Because they're not conservative, they're bloodthirsty.
Presumably they're waiting to see if Wossname on Fox saying that Obama is compromising US independence by involving NATO has legs before they join in.
1 gets it right. They only support a president's control over war and peace if the president chooses war.
Ron Paul protested .
Last week the Obama Administration took the United States to war against Libya without bothering to notify Congress, much less obtain a Constitutionally-mandated declaration of war. ...
5
Rand Paul also protested .
Today, Sen. Rand Paul introduced a sense of the Senate resolution to bill S.493, which quotes President Obama's own words as a candidate in 2007 where he stated that: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. ...
I don't care what or how Republicans think.
4,5: It's true that Ron and Rand aren't mindlessly pro-war, but they can get away with it because they want to destroy the U.S. economy. I think it's in the Republican bylaws somewhere that you can't be a party member in good standing without indulging in cartoon villainy.
Walter B. Jones Rep. from North Carolina opposed it. He's had an interesting road on the war powers issue--he was strongly for Iraq initially and was one of the co-sponsors of the "Freedom Fries" name change but seemed to have been genuinely upset by the extent of the lies and has been pretty consistent on it since ~2005 including sponsoring legislation intended to curtail any attacks on Iran (I know it sounds like a joke).
But overall LB is right. Boehner, for instance, only put out a mild statement saying Congress should be "consulted" and kept better informed.
I may be remembering wrong, but I think Clinton took a lot more shit over Kosovo.
9: You are not wrong. The Neocons supported him because that's their nature, but there were a few voices on the mainstream left and a lot on the right who opposed it. The whole thing was tainted heavily by the conspiracy theorizing bullshit that dogged Clinton throughout his presidency, with a number of prominent people hinting or saying outright that it was all a cynical ploy to distract the country, but there was some principled opposition on the right (I seem to recall Pat Buchanan actually saying some things that made sense but I might have been high, drunk, or crazy at the time).
It's worth noting that since then the right has gotten even wackier, nastier, more authoritarian, and more imperialist.
I seem to recall Pat Buchanan actually saying some things that made sense
Buchanan was (is?) an old fashioned isolationist. Stopped clock.
Since Buchanan's isolationism tends to lead him into opposing wars, which is generally the right thing to do, I'd say more of a stopped calendar than a stopped clock.
pace dsquared and the various conspiracy-mongers of WJC's presidency, I am willing to revise and extend my remarks at 1 to:
Because they're not conservative, they're bloodthirsty (mostly).
Buchanan isn't an idiot, he's a fascist; the Republicans have a big tent.
OP: Of all the principles to get consistent about, why this one?
Two words: Defense. Contractors.
13: Clinton was more than 10 years ago. That was back in the days when neocons didn't absolutely own U.S. foreign policy. I think No. 1, at least as regards 2011, need not be amended.
Buchanan isn't an idiot, he's a fascist
And yet, aside from immigration policy, I agree with him on foreign policy pretty much all down the line.
even though it's motivated by jew-hatin' somehow, his "let's not get in wars in the middle east" policies are surprisingly sound.
I actually try to avoid learning what Buchanan thinks about anything, because I'd be tempted to reflexively disagree, and as the both of you say, that's not always a safe bet.
Buchanan isn't an idiot, he's a fascist
The idea that you have to be a brainless thug to be a fascist is a dangerously widespread misconception. D'Annunzio had about three brains, all of them twisted. Salazar was an extremely effective finance minister. Just because they can use big words and don't have LOVE and HATE tattooed on their knuckles doesn't mean they're not fascists.
I would have thought the obvious reason for this is that the GOP is nervously eyeing the tea party base, the tea party base hates muslims, libya is full of muslims, ergo coming out against bombing muslims is political suicide.
If it's any comfort, it probably bothers them that Obama also wants to bomb muslims.
"That's our thing! That we do! We bomb muslims, and he's co-opting our thing!"
22, 23: If they were slightly more sophisticated they would argue that Obama is helping Al-Qaeda by bombing Qadaffi, an archenemy of Al Qaeda, but apparently that would require a slightly more nuanced understanding of the muslim world.
21: I don't think that's right. I think elected Republican officials actually love war, the way they love the rich. The neocons have completely won the policy argument. It's not like they're in a monogamous relationship with the rich -- they can love more than one thing.
Depends what you mean by serious. I've seen plenty of commentary from both Republican politicians and from the blogosphere about how it's the latest demonstration of Obama's overthrow of the constitution, and others have made the slightly subtler jibe that he'd rather consult foreigners than Congress, but they're still not going to do shit about it. Because they don't want a future Democratic Congress impeding a future Republican president's ability to bomb Arabs unilaterally.
Yeah, it's not as if there's been literally no pushback on this front, but nothing that sounds as if it's going to lead to any sort of consequential political action. Ron Paul and Rand Paul are about as representative of the Republican mainstream on this as Dennis Kucinich is of the Democrats generally.
