I really wonder whether the Republican base can stomach
what Rand Paul is selling.
Mr. Paul said flatly that it had been a “mistake” for the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. And he suggested that the situation in Libya had deteriorated because of the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Both are fair points, mind you. He can get away with criticizing intervention in Libya by blaming it on Hillary Clinton (not Barack Obama, because Barack Obama is not running for anything):
[H]e called the 2011 overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi — which he labeled “Hillary’s war,” referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state at the time — an “utter disaster.”
But his condemnation of the Iraq War is still a touchy subject in Republican circles, where the notion of shock and awe-based democratizing of the region is still the dominant theory of foreign policy. This is the party in which Dick Cheney is still looked upon as a savvy military and foreign policy mastermind. This is the movement that continues, against all odds and common sense, to ask Bill Kristol how he would handle things.
Curiously, these rejections of military interventionism (one limited in scope, the other massive) came in a Rand Paul meeting with Jewish leaders that was intended in large part to patch relations with supporters of Israel who have been alarmed at what Paul's theoretical non-interventionism (including past proposals to end foreign aid to all nations, Israel included). He needs to reassure those voters that while he is not a neoconservative ultra-hawk of the sort usually demanded by the base, his non-interventionism is vague and noncommittal enough to not be scary. It's not clear he's making headway on that part.
“Clearly Senator Paul does not pander,” said Michael Fragin, a Republican who attended the gathering and hosts a weekly radio show about politics in New York. “Telling this audience that the Middle East was better off with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi in power shocked me. It was a rambling and incoherent expression of foreign policy that puts him closer to Bernie Sanders than anyone in the G.O.P.”
That isn't the line you want to hear, if you're one of Rand Paul's strategists, so we can expect that Paul will be staging another one of these in the near future. Opposition to the Iraq War may simply not fly among the hard-right base, especially now that the other conservative candidates have sought to establish their own foreign policy credentials based not on
whether we should next bomb Iran, but how soon and how much.