Well, okay, our headline goes too far. But the claim is about as plausible as Rand Paul’s outburst that Republican internationalists like Lindsey Graham and John McCain are responsible for the rise of the Islamic State.
“ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS,” the GOP presidential candidate said Wednesday on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. “These hawks also wanted to bomb Assad, which would have made ISIS’s job even easier. They’ve created these people.”
Citing Iraq, Syria and Libya, Mr. Paul added that “everything that they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong about for 20 years, and yet they have somehow the gall to keep saying and pointing fingers otherwise.”
Speaking of gall, and a word of political advice, an aide might want to remind Senator Paul which party’s nomination he is seeking. Republicans who begin their campaigns assailing other Republicans rarely succeed—especially when the accusation is culpability for a would-be caliphate that uses executions, slavery, extortion, rape and general terror to enforce oppression in the Middle East and North Africa, and whose ideology inspires jihadists world-wide.
More to the point, even President Obama now largely refrains from blaming George W. Bush for all the world’s ills, albeit with an exception here and there for old time’s sake. Maybe even he recognizes that the statute of limitations has expired for Republicans who haven’t run the executive branch for seven years and have had no perceptible influence on Administration policy.
Mr. Paul is intelligent enough, and his misreading of recent Middle Eastern history is so flagrant, that he might be trying to deflect attention from his own misjudgments. In Mr. Obama’s second term, the U.S. has largely followed Mr. Paul’s foreign-affairs preferences to the letter, and the result has been more chaos and disorder.
The origins of the Islamic State are al Qaeda in Iraq, or the post-Saddam Hussein insurgency that suffered a near-total defeat amid General David Petraeus’s surge and the Sunni Awakening. The weak guerilla remnants of that organization survived on the peripheries of Iraq and Syria between 2008 and 2011 and then filled the security vacuum that Mr. Obama left behind by withdrawing all U.S. forces.
The Islamic State’s revival was also aided by its sanctuary over the border in Syria as that country revolted against the rule of Bashar Assad. Far from supplying arms to the rebels, Mr. Obama explicitly rejected U.S. intervention in 2011. CIA Director Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again advocated aiding the rebels in 2012, but Mr. Obama refused again.
As for the U.S. bombing of Assad, Mr. Paul can’t blame ISIS on something that never happened. Mr. Obama briefly considered bombing in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, only to panic at the last minute and toss the decision into Congress after a stroll on the South Lawn. The ensuing Perils-of-Pauline political melodrama, in which Mr. Paul joined the Paulines who opposed any U.S. intervention, guaranteed little was done.
Mr. Paul seems to think he can win the GOP nomination on an anti-interventionist platform, though we think he’d be better off focusing on his domestic agenda. But if he wants to run as an Obama Republican on foreign policy, he shouldn’t also adopt the Obama trick of rewriting history. It reflects poorly on his judgment as a potential Commander in Chief.
