Republicans Abroad Korea

Congratulations, President-elect Obama

I, on behalf of Republicans Abroad-Korea, congratulate president-elect Obama on his victory. 

Like Republicans elsewhere, I will support him when we agree and oppose him when we disagree.  But in any case, as the incoming duly elected president of my republic, he has my loyalty.  When I oppose him, it will be a loyal opposition.

From Senator McCain's concession speech:

Tonight, more than any night, I hold in my heart nothing but love for this country and for all its citizens, whether they supported me or Senator Obama, I wish Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president.

And I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties but to believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here.

Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history, we make history.

I thank Senator McCain and Governor Palin for their efforts in this election.

What it will take for Republicans to win back voters

by Andy Jackson

On November 7, Americans voters turned control of Congress over to the Democrats, creating a divided government for the first time in six years. For Republicans, it is important to know why we lost and what can be done to win back the voters’ trust in 2008.

Some members of Republicans Abroad-Korea (RAK) met soon after the election to discuss just those issues. The consensus reached was that it was not one issue but a ‘perfect storm’ of several factors.

The Iraq conflict was clearly a factor. While the progress is being made in preparing Iraqi forces to take over security operations, that progress has been slow and the American people have shown increasing impatience with casualties our military personnel have been taking there.

Another factor against Republicans was the historical trend of the party in control of the White House to lose seats in Congress. The party in power has traditionally lost an average of 30 House seats and 6 Senate seats in midterm elections. The Democrat electoral ‘tsunami’ was nothing extraordinary. That is one reason some Democrats, such as Bill Clinton adviser James Carville have called on DNC Chairman Howard Dean to resign.

One thing that seems clear is that this was indeed a Republican loss, rather than a Democrat victory. The Consensus of RAK members at the meeting was that we as a party had moved away from our core values, which turned off just enough voters to lose us dozens of seats. We were given control of Congress in 1994 on a promise to clean up the corruption and pork barrel practices that had taken hold in the legislature. But episodes like the Mark Foley sex scandal and Abramoff Indian lobbying scandal turned off many voters.

To compound matters, many Republicans had fallen into the same corrupt and free-spending ways that many Americans associate with the Democrats. The practice of earmarking (also known as pork barrel) actually grew under the Republican Congress as members of both parties raided the budget to fund projects in their districts. This is symbolized in a $315 million earmark for the famous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, a proposed span that would connect an island of 14,000 residents to an island of 50 residents.

The 2006 election was not a triumph of liberalism. On the contrary, many of the Democrats elected this month differed from their party’s leadership on a variety of issues. The ‘Blue Dog’ coalition of moderate and conservative Democrats increased its membership to 44, much more than the Democratic majority in the upcoming session of Congress. Conservative ballot initiatives generally did well across the country. Voters rejected our party, not our principles. There is still a center-right majority in America that will vote for us if we give them a reason to do so.

Fortunately, the Democrats already seem to be doing their best to help us. They offered few concrete ideas during the campaign and their conduct since the election has shown that they have learned little during their time in the political wilderness.

While they criticized the conduct of the war in Iraq, they have offered little in the way of alternatives. Despite some claims to the contrary, there is no Democrat plan for Iraq. Before the elections, some Democrats said that President Bush lied to Congress about intelligence on Iraq. Many, such as incoming House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, called for Bush’s impeachment. Surly, if Democrats really believed that the president had lied to Congress on matters of war and peace, they are morally obliged to move to impeach him. But now that the Democrats have the power to call for impeachment hearings (where they would have to present their evidence), they have suddenly decided that it is not a good idea. Even Conyers seems to have changed his mind, saying that impeachment is ‘off the table.’

