Friendly Reminder: Republican Presidential Candidates Want Another War
As we are now less than a year away from Election 2016, and the campaigns and debating are getting more serious, this is just a friendly reminder that the major Republican presidential candidates want to start another war.
Have you had enough of war in the Middle East yet? Given that we have had three major wars in twenty-five years, two of which have lasted over a decade and are still kind of unofficially going on, I certainly have had enough.
But if a Republican is elected in 2016 we will certainly have more war.
Ted Cruz, who has repeatedly called President Obama the “world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” has vowed to rip up the Iran Nuclear Deal on his first day in office. Given that the deal pushes an Iranian bomb back fifteen years, from the six-month timeline available to Iran now, this is a seemingly counter-intuitive move. But, since Ted Cruz really does not want Iran to have a bomb, after ripping up the nuclear agreement the only option left on the table would be war given that sanctions would be reinstalled, and nothing would be ideologically stopping Iran from continuing construction on nuclear facilities.
Jeb Bush wants to start a new war in Iraq, going so far as to bring a veteran to the recent GOP Debate in a cheap political move of pandering. Jeb would be the third Bush president in a row to start a war in Iraq. I do not feel that that is a legacy we should allow the Bush family.
Ben Carson claims that military generals have told him that capturing ISIS’s land and oil is easy, and that another war in Iraq should not be hampered with rules. “Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect,’” he said on Fox News criticizing President Obama for knowing “nothing about the military.”
Marco Rubio wants to ramp up military spending, and I have written previously that Rubio is running George W. Bush’s campaign as a “compassionate family man, yet cold-hearted war machine lever-puller who will be manipulated into another decade of war.” And it’s true.
“We need to get back to funding our defenses because it is the most important thing the federal government does,” he said on Fox Business. It is hard to imagine what an increase in defense spending is necessary for other than more war.
Donald Trump has been less clear about his military ambitions, though he has in the past called the Iraq War a mistake, and, curiously, the Afghanistan War as well. [Ed. Note: While Trump has been quite vague about his military intentions, he has said we should go in with force and take the oil from Iran and ISIS.] However, if not sending troops on adventurist foreign policy wars, Trump promises a large, militarized “deportation force” that would basically declare war on illegal immigration domestically.
It is unclear at the moment what this force will look like other than Trump’s insistence that his mass deportation would be orchestrated “humanely,” but Donald Trump is currently winning the GOP primary with blatantly fascist ideology. Remember the Birther Movement in which Trump was the most vocal supporter of impeaching President Obama over ethnic mistrust of Obama’s place of birth? Remember how Trump wrote a book called “Crippled America,” and has largely scapegoated immigrants for America’s problems with wild xenophobia? Trump is using a fascist playbook, and the secret police he envisions is the beginning step of every fascist dictatorship in history.
Scary stuff from all of the major Republican presidential candidates. They want more war whether abroad or at home, and I personally want none of it.
