Rare News Desk
Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) took shots at Sen. Rand Paul in a Washington Post op-ed Friday writing that Paul is “curiously blind” to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL) power grab in Iraq. Perry said the Kentucky senator believes “our nation should ignore what’s happening in Iraq” and called Paul out as an “isolationist.”
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In turn, Paul promptly called Perry out for mischaracterizing his views in his own op-ed for Politico.
But polling data shows that most Americans are generally embracing Sen. Paul’s foreign policy ideas, not Gov. Perry’s–including Republicans.
Consider these recent polling stats:
- A June Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed “58% of the Republican respondents said the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth it, compared with the 37% who said it was.”
- A related Journal/NBC/Annenberg survey conducted days later found similar erosion in views about Iraq found that “46% of Republicans said the war in Iraq wasn’t worth it, compared with the 44% who said it was.”
- Also in the Annenberg survey, “63% [say] the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth it, compared with the 39% who held that view in January of 2013.”
- An April Wall Street Journal poll showed that 45 percent of Republicans think America should be less involved in world affairs, compared to 29 percent who believe the opposite.
- A separate Pew Research poll from December showed that “after 9/11, 22 percent of Republicans said their country should generally ‘mind its own business’ internationally, today that number has risen to 53 percent.”
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza made note of two key jabs Paul made against Perry:
“On foreign policy, Perry couldn’t be more stuck in the past, doubling down on formulas that haven’t worked, parroting rhetoric that doesn’t make sense and reinforcing petulant attitudes that have cost our nation a great deal.”
“If repeating the same mistakes over and over again is what Perry advocates in U.S. foreign policy, or any other policy, he really should run for president. In Washington, he’d fit right in, because leading Republicans and Democrats not only supported the Iraq war in the first place, but leaders of both parties campaigned on it in 2008.”
Writes Cillizza, “What Paul is proposing is that he is the Republican candidate willing (and able) to handle the party’s long-delayed reckoning with the war in Iraq.”
But Perry isn’t the only Republican picking foreign policy fights with Paul.
Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic summarized and itemized former Vice President–and Paul critic–Dick Cheney’s beliefs about the Iraq War on Monday:
Invading Iraq was prudent.
George W. Bush waged the war successfully.
Barack Obama is responsible for the chaos in Iraq today.
America needs to wage war in at least three countries and spend more on the military.
Sen. Paul would likely respond to those four points in this way: Iraq wasn’t prudent; it wasn’t a victory (see ISIL); it wasn’t Obama, intervening in Iraq in the first place is to blame for the chaos; and no, America doesn’t need to create more foreign entanglements or spend more on the military.
Cillizza observes that Paul is saying “the war in Iraq was a mistake because his party (and many Democrats) didn’t take the time to think through all of the consequences of it beforehand. And that being the most powerful nation in the world doesn’t mean that always taking the most muscular option when it comes to dealing with other countries is the right thing to do.”
Paul posed a moral question to Perry about his advocacy of intervention in Iraq: “How many Americans should send their sons or daughters to die for a foreign country — a nation the Iraqis won’t defend for themselves? How many Texan mothers and fathers will Governor Perry ask to send their children to fight in Iraq?”
In the aftermath of Iraq — and in the hopes of never repeating it — Americans are now asking the same questions.
Apparently, so are more Republicans than ever.
