya could end up looking like, in the wordsof British special envoy Jonathan Powell, “Somalia on the Mediterranean.”
.. We might be able to explain a one-off failure in terms of allies screwing up. But three times in a decade suggests a deeper pattern in the American way of war.
.. In the American mind, there are good wars: campaigns to overthrow a despot, with the model being World War II. And there are bad wars: nation-building missions to stabilize a foreign country, including peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. For example, the U.S. military has traditionally seen its core mission as fighting conventional wars against foreign dictators, and dismissed stabilization missions as “military operations other than war,” or Mootwa. Back in the 1990s, the chairman of the joint chiefs reportedly said, “Real men don’t do Mootwa.” At the public level, wars against foreign dictators are consistently far more popular than nation-building operations.
.. When I researched my book How We Fight, I found that Americans embraced wars for regime change but hated dealing with the messy consequences going back as far as the Civil War and southern reconstruction.
.. But many Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, and Australians see peacekeeping as a core military task. Japan will only send its forces outside the homeland for peacekeeping missions in places like Cambodia and Mozambique. In a poll in 1995, Canadians said their country’s top contribution to the world was peacekeeping
.. So why do Americans fight this way? The practice partly reflects the country’s success at winning interstate wars versus its struggles at nation-building and counterinsurgency. People naturally want to stick to what they’re good at.
.. Americans often believe that malevolent actors repress a freedom-living people: Get rid of the evildoers and liberty can reign.
.. And so America goes to war with an extremely short-term mindset, quickly toppling the bad guys but failing to prepare for the later challenges to come. All eyes are on smiting the oppressor because this is the kind of war people want to fight. The problem is that societies like Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan are deeply traumatized by years of dictatorship, sectarian division, or civil war. Thomas Jefferson is not going to suddenly pop up when the wicked rulers are dispatched.
How the Republican establishment learned to shirk responsibility
The “establishment” was the institutions of liberalism — the media (especially The New York Times), the universities, the courts. We, by contrast, were outsiders, training low-caliber arms fire at the high, fortified walls protecting the liberals who really wielded power.
The fact that the magazine’s editor in chief advised George W. Bush prior to his run for the White House and then occasionally visited the president of the United States in the Oval Office was irrelevant. So was the fact that one of Bush’s senior advisors (Peter Wehner, who now writes regular op-eds for the Times) sent frequent faxes to our offices giving the administration’s spin on events — spin that not infrequently made its way, uncredited, into the editor in chief’s widely read monthly column in the magazine.
.. the Republican counter-establishment unanimously supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and actively excommunicated the few on the right who dared to dissent from the party line.
If there was a mea culpa for this, I missed it.