Bob Herbert talking:
we’re watching our democracy being dismantled right before our very eyes. This has been going on for a long time. So, this was a Sheldon Adelson-CNN debate. It wasn’t just a CNN-sponsored debate. You have the leading Republican candidate is a billionaire, Donald Trump; all the Republican candidates willing to genuflect before Sheldon Adelson, you know. And I just think that it’s—someone—in the press, in the media and in the public—needs to wake up to this. What are we debating? We’re debating how we can erode our democracy further; how we can give up our civil liberties and our civil rights; how we can prevent people, on the basis of their religion, from even entering the country, certainly from participating in our daily lives and that sort of thing. We’ve seen—I know we’re not talking about the economy, but all of this is together—we’ve seen what’s happened in the way that the economy has been hijacked to be in the services of the very wealthy. And I think it’s potentially catastrophic. I mean, we are losing the United States as we had come to know it or as we were taught growing up in civics lessons and history books were the things that made the United States special.
over an hour was spent just discussing ISIS. it was almost as if CNN had decided that fear and the fight against terrorism was now the main discussion that had to occur, because, for instance, in discussing foreign policy, there was no mention of Israel and Palestine no discussion of Latin America, or President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba. There was even scant discussion of the situation with Russia and the Ukraine. It was all focused on the Middle East and on ISIS, it seemed.
It was all about ISIS and terror and fear, and the subtext—I don’t even think it’s a subtext; I mean, it’s right out there—and fear of Muslims. So, I thought it was crazy. And not only was the entire—almost the entire debate focused on ISIS, I thought they didn’t do even a good job of interviewing the candidates about ISIS. So you didn’t have follow-up questions to try—the whole thing was incoherent, so you didn’t have follow-up questions to try and pin these fellows down. So you have these candidates up there: “Well, I’m going to destroy ISIS. If I’m president, I’m going to destroy ISIS, and Americans are not going to have to be afraid anymore.” OK, how are you going to do that? Are you going to wage a serious war against ISIS? Are you going to build up the American military and invade the Middle East again? And by the way, how are we going to pay for it, because are we going to have tax cuts at the same time that we’re conducting a war, like we did the last time with disastrous results? We didn’t get any kind of follow-up questions last night from these interviewers.
And then, one thing that was like astounding to me: Trump is the leading GOP contender at this point; he doesn’t even know what the nuclear triad is. This is the guy that’s going to be our commander-in-chief. So when he flubbed that question and made it clear that he didn’t know what the questioner was talking about, was there some kind of follow-up to spotlight for the American people that the fellow that claims to be the strongest on foreign policy and warfare and fighting terror doesn’t even understand what America’s nuclear capabilities are?
Zaid Jilani talking:
I think that there is a sort of perverse, sort of almost bloodsport mentality in these debates, in that they’re talking about terrorism as if you approach it as if you’re trying to tackle an enemy, where you’re going to defeat an army and you’re going to raise a flag, and then it’s going to be over and it’s going to be done. You know, that’s not what terrorism is about. What terrorism is about is the mentality of people, for example, on this Republican stage, who are antagonizing Muslims, who are saying, “Hey, we’ve had—you know, we’ve had 12, 13 years of war in the Middle East. Let’s have some more years of war in the Middle East. Maybe it will work this time.” Right? You know, the Obama administration has launched at least 6,000 airstrikes as part of this war. You know, more than a dozen countries are involved in Syria and Iraq. Obviously, military force is not the only solution to this conflict. And yet these folks on this stage are appealing to voters, 60 percent of whom want to actually ban Muslims from the United States, as Donald Trump was, where they’re trying to appeal by just basically saying that the more we kill, the more we harm, the more strength we use, the stronger we are. I mean, let’s be honest about this. ISIS doesn’t have—doesn’t really have an army. They don’t have a navy. Where’s their artillery? Where’s their air force? They have very little actual military force, and they can do very little actual damage to the United States.
I think one of the most remarkable things about this debate was also what was not said. You know, 45,000 people in this country are dying every year because they can’t get healthcare. We have about a quarter of our children—you know, between a third and a quarter of our children in poverty, depending on what part of the country you’re looking at. We have deindustrialization throughout the country. I mean, I went to graduate school in Syracuse, New York. There’s homes there that look like they’re bombed out, but ISIS didn’t do that, right? You know, NAFTA did that, and deindustrialization did that.
And yet all of these questions are being left out of the debate altogether, so we can talk about this really fringe organization in the Middle East that poses almost no threat to the United States. They do pose some threat, but we have more than enough capability to handle them. And instead, they’re talking about building a bigger army, building a bigger military. We actually had a great piece up at The Intercept where we found audio from various defense executives, where they’re actually saying this war is great for their bottom line, where they actually expect rising profits, where they did very well on the budget. And why is that? Why do we need, you know, the most powerful military in the world focusing on a group of a few thousand people with almost no military technology, who are mostly a threat to people in Iraq and Syria—they are a real threat there—but are barely a threat to the United States? We should be handling this with special operations, with intelligence, and primarily with police. And obviously we should not be antagonizing more Muslims and doing things that would kill tremendous numbers of people, because that’s the number one reason Muslims do get drawn to extremist and thuggish groups like ISIS, is that they see their brothers and sisters being killed in these wars, they see their brothers and sisters being killed by allied regime and client regimes of the United States. And we are not going to be winning the hearts and minds by talking about, you know, decapitating children and blowing people’s arms off and legs off and destroying their homes.
Bob Herbert talking:
People do not understand what war is. War is a horrifying set of circumstances. And most Americans do not know what war is. They think it’s like television or a video game or something like that. And it’s rah-rah. You root for the home team, you know, and let’s go in and kick their butts and come home and wave the flag and declare victory. And it’s not like that at all. I cover all these folks, these American GIs who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan paralyzed and without limbs and horribly burned, with mental problems, post-traumatic stress, and then what happened to their families. And that doesn’t even begin to touch what happened to the folks in the countries, the folks who lived in Iraq and who lived in Afghanistan. And now we just want to go and just, you know, reprise it, let’s do it all over again. It is so preposterous. It’s a shame.
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Bob Herbert
distinguished senior fellow with Demos. From 1993 to 2011, he was an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.
— source democracynow.org