Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Arthur H. Vandenberg

Editor’s Note: This arti­cle was orig­i­nally sched­uled to run on the morn­ing of Sep­tem­ber 13. Because of the increased inter­est in the topic, its pub­li­ca­tion has been moved for­ward to the evening of Sep­tem­ber 12. As a result, we will not be run­ning our usual Thurs­day morn­ing article.

Pol­i­tics stops at the water’s edge.
— Sen­a­tor Arthur Hen­drick Vandenberg

Arthur Van­den­berg was the Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor from Michi­gan from 1935 until his death in 1951. Sen­a­tor Van­den­berg was the chair of the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee and worked with Pres­i­dent Harry S Tru­man to cre­ate the United Nations. After World War II, when Van­den­berg pub­licly changed his stance from iso­la­tion­ism to inter­na­tion­al­ism, he coined the famous maxim above.

Mitt Rom­ney was born in Detroit in 1947 to a Michi­gan Repub­li­can polit­i­cal fam­ily. Romney’s father was the Gov­er­nor of Michi­gan from 1963 to 1969 and his mother made a failed run at the Class 1 Sen­ate seat once held by Van­den­berg and now held by Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­a­tor Deb­bie Stabenow.

Repub­li­cans used to actively par­tic­i­pate in a mus­cu­lar for­eign pol­icy in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Demo­c­ra­tic Pres­i­dents and Con­gress­men. There were giants in the earth in those days. In a time before small-​​minded Repub­li­cans trum­peted small-​​minded ideas like the Agenda 21 con­spir­acy the­ory or the sup­posed impo­si­tion of Sharia law on U.S. com­mu­ni­ties, Repub­li­cans actu­ally worked side-​​by-​​side with Democ­rats to bring to life Vandenberg’s maxim. What­ever dif­fer­ences we might have across the aisle in the halls of Con­gress were set aside so the United States could present a united for­eign pol­icy front.

No more.

As pol­i­tics has become more par­ti­san, now Con­gress feels the need to inter­fere in for­eign pol­icy, whether within the same party or between par­ties. Wit­ness the internecine strug­gle over the sta­tus of Jerusalem which popped up this year as the Supreme Court case Ziv­otof­sky v. Clin­ton.

Between par­ties, a debate over the Israeli response to Iran­ian nuclear ambi­tions and this Tuesday’s attacks on a U.S. con­sulate in Beng­hazi, Libya and a U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt have roiled the U.S. Pres­i­den­tial election.

On Tues­day, the 11th anniver­sary of the Sep­tem­ber 11 ter­ror attacks, armed mobs over­ran the U.S. Con­sulate in Beng­hazi, Libya, killing Ambas­sador Chris Stevens and three other Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. Stevens was present to over­see the evac­u­a­tion of the con­sulate when he was trapped in the con­sulate and killed.

Pro­test­ers at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo remove the Amer­i­can flag and replace it with a flag that says “There is no god but God and Moham­mad is his prophet.” (Photo: AP)

A protest against an obscure anti-​​Islamic film was the prox­i­mal cause of the Beng­hazi protest. At the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, a riot broke out simul­ta­ne­ously with the Beng­hazi protests. While no one was killed in Cairo, pro­test­ers scaled the wall and took down the Amer­i­can flag.

It now appears that anti-​​government rad­i­cal Islamists in Beng­hazi took advan­tage of the tur­moil to mount a coör­di­nated, per­haps pre-​​planned, assault on the consulate.

In both Cairo and Beng­hazi, the protests appear to have been orga­nized on Face­book and were in response to a film which insults the Prophet Mohammed.

If one assumes the film has artis­tic value — appar­ently, a gen­er­ous assump­tion — the film’s auteur is “Sam Bacile” (rhymes with “imbe­cile”), a man who says he is a Los Ange­les real estate devel­oper and Israeli cit­i­zen who gath­ered dona­tions of $5 mil­lion to make this (lit­eral) bomb. “Sam Bacile” gave inter­views to the Wall Street Jour­nal and Asso­ci­ated Press, but more recent reports indi­cate he doesn’t exist at all. Who­ever he is, he is respon­si­ble for shout­ing “fire” in a crowded the­atre, result­ing in the deaths of four Amer­i­cans. From The Guardian:

The film [“Inno­cence of Mus­lims”] claims Muham­mad was a fraud. An English-​​language 13-​​minute trailer on YouTube shows an ama­teur cast per­form­ing a wooden dia­logue of insults dis­guised as rev­e­la­tions about Muham­mad, whose obe­di­ent fol­low­ers are pre­sented as a cadre of goons.

