Trump Paralyzed Hillary’s Campaign
Noah Rothman 2016-05-10
For months, Democrats who wrestled with the prospect of handing Hillary Clinton their party’s presidential nomination comforted themselves with public polling. Sure, Clinton was a tainted candidate. A serially mendacious individual with a bad habit of getting caught in her deceits, the subject of a federal investigation into potentially criminal misconduct, and a lackluster campaigner with a record of failure; concerns among Democrats over Clinton’s suitability for the presidency only mounted over the course of the long primary.
If, however, the GOP was kind enough to grant Clinton the chance to run against a candidate as toxic as Donald Trump, the former secretary of state’s ineptitude wouldn’t matter. She’d walk into the White House. Despite some headline-grabbing Quinnipiac University swing state polls that suggest a competitive race in November, the vast majority of the public polling does suggest a landslide defeat in store for the likely GOP nominee. But the polls will inevitably tighten as the electorate’s partisan polarization reasserts itself. Campaigns and candidates matter. Clinton cannot simply coast into the Oval Office. She’ll have to work for it, and it’s not clear that she knows precisely how that is done. For the moment, like the Republicans who tried and failed before her, Clinton and her campaign staffers seem utterly perplexed by the Trump phenomenon.
On Monday, Hillary Clinton advisors Jake Sullivan and Gene Sperling telegraphed the former first lady’s pivot away from the zombie Democratic Primary and toward the general election. In a conference call with reporters, the two Clinton loyalists announced their intention to target Donald Trump’s tax plan. The two advisors revealed their focus would be on attacking Trump’s plan to push for “tax cuts for the hyper-wealthy [while] leaving most behind,” reported The Atlantic’s Steve Clemons. “We frankly think that Mr. Trump’s economic plans have not received the scrutiny they’ve deserved,” Sullivan said. He assured reporters on the call that Team Clinton will be pounding the drum over Trump’s “eye-poppingly massive” tax cuts for the rich “every day between now and the election.”
This boilerplate Democratic campaign strategy would be fine — perhaps even compelling – if deployed against a vanilla Republican candidate. Trump is, however, no Republican cast in the same mold as George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. In fact, as Team Clinton was revealing its intention to attack Trump for his proposal to ease the tax burden on the rich, the news cycle was already dominated by Trump’s decision to buck Republican orthodoxy on taxes in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd.
In that “Meet the Press” interview, Trump signaled his willingness to surrender his opening bid in the coming fight over tax code reform (well before negotiations had even begun) by insisting that his cuts on the highest marginal rates will likely be pared back by congressional Democrats. “I have a feeling we pay some more,” Trump said of his fellows in the top tax bracket. “I am willing to pay more, and you know what, wealthy are willing to pay more. We’ve had a very good run.”
Despite Trump warning the Clintons for weeks that he intends to borrow heavily from self-described socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ playbook, Team Clinton was unable, or unwilling, to preemptively reform their message and tailor it to Trump’s populist progressivism. Nor could they adapt and respond to a news cycle dominated by Trump’s remarks on taxes and the stunning departure they represent from typical Republican economic philosophy. If Democrats fear that Clinton’s team has ossified and grown complacent, this episode should confirm those suspicions.
It’s not merely the Clinton campaign’s bullheaded determination to plunge forward with an uncreative campaign strategy that was designed and implemented well before Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee. Clinton appears to have learned nothing from the pile of Republican bodies Trump left in the wake of his scorched earth primary campaign.
“She’s married to a man who was the worst abuser of women in the history of politics,” Trump said of his friend, golf buddy, and the inspiration for his 2016 presidential bid, former President Bill Clinton. “She’s been the total enabler.” The celebrity candidate added of the former first lady. “She would go after these women and destroy their lives. She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.”
Team Clinton’s response to this brazen assault on her dignity and character was… Nothing.
“I have nothing to say about him and how he’s running his campaign,” Clinton responded. “He can run his campaign however he chooses.”
“I’m not running against him. He’s doing a fine job of doing that himself,” she added. If “that line sounds familiar, it should. “I’m not running against Donald Trump” is the assertion made by those Republicans who ultimately lost to Donald Trump.
