Actual Policy Debate

Regime change necessary for victory

This post is not mostly about Trump.   It is more important than Trump.

But I get it.   Policy is boring and Trump is interesting.  Policy is complicated.  But our lives may depend on getting policy right, and there is an election to decide who gets to make the policy.   So I am going ahead with this.

Actual policy disagreements that were revealed in the Democratic and Republican debates last week.    What do we do about Assad?

In the Democratic debate Hillary Clinton revealed herself to be more of an interventionist than Sanders.   Sanders noted it and reported it, explaining politely to the audience that there was a legitimate difference of opinion being revealed here.  Hillary said--and Sanders reiterated--that Hillary's basic instinct is to do diplomacy in the context of military action and to have supported regime change.   She supported "regime change" in the form of deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya and now Assad in Syria.   Deposing a strong secular dictator runs the risk of leaving a potentially ungovernable country, a void into which ISIS can step in.   Hillary says that Syrian president Assad has been so murderous of his own people and is so closely tied to another American enemy, Iran, and has such a tenuous grasp on legitimacy that he must be removed even though he perhaps provide some governmental order as an alternative to ISIS.    Her goal, expressed in the Democratic debate, is to fight both ISIS and Assad simultaneously.  There can be no real order, she said, unless Assad is gone.

Sanders and O'Malley say that stopping ISIS comes first, even if it means we support a corrupt form of order in the form of Assad because although Assad is bad he is still the only real alternative to ISIS.  Without Assad there is no glue of legitimacy other than an Islamist organizing principle:  ISIS.   Better to accept Assad than ISIS.

Victory, then regime change

In the Republican debate every Republican was eager to show how hawkish they are, how firm, how resolute, how willing they are to justify collateral damage, how Putin-like they can be.  They varied a little on the volume setting on anger and bellicosity, but the shakeout on policy turned out not to be linked to the strength of their language.    This makes things confusing and unintuitive.   Kasich is mild mannered as he says we should "punch the Soviets in the nose."    But others sounded fierce.  Christie was insistent he would shoot down Russian airplanes because he is not a "feckless weakling" and Ted Cruz spoke of carpet bombing whole cities to kill a few ISIS fighters hiding within them, and they sounded angry and tough when they said it.   But they are on opposites sides of the issue on regime change and whether it is a necessary evil to support a secular dictator strong man so that there is non-ISIS order in place.   Let me chart it.

Intervene and depose bad secular strong man along with fighting ISIS  (the Hillary position):
Rubio, Christie, and Kasich.  

Katich put it this way:  'Assad is aligned with Iran and Russia. He has to go."

The other view, that fighting ISIS comes first, so we must support Assad, who creates some order around which anti-ISIS forces can coalesce, and in general America may need to settle for secular order by a corrupt leader  (the Sanders/O'Malley position, and now Obama, too):  Trump, Cruz, and Paul

Paul put it this way  "Topple Assad. And then there will be chaos, and I think ISIS will then be in charge of Syria."   

Trump noted that in World War Two we allied with Stalin, arguably exactly as evil and murderous as Hitler, in order to stop Nazi Germany and said that the same policy may apply.   "We have to do one thing at a time."

None of these positions are "dovish".   No one wants simply to withdraw from the Middle East.   The Obama position is essentially this one now, since the Russians have stepped into Syria, making reluctant common cause with Assad because we have no other choice.   No Republican would say aloud that they share a position with Obama, even when they are doing so.     Every candidate of both parties agree the situation is a tangled mess, everyone agrees that Assad is terrible.  Everyone is suspicious of the Russians.   But some candidates are happier working with the Russians and Assad than others and it doesn't divide on partisan lines.

For now the policy is to work with the Russians and to hope the Assad-controlled area grows back at the expense of ISIS, while simultaneously voicing rhetoric condemning the tools of our own policy.   So viewers cannot just listen to tone and get the gist of things.   The actual policy is hidden in the finer print.

If you want to read a more detailed examination of some of the same issues, look at this post by a college classmate, Jeffrey Laurenti:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-laurenti/un-vote-candidates-debate_b_8865098.html