It depicts Muham­mad as a feck­less phi­lan­derer who approved of child sex­ual abuse.

Antic­i­pat­ing the protest after see­ing the invi­ta­tions, the Amer­i­can Embassy in Cairo sent their staff home and issued a pre­sum­ably pre­emp­tive state­ment, which failed in fend­ing off the protest:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo con­demns the con­tin­u­ing efforts by mis­guided indi­vid­u­als to hurt the reli­gious feel­ings of Mus­lims — as we con­demn efforts to offend believ­ers of all religions.

Today, the 11th anniver­sary of the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks on the United States, Amer­i­cans are hon­or­ing our patri­ots and those who serve our nation as the fit­ting response to the ene­mies of democracy.

Respect for reli­gious beliefs is a cor­ner­stone of Amer­i­can democ­racy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the uni­ver­sal right of free speech to hurt the reli­gious beliefs of others.

The Obama Admin­is­tra­tion blew a gas­ket (fig­u­ra­tively and diplo­mat­i­cally, of course) when they found out the Cairo Embassy was freelancing.

The state­ment by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Wash­ing­ton and does not reflect the views of the United States government.

Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney came out fir­ing. In a pre­pared state­ment Tues­day night, he said:

It’s dis­grace­ful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to con­demn attacks on our diplo­matic mis­sions, but to sym­pa­thize with those who waged the attacks.

Told by reporters that 1) the sup­posed “apol­ogy” for the embassy inva­sion pre­ceded the attacks and 2) the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion had repu­di­ated the embassy’s state­ment, Rom­ney refused to walk back his Tues­day night state­ment. Instead, he dou­bled down at a Wednes­day morn­ing press conference.

The embassy is the admin­is­tra­tion … the Pres­i­dent takes respon­si­bil­ity not just for the words that come from his mouth, but also the words that come from his ambas­sadors, from his embassies, from his State Department. …

The admin­is­tra­tion was wrong to stand by a state­ment sym­pa­thiz­ing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt instead of con­demn­ing their actions. It’s never too early for the United States gov­ern­ment to con­demn attacks on Amer­i­cans and to defend our val­ues. The White House dis­tanced itself last night from the state­ment say­ing it wasn’t cleared by Wash­ing­ton. That reflects the mixed sig­nals they’re send­ing to the world.

Let me see if I can break down Romney’s rather con­vo­luted statement.

  1. Rom­ney says the admin­is­tra­tion “stood by” words that do “not reflect the views of the United States gov­ern­ment” accord­ing to an offi­cial spokesperson.
  2. Rom­ney says the admin­is­tra­tion did not con­demn the attacks that they con­demned.
  3. Rom­ney says Pres­i­dent Obama does not “defend our val­ues”. (This one is unprov­able either way, since I’m pretty sure that Romney’s val­ues and my val­ues might be dif­fer­ent, so I’ll let it pass.)
  4. Rom­ney says that the White House “dis­tanced itself … from the state­ment” so he then con­tra­dicts his state­ment #1.
  5. He sums up by accus­ing the Pres­i­dent of send­ing “mixed signals”.

So after vio­lat­ing Vandenberg’s maxim, show­ing us that his clumsy way with for­eign pol­icy in Lon­don, Tel Aviv and War­saw was not merely a one-​​off mis­take, and then bend­ing him­self in a log­i­cal pret­zel in order to attempt to crit­i­cize the Pres­i­dent, Can­di­date Rom­ney accuses the Admin­is­tra­tion of send­ing “mixed signals”.

In a per­haps related devel­op­ment, Pres­i­dent Obama’s staff has announced he is “too busy” to meet with Israeli Prime Min­is­ter (and Rom­ney BFF) Binyamin Netanyahu when the Israeli leader vis­its the U.N. in New York later this month.

What do you think? Was Rom­ney right to crit­i­cize the Pres­i­dent? Is the Pres­i­dent respond­ing appro­pri­ately? What, if any­thing, should be done about “Sam Bacile”?

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