Clinton’s notorious bunker mentality might lead her and her supporters to presume that the former first lady can win the presidency by default. This is dangerously misguided. The notion that Clinton can win by ceding to Trump total control of the airwaves and playing — as Republicans played — defense to the reality television star’s endless stream of unsubstantiated accusations and bewildering, conspiratorial gibberish is a losing strategy. Hillary Clinton’s campaign team cannot count on media complacency, either. She is neither interesting nor fresh enough to attract the eyeballs necessary to sustain the revenue-starved, top-heavy newsertainment industry. Clinton will have to work for the White House, and that will mean forcing Trump to compete on the turf of her choosing.
Democrats don’t have to write an entirely new playbook to defeat Donald Trump. But if they are inclined to dismiss him as an opponent unworthy of their exertions, they’ll soon learn how wrong they were.
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Trump Paralyzed Hillary’s Campaign
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Listening and Learning With Trump
Jonathan S. Tobin 2016-08-30
The political world is waiting with baited breath to hear Donald Trump’s immigration policy speech scheduled for tomorrow in Arizona. His surrogates, who have suddenly become very circumspect on an issue on which their candidate’s position was once crystal clear but is now being kept deliberately hazy, assure us that he will explain all in his address. Rather than admit that he went back and forth on the key issue of the fate of the 11 million illegals currently in the country, they tell us he is “listening and learning” to what the people are saying even as they also comically insist that he’s always been consistent. What does that mean?
What we can expect from Trump tomorrow is a speech that will thread the needle in a way in which he can demonstrate some evolution to potentially persuadable centrists while still reassuring his core voters that he’s the same politically incorrect candidate whose confrontational attitude they love. That means some talk about how high the wall he will build along the border will be along with rhetoric about compassion for immigrant families and haziness about mass deportation of illegals. The wall talk will be fantasy, the compassion will be phony, and the discussion of a process for forcing out the illegals will be disingenuous. But if he sticks to whatever script he’s given to read off the teleprompter the change in tone will likely be celebrated—at least by many Republicans—as the long awaited pivot his party has been counting on.
What can he achieve with such a stance?
The first point to acknowledge is that the basic goal of the speech—solidifying Republican support behind Trump—is easily achievable. As we saw once he effectively clinched the party’s presidential nomination in early May, most Republican voters are eager to vote for their party’s candidate no matter how much they might dislike him.
The overarching dynamic of American politics in the early 21st Century is rigid partisanship. The chasm between supporters of the two major parties is such that it may take an even more disliked candidate than Donald Trump—who is currently viewed favorably in most surveys by only about one in four Americans—to allow for the kind of historic landslide that used to occur with regularity in presidential years. Indeed, it may literally be impossible the sort of wipeout that happened in 1964, 1972, and 1984. There is simply no way more than a fraction of Republicans can be persuaded to vote for any Democrat, let alone one as reviled by conservatives as Hillary Clinton, in the way that GOP voters backed Lyndon Johnson and Democrats voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
So all Trump needs to do in order to increase his percentage of support among Republicans from a dangerously low figure that dips below 80 percent to one closer to 90 percent or better, is to stop shooting himself in the foot (something that may not be possible) and to move a bit to the center on key issues. Considering that he is a man utterly bereft of cherished political principles, that shouldn’t be too hard.
The second point about even a Trump speech that will be deemed a success is that his camp shouldn’t labor under the delusion that shoring up GOP support is the same thing as securing the percentage of independents and Democrats he needs to actually win the election. It used to be an axiom of politics that most Americans don’t start paying attention to the election until after Labor Day, but that may no longer be true. In our 24/7 news cycle environment, there can’t be too many people who don’t already have a strong opinion about both Trump and Clinton and that may put a Trump victory out of reach.
Third, despite the maneuvers in recent weeks in which Trump has sought to appeal to minorities, those voters are irretrievably lost in 2016.
Trump’s push to get African-American support—in which he has sought to pit them against largely Hispanic immigrants—is doomed to failure. Black voters would be smart to consider how badly their community has suffered at the hands of generations of liberal policies. But Trump, a man who has dog whistled to racists during the campaign and is tone deaf about their sensibilities, is not the right messenger for this effort.
Just as foolish is the thought that all but a tiny minority of Hispanics will vote for someone whose rhetoric about Mexican rapists and drug dealers or a biased judge will never be forgotten. The “listening and learning” that’s currently going on isn’t about heeding Hispanics but an attempt to reassure moderate whites.