They criticized corruption on the part of some Republicans, but the race for majority leader came down between Rep. John P. Murtha, co-conspirator in the Abscam scandal of the 1970s who sent $121 million in earmarks to his district last year and Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, in the top 10% of earmarkers in the House at $61.7 million. In 2006, Hoyer obtained $2.8 million for ManTech International Corp, a company that has donated almost $50,000 to his political action committee. The ‘culture of corruption’ that Democrats accused Republicans of permitting will find a happy home in Nancy Pelosi’s House.

But Republicans cannot just wait for Democrat mistakes and overreaching. We must show voters that we have some back to our senses and will fight for the values that they care about. A good start would be to work with conservative Democrats to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and to hold the line on government spending, especially pork barrel projects. While we can and should seek to find common ground with Democrats, we should also fight them when they advance extremist legislation. They have a majority but not a veto-proof one and we can still advance our priorities. If we can prove to voters through our actions that we have returned to our principles, the door will be open for us in the 2008 elections.

Andy Jackson is Executive Director of Republicans Abroad-Korea. All opinions expressed here are strictly his own.

Paying your dues in Iowa

by Andy Jackson

If any other RAK members have "war stories" that they would like to share, send an email and I'll post it. Or I can make you an author for this blog and you can post any time you'd like.

I came across this article from MSNBC which talks about the hard work that campaign staff in Iowa do. That brought back memories of my own campaign experience in Iowa back in 1996. I was the "Political Coordinator" for the Alan Keyes for President campaign.

I remember that flag: Some volunteers made the biggest flag they could and then realized that it was too big for the building.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

[Clare] Gannon, an Iowa native, graduated from Northwestern University with a communications degree. She works nearly 90 hours a week on “Campaign Row,” an area of downtown Des Moines where about half of the candidates’ Iowa headquarters are clustered in old storefronts and office space emblazoned with campaign signs.

She predicted many young campaign workers will leave Iowa with the same feeling: “If I got through that, I can get through anything.”

I felt the same way, except we didn't have enough money for an office down town. Our office was almost in Urbana (I think that is the name of the town). That lack of money and the fact that we were competing with Pat Buchanan for the same voters made my job very difficult.

There were two full-time staffers in Iowa. One to raise money (unlike most campaigns, we paid for almost everything with locally-raised money) and one to get votes. I was the vote guy. My main job was to provide support to our grass-roots organizations across the state. I also handled scheduling for candidate visits but rarely went on the road with Alan because I had to hold the fort in Des Moines.

I was at this rally. We had a great organization in Cedar Rapids (Linn County).

Alan was rarely happy the few times I did see him. I always scheduled him very tightly whenever he came to the state. That, combined with his tendency to speak longer that planned for, meant that he was always running late. At least once he felt the need to remind me that he was not a machine.

One time I did hit the road with him was in the last few weeks before the caucuses. We got a couple of other staffers to man HQ so I got in an RV with Alan, another staffer and one reporter. The the heater in the RV was no match for the -5 to-30 temperatures so we had to rap Alan up in a blanket or two as we went from event to event.

It was a tough campaign. We didn't have enough resources, we were competing with a more established candidate for the same voters and I made some rookie mistakes. We only pulled in 8% (our goal was 10%) and I left the campaign a few weeks later to start making my student loan payments. But I will always remember our putting up the good fight against the odds.

Korea Times letter-to-the-editor

by Andy Jackson

On Saturday, December 13, this guest column appeared in the Korea Times. On Wednesday, December 17, the Times posted this reply. I assume that it will be in the Thursday paper. I'll post the letter in full here:

[Letters to the Editor] The 'Vocal Minority' in US

By Andy Jackson

In a recent guest column (The silent Majority in US, Saturday, December 13), Moon J. Pak of the Korean-American League made several inaccurate statements about how most of Americans feels about our involvement in Iraq. While there is a great deal of controversy in the United States about the goals and methods of the war last spring and the current operations, Moon paints a misleading picture of public opinion in the U.S.

Here are the facts:

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 60 percent of Americans approve of the U.S. going to war last March. Fifty-five percent want to either increase the number of American troops in Iraq or maintain them at current levels.