Meanwhile, the French deployed helicopter gunships in Abidjan yesterday, which might seem sort of attention-grabbing if there weren't a zillion other news cycles running right now.
Was there any public conversation at all about the transition from "no-fly zone", which I understood to mean "We'll shoot down any Libyan planes that take off, but other than that we're not taking any aggressive action" to airstrikes? That happened instantly, and without any public justification I noticed.
"No-fly zone" starts with destroying all defense and tracking systems. I'm not sure when that morphed into aerially attacking ground forces.
I'm not sure when that morphed into aerially attacking ground forces.
Before the papers were even signed would be my guess.
29: To the extent that the entire UN mission right now in Libya is ostensibly "to protect civilians", I've heard talk of needing a "no-drive zone". But I can't recall anyone mounting a spirited case for doing so. We, er, well NATO just sort of did it, as far as I can tell.
Doesn't the UNSCR say 'all necessary measures ... to protect' caveated with 'no occupation force'? That'd license the release of anything that can be released from a boat or a plane.
Sure, if the plan going in were to go to the limits of the resolution. That's just not how it was getting talked about beforehand.
oh for fucks sake buchannan isn't a fascist. he is a feudalist.
was the change from isolationist to blood-on-the-fangs caused by the change from midwest to dixie as the center of the GOP?
also: i think people are mistakenly thinking that the GOP dislikes obama/romney/wellpointcare. I think they don't like. It was the original support that was bs (not including romney. obviously he has no principles. i bet he'd even raise taxes on the rich of that was poltically beneficial.)
"the GOP dislike of obama/romney/wellpointecare is fake
I do think the idea that 'conservative principles'/Republicanism entails permanent war forever is reasonably new--really, a post-9/11 thing. Remember back when a Republican governor won the presidential nomination, and then the presidency, promising a humble foreign policy?
The past is a foreign country.
Or rather: 'permanent war forever' has dominated American foreign policy since WW2, but there was a period between '89 and '01 when the post-cold-war version had yet to become either a respectable ideology or have much partisan valence.
39: It's like you don't even believe that 9/11 changed *everything*.
39: And some of the posture in that debate was a tactic of linking Gore to Clinton via Kosovo, but yes these things do change a bit.
Most of the post-1992, pre-2001 Republican reluctance to get into wars (to the extent it wasn't just Clinton hatred) was an antipathy to the UN and to humanitarian causes generally that weren't seen as "warlike" enough. There was no revulsion at bombing or attacking folks considered to be our "enemies" generally, as the Republicans would have had to oppose St. Ronnie's bombings of Tripoli or interventions in the Persian Gulf.
43: Well, yes, but the point is, even that sort of reluctance has almost entirely disappeared, except in the sort of self-consciously isolationist posture of Paul jr & sr. Now that we're engaged in a civilizational struggle against islamofascis-whateverism, the idea that we only have specific enemies is seems like something from ... well, from a previous century.
I seem to recall a lot of desperate grasping from the right in the 1990s for a new scary foreign devil to replace the Russians -- a lot of China talk, and IIRC a fair amount of "Clinton is in bed with the Chinese" conspiracy theories. Then 9/11 happened, and they found their scary foreigners. You could almost hear the sigh of relief.
It was a common Republican arguing point in the 70s-80s to say that Republicans don't get the US into wars. WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam were all entered into by Democratic presidents. You have to admit WWI, Korea and Vietnam were some stupid ass wars.
This was an interesting book on the cold war:
The US picks and chooses among situations to intervene into. Once we do intervene we get stuck because it becomes a matter of national prestige.
WWI was certainly stupid generally, but tipping a drawn out draw in favor of the less nasty side seems plausibly defensible.
45 - The saber-rattling with China over the spy plane they downed in 2001 seems to have completely vanished down the memory hole.
45: Yes, the PNAC site has a lot of the saber-rattling material still available. Here are some excerpts from a rather notorious Op-Ed by Robert Kagan that appeared in the New York Times in 1999 after the Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade.
NATO's accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade has revealed the fallacy at the core of the Clinton Administration's China policy. While Administration officials continue to yearn for a "strategic partnership" with Beijing, China's leaders make no effort to conceal the fact they consider the United States an enemy -- or, more precisely, the enemy....
Would that we in the United States were as clear-sighted. The Administration believes that if we don't treat China as an enemy, it won't become one. Those who recommend a tougher approach, those who call for containing China's ambitions, are usually accused of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But what if the prophecy has already been fulfilled? When the smoke clears from this latest and most revealing crisis, sober Americans may want to start taking the emerging confrontation as seriously as the Chinese do.
"The right seems to sincerely believe that whether or not to take the country into a new war properly should be the decision of the President, and to stand by that belief even when it's a President they don't approve of. Of all the principles to get consistent about, why this one?"
Because their principle is 'war'. It occasionally causes minor difficulties (e.g., Kosovo), but usually the sheer mess of most wars provides the right with ample opportunity to make hay out of it, even when the opposing president is running it.