The only question about the minority vote is not whether Trump’s speech will increase his support there but whether it will be lost to Republicans for the foreseeable future. But that is something that can only be determined after Election Day as we see whether Trump and his followers will continue to dominate the GOP.
That means that while a good Trump speech tomorrow can keep the race relatively close, there’s nothing he can say on immigration that will be enough to win the presidency. That means the closest observers tomorrow should be down ballot Republicans who must hope—in what Trump fans must consider a cruel irony—that the billionaire puts forward a sufficiently rational front to do as well as Mitt Romney did in 2012 and avoid a Clinton landslide.
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America the Afterthought
Noah Rothman 2016-08-30
There are many adjectives that might aptly describe the Obama administration’s Syria policy, but “coherent” is not among them. The administration’s desperation to avoid involving the U.S. military in another ground conflict in the Middle East has become a cautionary tale about the nightmarish wages of an ideological commitment to non-interventionism regardless of strategic imperatives. Today, the complex web of combatants all fighting one another inside the Syrian cauldron is characterized by more than one U.S.-backed party fighting the other. Washington’s fecklessness long ago led America’s allies in this region to question their reflexive deference to the United States. Now, worryingly, America’s Middle Eastern allies are taking matters into their own hands.
Even as the Pentagon was releasing statements applauding its ally Turkey for engaging in a military incursion into Northern Syria, NATO allies were reportedly at odds over Ankara’s latest action and the reasoning behind it. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. officials were skeptical of a proposed Turkish-led military operation and were taken off guard when Turkey pulled the trigger. The apprehension of American officials seems warranted today as Turkey’s mission was clearly less aimed at attacking a weakened ISIS as it was designed to prevent U.S.-backed Kurdish forces from marching west of the Euphrates.
As Kurdish forces began to move on a depleted ISIS occupying militia near the Turkish border, Ankara reportedly began to press for kinetic U.S. assistance in long-delayed operation to press on the Syrian town of Jarablus. The White House sought to stall by requesting additional information, which military officials told the Journal amounted to a diplomatic rejection of the proposed joint U.S.-Turkish operation inside Syria. The White House clearly overestimated the value of American consent. “Turkey launched its offensive without giving officials in Washington advanced warning,” the Journal reported. “The proposal never reached President Barack Obama’s desk, according to a senior administration official.”
If this all sounds a little familiar, it should. That same sense of shock overcame American officials following the news that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates had undertaken airstrikes on Islamist targets in Libya as radical militia members began to surround Tripoli in late 2014. “Egyptian officials explicitly denied to American diplomats that their military played any role in the operation,” the New York Times reported, “in what appeared a new blow to already strained relations between Washington and Cairo.”
The Pentagon never warmed to the prospect of Sunni Arab regional coalitions executing combat operations without the guidance or even consent of the United States even if their targets were ISIS affiliates in North Africa. These are the earliest rumblings of regional hegemonies carving out unstable spheres of influence from the vacuum left behind by the United States following withdrawal from Iraq. Egypt’s incursion into Libya was followed by Saudi Arabia’s incursion into Yemen after the Iran-backed Houthi militia sacked that country’s capital. Iran is orchestrating intervention inside Iraq, fueling the sectarian tension that tor the country apart in the last decade. And Turkey has this month joined the United States and Russia in Syria, all of whom are operating on the ground and in the skies shooting at the other’s proxies.
This is the stuff of nightmares for international relations theorists who lay awake at night fearing the prospect of renewed great power conflicts. As America’s prohibitive power recedes, those seem more and more to be well founded fears. These developments reflect the extent to which the Obama administration was successful in relegating the United States to “just another power” status.
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Why Did Iran Put Missiles at Fordo?
Jonathan S. Tobin 2016-08-30
One of the few concessions that the U.S. was able to obtain from Iran during the course of the negotiations that led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was an agreement to end all uranium enrichment at Fordo. The underground military facility built into a mountain was of great concern to the West and Tehran’s willingness to halt its nuclear work there was considered a sign that it was serious about giving up its quest for a weapon. But if the only thing going on Fordo these days is harmless research and production of medical isotopes, why did the Islamist state deploy its most sophisticated military weaponry there yesterday?