A Fox News poll reported that 55 percent of Americans believe that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do.

Those previous polls were taken before Saddam Hussein’s capture. In a poll released Monday by ABC New/Washington Post, 80 percent of Americans favored keeping troops in Iraq.

While many Americans differ on tactics and specific policies in post-war Iraq, the majority consistently supports the war and maintaining American forces in Iraq until an Iraqi government can take control.

Moon also misleads readers about what leaders of both major parties in America have stated they plan to do about the future deployment of American troops in Iraq. While President Bush is gradually reducing the number of combat troops in Iraq, he has consistently stated that the United States will not unilaterally withdraw from Iraq until a stable Iraqi government is in place.

Most major Democrat candidates, including Howard Dean, also call for American forces to remain in Iraq until stability is restored.

Despite Moon’s misinformation, Korea’s contribution to the coalition forces in Iraq would be welcome by the American government and people. It would also be a sign that the ROK-USA alliance has developed into a partnership of equals, rather than protector and protectorate.

** Andy Jackson is executive director of Republicans Abroad. You can contact Republicans Abroad at http://gopkorea.blogs.com/gop/

These kinds of letters help raise the profile of RAK. I encourage other RAK members to submit their own letters-to-the-editor or guest column.

The Myth of Wesley Clark: Iraq and Kosovo

by Andy Jackson

NOTE: I hope this will be the first of a series of opposition research/issue pieces that Republicans can use to win the happy hour/coffee shop debates that help influence public opinion, especially in populations as small as the American ex-pat community in Korea. Submissions are welcome.

Before he even announced, there were groups of supporters creating "Draft Clark" groups. Within a week of declaring his candidacy, he rose to the top tier in most polls. His early fund raising has been so prolific that his campaign is already talking about forgoing federal matching funds.

Wesley Clark is considered by some Democrats to be their perfect candidate; socially liberal, fiscally conservative and a dove who has a chest full of medals. The military campaign he commanded in Kosovo was the most Politically Correct of wars; the targets were white Christians.

With the economy in full recovery and creating more jobs, the election will increasingly turn on events in Iraq.

Much of Clark's campaigning of late has been to attempt to Draw differences between the war in Kosovo and the war in Iraq. His first criticism of the Iraq war was that it was illegal, whereas the Kosovo campaign was legal. Differences of opinion about what is "legal" or "illegal" in international relations aside, his assertion is not factual. As pointed out in this article in the New Yorker, by Clark's own criteria the war in Kosovo was illegal:

The subject [of a conversation between Clark and the New Yorker reporter Peter Boyer] was how the war in Iraq, which Clark calls a "historic blunder," differed from the 1999 war over Kosovo, which Clark commanded. Clark was welcomed into the campaign by many Democrats as the triumphant commander of Kosovo, and he uses the lessons of Kosovo to explain his criticism of the Iraq war. In a speech at the University of Iowa College of Law, on September 19th, Clark had declared that chief among America's mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq without "the mantle of authority" bestowed by United Nations approval. But hadn't the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council? Yes, Clark allowed, and in that regard the Kosovo war was "technically illegal." He went on, "The Russians and the Chinese said they would both veto it. There was never a chance that it would be authorized." That situation did not seem entirely dissimilar from the prewar maneuverings regarding Iraq, when France and Germany said that they would oppose any Security Council resolution authorizing an immediate war; Bush bypassed the U.N. and resorted to an alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blair's Britain and sundry lesser members of the "coalition of the willing."

Having been called out on his assertion that the war in Kosovo had legal backing while the war in Iraq did not, Clark retreated to an assertion that the war in Kosovo was more justified than the war in Iraq because of the threat of Serbian ethnic cleansing. However, Clark is also mistaken on that part, as noted by Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic:

Moreover, the "imminent threat" of ethnic cleansing is an odd casus belli. By the time of the Kosovo operation, the world had already stood by and watched the slaughter of a quarter of a million Bosnians by the Serbian fascist machine. That had triggered no war from the West. The same could be said for the holocaust in Rwanda, which the Clinton administration (and the United Nations) observed from afar. For Clark to argue that Kosovo was worse than either of those events is bizarre.

