Peter Beinart at
The Atlantic writes
Where Are the Anti-War Democrats on Iran?
More than a decade after the invasion of Iraq, despite the disasters that American military intervention has brought, there is still a culture of impunity for Democratic politicians who defy their party’s voters on questions of war and peace. Of the 29 Democratic senators who voted for the Iraq War, only one, Joe Lieberman, faced a serious primary challenge. Yes, Hillary Clinton’s Iraq vote helped doom her presidential chances in 2008. But after questioning her foreign policy judgment during the campaign, Barack Obama named her secretary of state, where she joined Vice President Joe Biden, who had also backed the war, and was succeeded by John Kerry, who had too. Since her time as Secretary of State, Clinton has left little doubt that she remains more hawkish than both Obama and most Democratic voters. Yet it looks unlikely an anti-war candidate will challenge her in the 2016 primaries.
There are several reasons for all this. It’s partly because when it comes to foreign policy, conservative donors are more single-minded than liberal ones. Every Republican politician knows that Adelson conditions his checks on their Iran vote. Even dovish Democratic donors, by contrast, generally care about issues like abortion, gay marriage, gun control and climate change, which makes them more willing to donate to Schumer or Clinton despite their differences on Iran.
It’s also notoriously hard to mobilize Americans against wars until those wars begin. The anti-Vietnam movement didn’t become a force inside the national Democratic Party until 1968, when more than 20,000 Americans had already died. And liberal activists only began putting real pressure on Democratic politicians over Iraq after the war began, when they powered Howard Dean’s insurgent campaign. Since World War II, the general pattern has been that elites drive foreign policy—generally in an interventionist direction—until they make a mess big enough to make the public cry stop.
But these are explanations, not excuses. Liberal activists should go office to office in the senate, as Allard Lowenstein did when searching for a challenger to Lyndon Johnson in 1968, looking for someone to run against Schumer for majority leader unless he comes out clearly in support of the Iran deal. And they should start recruiting primary challengers against anti-Iran-deal Democrats who are up for reelection in 2016. These challengers don’t have to win. They just have to ensure that Democratic Senators who now worry mostly about alienating AIPAC begin worrying about alienating Democratic voters too.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—9/11 Documents Show Hijacking Warnings:
U.S. government agencies issued repeated warnings in the summer of 2001 about potential terrorist plots against the United States masterminded by Osama bin Laden, including a possible plan to hijack commercial aircraft, documents show.
While there were no specific targets mentioned in the United States, there was intelligence indicating al-Qaida might attempt to crash a plane into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. And other reports said Islamic extremists might try to hijack a plane to gain release of comrades.
The escalating seriousness was reflected in a series of warnings issued by the State Department, Federal Aviation Administration, Defense Department and others detailing a heightened risk of terror attacks targeting Americans.
Whether the Bush administration had enough information to take more aggressive action is at the heart of the dispute over the contents of an Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence briefing the White House was working to declassify at the urging of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. White House officials said the document would not come out Friday and probably would not be ready for release until early next week.
Several Democrats on the commission claim the memo, called a presidential daily brief, or PDB, included current intelligence indicating a high threat of hijackings. It was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."
"Something was going to happen very soon and be potentially catastrophic," said one of the Democrats, former Indiana Rep. Timothy Roemer. "I don't understand, given the big threat, why the big principals don't get together."(...)
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Greg Dworkin rounds up news from Rand's first day out, then walks us through an intricate chart mapping out Chris Christie's Bridgegate scandal. Boston Marathon bombing trial ends in a conviction. So what's next? Polls in Cuba give us an enlightening peek into political beliefs there. Political science inquiry of the day: Why do we still tolerate the Supreme Court? NV becomes the latest red state to launch voter suppression efforts, though some were just turned back in GA. Why are these efforts so important to them? They're a major part of keeping "the invisible Democratic majority" invisible.
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