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Candidates Mull the Next War
Highllighted in red are the stances that the various candidates have taken about combating ISIS
Republican Rivals Skirt Specifics on Plans to Fight ISIS
By PATRICK HEALY and ASHLEY PARKERMAY 23, 2015
Lindsey Graham and Rick Santorum want to deploy 10,000 American troops in Iraq as part of a coalition with Arab nations against Islamic State militants, and will settle for nothing less than “destroying the caliphate,” in Mr. Graham’s words.
Jeb Bush believes those additional American soldiers would have prevented the Islamic State from gathering strength in recent years. But an American-led force now? “I don’t think that will work,” he said in an interview Friday, his latest sign of wariness at the prospect of becoming the third President Bush to dispatch ground troops to the Middle East.
Marco Rubio describes his strategy against the Islamic State with a line from the action movie “Taken” — “we will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you” — yet he is more inclined to provide “the most devastating air support possible” rather than send in American troops. Scott Walker and Rick Perry are more open to a combat mission, while Rand Paul wants boots on the ground — as long as they are “Arab boots on the ground.”
As President Obama grapples with the unnerving territorial gains of the Islamic State last week, the Republicans eyeing the White House are struggling to put forward strategies of their own. The most detailed ideas have come from Mr. Graham, a United States senator from South Carolina who is on the Armed Services Committee, yet he ranks so low in polls that it is unclear if he will qualify to participate in the coming candidate debates. Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, and Mr. Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, draw more support from voters at this point, yet seem less sure of their war footing, saying they would rely on guidance from military advisers.
Based on recent interviews with several declared and likely candidates, as well as their foreign policy speeches and off-the-cuff remarks, a picture emerges of a Republican field that sounds both hawkish and hesitant about fighting the Islamic State — especially before its warriors find ways to bring the fight to American soil, a threat that Mr. Bush, Mr. Walker and Mr. Graham foresee. (Those three men, as well as Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, and Mr. Perry, a former governor of Texas, plan to announce their presidential intentions soon.)
Yet most of the Republicans are also reluctant and even evasive when it comes to laying out detailed plans, preferring instead to criticize Mr. Obama’s war strategy.
The fallout from the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has cast a specter over Republicans as they contemplate new deployments there, restraining some of them while tripping up others. Several say they favor some muscular policies, such as intensifying airstrikes (Mr. Rubio, Mr. Graham, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas) and providing weapons to Kurdish fighters (Mr. Graham, Mr. Cruz, Mr. Huckabee and Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard). But most have not been bold about trying to sell these ideas to voters.
Putting forward a plan of attack carries sizable risks for the Republicans. While the hopefuls might win votes in the 2016 primaries with aggressive postures against the Islamic State, they could also turn off some independent and war-weary voters whose support will be needed in the 2016 general election.
At the same time, no one wants to get ahead of events in the Middle East over the next eight months, before the first ballots are cast in Iowa and New Hampshire. Publicly committing to an American ground presence this far in advance poses hazards: Such a candidate, if elected, would become a war president immediately upon taking office in January 2017 and would be obliged to face the challenges of the Islamic State (assuming the fight were still underway) even if other pressing matters emerged, like the economy or a nuclear Iran.
Mr. Bush is among the most elusive. At times he sounds bellicose: “Restrain them, tighten the noose, and then taking them out is the strategy” against the Islamic State, he said in February. The next month he endorsed creating “a protected zone in northeast Syria where you could allow for an army to be built, both a Syrian free army and international soldiers with air power from the United States.” Yet Mr. Bush has not laid out substantive details for such aggressive actions.
At other times, he sounds uncertain: He recently floundered for days about whether he would have invaded Iraq in 2003 — and then found himself defending President George W. Bush, his brother, from a college student’s charge that he “created” the Islamic State by disbanding Saddam Hussein’s powerful army.
As for the role of American ground troops in the Middle East, Mr. Bush was more ambiguous than adamant last week.
“Whether we need more than 3,000, which is what we have now, I would base that on what the military advisers say,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday in New Hampshire. On Friday, after a speech in Oklahoma City, he said former military officials had told him that American forces “should embed in the Iraqi military.”
“The Canadians and French do,” he continued, “but we’re prohibited. That’s just remarkable.”
Mr. Rubio said in an interview that as part of a “strategic overhaul,” he would consider sending American special forces to work with Iraqi troops to weaken the Islamic State’s recruitment effort by “demoralizing them, embarrassing them, humiliating them through strategic and high-profile defeats.”
Some Republicans who have tended to be vague, like Mr. Walker, still lack expertise on foreign affairs. Mr. Walker said in an interview on Thursday that he would not “rule anything out” in battling the Islamic State and that he would allow American soldiers to act as so-called spotters near combat lines in Iraq to call in highly specific coordinates for airstrikes. (Several Republicans are open to this; the Obama administration has relied mostly on Iraqi and Canadian forces.)
“We need to empower the forces and individuals we have there connected to the military to more fully engage,” said Mr. Walker, who in the past has compared the Islamic State to “a virus in the computer” that needs to be wiped out in the Middle East before it spreads to the United States.
Several Republicans believe that the videotaped beheadings by Islamic State militants were a tipping point for many voters. In the view of advisers to these presidential hopefuls, the butchery elevated the Islamic State into a source of fear for Americans and turned the acronym ISIS into a widely recognized name — much like Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The executions of hostages of different faiths in Syria, Egypt and Libya have been mentioned by voters at town-hall-style meetings and private fund-raisers for Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, Mr. Walker and others this spring.
As a result, a grim outlook prevails: A New York Times/CBS News poll this month found that 64 percent of respondents said the American military fight against ISIS was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly.” Eight in 10 Republicans held these views, as did half of the Democrats surveyed. (At the same time, fewer than 20 percent of Republicans and Democrats said foreign policy would matter more than domestic issues in deciding how to vote for president.)
Rather than make military commitments, most of the presidential contenders have pledged to pursue diplomatic options to counter the Islamic State. Democrats have, too: Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that Iraqi soldiers had to lead the fight against the Islamic State, adding that “there is no role whatsoever for American soldiers on the ground to go back, other than in the capacity as trainers and advisers.” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has ruled out American combat forces.
And even though many of the Republicans’ foreign policy advisers believe the United States must ultimately take a leading role in a coalition against the Islamic State, most in the 2016 field, for now, are taking the relatively safe route of expounding on the need for stronger alliances with Arab nations.
“When allies lose confidence in us, they take matters into their own hands,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said last week. “I think it’s better for America to extend a helping hand — and help manage events.”
Mr. Christie’s language, including calling for “rolling back the shadow of ISIS,” was less loaded than that of many other Republicans. On Thursday, for instance, Mr. Santorum declared, “If ISIS wants to bring back a seventh-century version of Islam, then we need to load up our bombers and bomb them back into the seventh century, where they belong.”
But like many of his rivals, Mr. Santorum left many of the precise details and potential fallout of that declaration largely unaddressed.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.