A hawkchicken?
Their advocacy boils down to “i-if it’s OK with you, dear” so maybe a chicken-chickenhawk.
Why, when there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize someone, must people reach for the absurd?
No - it’s not a fair characterization.
*Re-*discovered, you mean. One of my all-time favorite newspaper cartoons dates from the time of Clinton’s military operations and depicted an elephant dressed as hippie shouting “Hell no, we won’t go!”.
There was a firestorm of opposition on the Right to both the Bosnia and the Haiti operations–I remember the phrase “body bags” being bandied about–and it was even more obvious that this was simply to deprive Clinton of the boost in popularity that presidents usually enjoy when they take military action.
Of course Clinton was endlessly lambasted for having avoided the draft during Vietnam, and this is part of the framing of the issue.
So what we have here is the Right bitterly opposing low-casualty wars and attacking their CinC for not having served, then installing an absolute rogue’s gallery of chickenhawks who dragged us into and cheer-led for high-casualty wars amid an orgy of militarism, and now they’re pathetically trying to apply the same onus to a CinC proposing a no-casualty war.
As for the OP, that’s namecalling. When I was in, I think, 6th grade, it was one of the seven types of propaganda we were required to memorize.
I realize that calling the OP propaganda is also namecalling. It’s tough to avoid.
As for the substance:
John Kerry is generally hawkish. Has been for decades. He’s a good fit with his party on most issues, but not on military policy. Edward Luttwak must feel a bit vindicated this week.
As for Barack Obama, while no pacifist, he is a bit more reluctant to use force than the average US president. And his military goals are limited. But Obama is hardly unwilling to use force in dangerous circumstances. Look how often he bombs Pakistan, a nuclear power!
I support a red line policy against use of highly deadly poison gases, especially against civilians. So I think that a short Obama-style (it would not have been Kerry-style) missile campaign against Syrian tanks would have be a good move, and a far better idea than what we keep on doing in Pakistan.
I expect this is meant to be followed up by, “Well, then, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/whoever must not be a chickenhawk either!”
I’m not 100% sure what relevance this would have in 2013, but it’s my guess as to the point.
Maybe. Discredit the epithet itself by making it mean anything so it means nothing? Hmm…
On the merits of the question, though:
What he said.
Not particularly. It’s at least no more relevant to me than GWB having a father that served in the military.
I question your math skills: bombing campaign in Lybia and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Which war are you talking about? Vietnam?
Something like that. More a curiosity about how (in)consistent people might be at applying that label.
Why did you answer this one question I posed, and ignore the more substantive one?
The idea of “chickenhawks” baffles me. The real implication is that only those who have served in the military are fit for presidency, which stinks of unpleasant militarism.
I think a better definition, if it helps clarify it, is “someone who will ask other people to offer their lives for a purpose he wouldn’t offer his *own *life for”.
We have a winner!
One’s service in the military or lack thereof is in no means any indicator of one’s fitness for public office nor of one’s right to render opinions on public policy.
Losing his chemical weapons (maybe not all of them) hurts him a lot less than losing his airstrips and rocket batteries and such. Also it would seem to immunize him against any future intervention.
Simply staying in power would be a victory for him, even if it’s by the simple ruse of pretending to have given up his means of terrorizing his people.
I’m not sure about the second part, but the first party doesn’t really matter- the stated goal is to eliminate his ability to use chemical weapons, and giving them up without military action achieves that. We’ve already stated we’re not out for regime change. If Assad actually gives up his chemical weapons peacefully, then that’s a big win for the US (and Russia)… even if there were some real-time diplomatic blunders, in ten years (if it works out this way) what will be remembered is that the US threatened strikes and Assad gave up his chemical weapons to avoid the strikes.
The goal is to punish him for using chemical weapons–to reduce the likelihood that he or other despots will choose to use chemical weapons in future.
I do not believe that either diplomacy or limited military action can literally eliminate his ability to use chemical weapons. Samantha Power just says strikes would “degrade Assad’s capacity to deliver” such. That is, by taking out general military infrastructure and hardware. Which, she goes on to say, obviously hurts his conventional power too.
If Assad can avert that, by token gestures of compliance with an unverifiable agreement on chemicals, he stands a greater chance of holding on to power.
That’s part of it, and giving them up is not as much “punishment”, I suppose, as air strikes. But I think the positive of a peaceful (besides, of course, the civil war) solution makes this course of action better. One of those compromises that actually helps all sides (except, perhaps, the rebels).
Again- (assuming he actually gives up the weapons) the US doesn’t seem to have any interest in regime change, so this doesn’t really matter.
Agreed, except I’m sure veterans of earlier wars–especially the few remaining from Korea and World War II–find it annoying that we would call Iraq and Afghanistan high casualty wars.
Maybe not to you. But it would certainly be a victory for Assad.
If you want to punish Assad for using chemical weapons, that means either killing him or putting him on trial at the Hague. Neither of those two things can happen without an invasion of Syria.
So do you want an invasion of Syria, yes or no?