The threat of genocide in the Balkans was also, of course, another way in which the two wars were identical in legitimacy. There are an estimated 300,000 mass graves in Iraq today. Saddam's genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the Shia and the Marsh Arabs are and were no different than the monstrosities of Milosevic--except in scale and viciousness. Does Clark believe that leaving Saddam in power would have removed the "imminent threat" of further genocide and mass murder against the peoples of Iraq? Who is he kidding? Does he think that Uday and Qusay Hussein represented the hope of a more humane future? Of course not. If your criterion for intervention is the "imminent threat" of genocide, then Clark's defense of the Kosovo war necessitates an identical defense of the Iraq war. One more obvious distinction: Milosevic hadn't actually used gas or chemical weapons to kill civilians. Saddam did. Moreover, Milosevic had restricted his murderous military campaigns to the territories of the former Yugoslavia. Saddam had already launched wars against two neighboring states, Iran and Kuwait. A final point: Milosevic hadn't threatened the United States and hadn't attempted to assassinate the president of the United States. Saddam had. On humanitarian and realist grounds, toppling Saddam was far more legitimate than toppling Milosevic.

Clark's final complaint against that the war against Saddam was based on a false premise is also faulty:

Now let's take Clark's final point: that the war against Saddam was conducted "under false pretenses." Does he mean that Saddam had publicly and openly disarmed as he promised to do in 1991? Not even Jacques Chirac believed that; and the Kay report has already documented a vast apparatus of concealment and subterfuge to keep the WMD programs alive. Does Clark mean that he knew that no such WMDs existed? Nope. He already opined on CNN that Saddam "absolutely" had WMDs, adding, "I think they will be found. There's so much intelligence on this." Was it because the war turned out to be more destructive than had been planned for and promised? Again, it was a miraculously speedy, humane and successful war, as Clark also conceded on CNN. In the Times of London, as Boyer points out, Clark even went into hubristic mode: "American military power, especially when buttressed by Britain's, is virtually unchallengeable today. Take us on? Don't try!" If the Bush administration's intelligence was faulty, Clark signed onto it at the time. If the administration's strategy was wrong, Clark praised it at the time. He has absolutely no credibility in arguing that the war was conducted "under false pretenses."

He goes on to say that some of Clark's reasoning on the war against terror is "Ross Perot Crazy." I strongly urge you to read the rest of the New Republic article. In fact, I will link it again here.

BTW, if Clark gets far in the Democrat Primaries, here are a couple of pictures that you can expect to see. They are Clark playing around with Bosnian Serb commander and indicted war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic in 1994. In all fairness to Clark, those pictures were taken 10 months before the the Srebrenica massacre that Mladic directed. But who said that Democrats were fair?

Here is an article about the meeting from World Net Daily.

You will also hear this phrase:
"I'm not going to start the third world war for you."

Here is a small part of an article from Antiwar.com:

"I'm not going to start the third world war for you," General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international KFOR peacekeeping force, is reported to have told Gen. Clark when he refused to accept an order to send assault troops to prevent Russian troops from taking over the airfield of Kosovo's provincial capital. The Times of London reported on 23 May 2001 in an article titled, "Kosovo clash of allied generals," that "General Sir Michael Jackson [was] told that he would have to resign if he refused to obey an order by the American commander of Nato's forces during the Kosovo war to stop the Russians from seizing control of Pristina airport in June 1999."

The BBC also reported on the incident.

I personally believe that the Clark campaign will eventually collapse under its own contradictions.

Prediction: Clark wins 3 or 4 states and drops out in April.