On Monday, Iranian television showed the deployment of the country’s new Russian-made S-300 missiles at Fordo. The advanced weapon systems were the source of much contention between the U.S. and Russia during the course of the nuclear negotiations as the West pleaded with Moscow not to deliver missiles that significantly upgraded Iran’s ability to defend its nuclear sites. But the sale eventually went through. Since the Obama administration labors under the delusion that it has definitively ended the nuclear threat—rendering concerns about Iran making places like Fordo impregnable moot—it didn’t make much of a fuss about the delivery of the missiles.
The administration appears to be clinging desperately to those delusions. Though State Department spokesman John Kirby said yesterday that the U.S wasn’t happy about the delivery of the missiles or the Iranian stunt at Fordo, he also admitted that Secretary of State John Kerry didn’t spend much time complaining about the issue when he met with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov last Friday in Geneva. The best that Kirby could do was to say the U.S. would be in contact with its allies regarding the presence of the missiles at Fordo.
Don’t expect much out of those consultations. America’s European allies are just as committed to the notion that they have effectively ended the nuclear threat and have no appetite for protests about Fordo, let alone action. As Kirby said, the U.S. is simply going to rely on the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to ensure that the nuclear deal is being enforced.
But the questions about the S-300s at Fordo go deeper than the obvious suspicions about illicit activities or secret nuclear work in the area. Iran knows that all the talk about “snapping back” sanctions if Iran violated the deal or the possibility that force might be used if a “break out” to a weapon were detected by the U.S. is just empty posturing. The U.S. and the Europeans couldn’t wait to dismantle the sanctions on Iran, and it’s not clear what, if anything, it is that Iran could do to convince the West to re-impose them.
The brazen deployment of advanced missiles at a supposedly clean site is one more example of Iran behaving as if it knows it can violate the nuclear deal with impunity. Just as likely is an Iranian strategy of pushing the envelope in terms of compliance that will make the transition to a weapon swift and easy once all of the provisions in the weak accord expire within the next 10-15 years. We already know that Iran has been cheating on the deal as it seeks to acquire illegal nuclear technology in Europe and has also violated other agreements on the testing of ballistic missiles that have no purpose but to provide a delivery system for the bomb that they still disingenuously claim they don’t want.
President Obama’s approach to Iran was always predicated on the notion that its leaders wanted a chance to “get right with the world.” That provided the rationale for a U.S. policy of allowing Syria to descend into chaos since action there would have offended an Iran that was determined to keep its ally, Bashar Assad, in power. But while Iran was grateful for Obama’s willingness to abdicate U.S. responsibilities in the Middle East, its enthusiasm for cooperation was limited to its desire to profit from the end of sanctions and the release of frozen assets that could strengthen its economy, thereby protecting the longevity of the theocratic regime and aiding its push for regional hegemony and support for international terrorism. Since the deal was concluded, Iran has taken every possible opportunity to flaunt its defiance of the West and the presence of the missiles at Fordo is just the latest instance.
Connecting the dots between all of these pieces of evidence about Iran’s current and future plans isn’t that difficult. But doing so requires a determination to look at the facts rather than cling to the administration’s failed hopes about the deal. It remains to be seen whether the president’s successors will be prepared to think clearly about the mess he is leaving them before it is too late to do something about it.
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Conservatism Unbound
Noah Rothman 2016-08-30
Conservatives have long labored under the delusion that conservatism was popular. They told themselves that their policy preferences had a variety of natural constituencies who suffered from an almost Marxian lack of self-awareness. They soothed the pains of electoral rejection with the contention that their views simply needed a champion who shared their convictions, and they eschewed introspection when one advocate after another failed to meet this measure. The 2016 cycle has disabused contemplative conservatives of the idea that their program is preferred by even a majority of Republicans. Conservatives are now adrift, and many of its members have succumbed to despair.
Today, conservatism is an ideology alienated not just from its political home in the GOP but also from the opinion leaders who lent it vitality and legitimacy. This is, however, an artificial condition; it occurs not as conservatism was failing but ascendant. Theirs is a movement with broad ranks with ample representation in government, and it is now largely untethered to its former power centers. This is a dangerous place for any intellectual philosophy to find itself, but it can also be an auspicious one.
The right’s conservative voters long ago became accustomed to being placated by political representatives seeking their vote. They were used to having their preferences defended primarily by self-styled purists with access to booming microphones. They had their egos massaged by those for whom conservatism was as much a product to be peddled, as it was a governing belief structure. Enter Donald Trump and that facade crumbled.
“This is called the Republican Party, it’s not called the Conservative Party,” Trump declared just hours after he had secured the hard-fought title of presumptive Republican presidential nominee. He was not simply rejecting those who had rejected him, but an ideology to which he never adhered and did not respect. Many have noted that Trump’s grasp of the tenets of limited government is tenuous at best and that he speaks broken conservative as though it were a second language. What’s more enlightening about this moment is that so many who fashioned a career for themselves by talking to and speaking for conservatives have abandoned the pretense.
An episode illuminating the conservative right’s unenviable condition occurred recently on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program amid Donald Trump’s tour en l’air toward a more rational immigration policy. More in sorrow than anger, an exasperated Trump skeptic called into the program dedicated to forcing the radio host to confess that Trump’s conservative act was only ever just that. Only after a prosecutorial case was laid before him did Limbaugh concede that he always believed Trump’s border hawk persona was a ruse. That’s no minor admission; at no point in the last 400 days did this trusted host seek to share this observation with his audience.
The melding of the so-called conservative commentary class with the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign lacks precedent. Some the right’s most prominent radio and television hosts and media executives serve not merely to provide the nominee with a stage on which to disseminate his message but as advisors crafting that message. The Republican Party’s institutional organs are committed to Trump’s campaign, if not out of agreement with his vague platform than as a result of an acute case of prisoner’s dilemma. A longstanding persecution complex among conservatives may soon be replaced with a sense of abandonment.
While the conservative right is used to being told by their movement’s thought leaders that their politicians have forsaken them, they are unaccustomed to being disowned by those very same thought leaders. And yet, none of this is occurring because the conservative movement and its champions with an (R) after their names failed to win elections. Quite the opposite; the GOP entered 2016 in a position of authority. The GOP won its largest House majority since World War II in 2014. They retook the Senate and secured a majority of governorships. Most promisingly, the GOP had all but wiped out a generation of Democrats at the legislative level after retaking more than 900 seats from the president’s party since he took office in 2009.
Many of these new elected leaders were and remain conservative true believers—children of the Tea Party movement. Today, they find themselves just as unbound to institutions and emancipated from party leadership as are conservatives in the grassroots. Conservatism hasn’t been replaced with an ideology but a personality. That figure seems destined to lose a national plebiscite in spectacular fashion. And when that mania has subsided, these legitimate elected leaders will remain.
There is an opportunity in all this tragedy. Conservatives are now de facto press secretaries for no politician. They need not twist themselves into knots as Limbaugh had in defense of the indefensible. Their movement’s writers and thinkers, those who are still married to the philosophy of small government, are out there waiting to fill the vacuum left in the wake of what looks like a crushing defeat for Trumpism. But recapitulating the movement and retaking the GOP is a choice, and it will demand compromise from those committed to that project. Conservatism is not popular, and conservatives must come to terms with that. Rarely are movements that promise the public nothing more than the fruits of their own labors voguish. But they can be admired, and their adherents can be respected models worthy of emulation.
Conservatives have options: they can retreat into self-pity, insularity, and uncompromising recalcitrance or they can choose extroversion and evangelism. Conservatives must exemplify the change they wish to see in the nation, if only because they will have the opportunity to reconstitute their movement sooner than they may think.
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Peace in the Western Hemisphere
Max Boot 2016-08-30
All of the usual caveats apply, and it is far too early to judge success or failure, but the very fact that the end of the Colombian civil war may be upon us is big news and deserves more attention than it is getting from the gringo press.
Colombia’s battle against the Marxist insurgents cum drug dealers known as FARC (a Spanish acronym for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is one of the longest running wars on the planet. That conflict is exceeded in length only by the Palestinian conflict against Israel, the Kachin and Karen war against Burma, and a few other rump struggles. As recently as 15 years ago, the FARC controlled a quarter of Colombia’s territory–more land than Switzerland–and appeared on the verge of taking power. From those heady heights to today, with FARC’s 7,000 or so fighters pledged to disarm, is as dramatic a turnabout as we have seen in the annals of counterinsurgency.
What happened? Two factors account for FARC’s downfall.
First and most important was the election of Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia in 2002. He is in many ways the opposite of Hamid Karzai or Nouri al-Maliki, weak leaders who sought to appease powerbroker and warlords and wound up plunging their countries deeper into the hell of internecine conflict. Uribe was a strong man in the best sense–not a dictator but a democratic leader in the tradition of Churchill, Lincoln, and Roosevelt who understood what had to be done to win a war and did it.
He curbed corruption and abuse against by the populace by the security forces. He brokered the disarmament of right-wing militias. He instituted a war tax to pay for an increased war effort, and he committed to a policy of “democratic security” that allowed the military to secure parts of the Colombian countryside that had never been under the control of any central government.
Uribe received a critical assist from the United States. Plan Colombia, begun under President Clinton and expanded by President Bush, funneled more than $10 billion to Colombia. Initially, the money was designed to assist with anti-drug efforts but then, after 9/11, the remit expanded to support the general struggle against FARC, which made perfect sense, because it was impossible to disentangle insurgent activities from those of narco-traffickers. Along with U.S. funds came U.S. advisers, with the Special Forces taking an especially prominent role in advising the Colombian armed forces in the tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.
The U.S. Embassy in Bogota lists some of the achievements that I have glimpsed for myself on several visits to Colombia: “In 2004, the Uribe government established, for the first time in recent Colombian history, a government presence in all of the country’s 1,099 municipalities (county seats). Attacks conducted by illegally armed groups against rural towns decreased by 91 percent from 2002 to 2005. Between 2002 and 2008, Colombia saw a decrease in homicides by 44 percent, kidnappings by 88 percent, terrorist attacks by 79 percent, and attacks on the country’s infrastructure by 60 percent.”
The war might have ended long ago were it not for FARC’s drug-running profits and the shelter that it received from next-door Venezuela. Indeed, one of the failures of Plan Colombia has been a recent increase in Colombian drug production. Still, by any standard, this is spectacular success made possible by the combination of enlightened U.S. aid and enlightened local leadership. Too often the U.S. has been too heavy-handed in advising local allies, and those allies have been led by men such as Karzai and Maliki who were not the great wartime leaders they needed. Colombia was one of the few exceptions to these baleful trends, and what was accomplished there shows the potential of counterinsurgency strategy at its best.
It is all the more regrettable, then, that Uribe, now a senator, is sullying his record by conducting a bitter political campaign against his successor as president, Juan Manual Santos, and the peace accord he has engineered. Uribe should see the treaty as ratification of his success–FARC would never have agreed to stop fighting were it not for the battlefield defeats it suffered beginning in the Uribe administration. But, much like Theodore Roosevelt turning against William Howard Taft, Uribe has decided to prosecute a vendetta against his successor, who served as defense minister in his own government. Uribe is actively campaigning for the Colombian people to reject the accord in a national plebiscite on October 2.
Uribe claims the peace agreement, negotiated in Havana, is full of unwarranted giveaways to FARC. These include a guarantee that FARC’s political party will receive a minimum of five seats in the Senate and five more in the lower chamber of parliament for two legislative terms. The deal promises demobilized FARC fighters a monthly stipend for two years and possible one-time payments of $2,500. The accord also offers an alternative justice system that will allow both ex-guerrillas and soldiers accused of war crimes an alternative to serving long prison terms.
As the Washington Post has noted, Santos himself has described this as “toad swallowing,” i.e., having to take bitter medicine. In an ideal world, the government wouldn’t have to offer such concessions. But the world that Colombia inhabits is hardly ideal. Despite all of the setbacks the rebels have suffered, they could have kept on fighting indefinitely. The government showed itself capable of blunting the insurgency but could not end it entirely by force. Hence, the need to reach a deal with the rebels that naturally includes some sweeteners.
Colombia’s voters will have to pass their own judgment on this accord, but from where I sit—admittedly, a long way from the jungles where FARC has been a law onto itself–it appears to be a fair bargain to end the longest-running war in Latin America and one of the longest anywhere in the world. Colombia will still have deep problems in the future, and there is no doubt that many of the FARC fighters who have known nothing but war will become gangsters rather than solid citizens. But to remove the shadow of war is a significant achievement in a country that has been wracked by internal violence since its 19th Century origins.