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| US Candidates Split Along Odd Lines |
| US Candidates Split Along Odd Lines On Mideast Regime Change
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 28-December-2015
4:15:21 AM |
| America's 2016 presidential candidates are split on promoting regime change in the Middle East, but not along the usual party lines.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is aligned with Republican contenders Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie in casting Assad's ouster as key to defeating the ISIS. Republican contenders Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are finding common cause with Democrats Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley in suggesting it's better to keep authoritarian leaders - including Syria's Bashar Assad - in power as a bulwark against extremism.
The divide reflects a nation still grappling with its role in the world after President George W Bush's eight years in office, when regime change was at the centre of US foreign policy, and trying to decide how best to combat the rising threat posed by ISIS. The twisted alliances among the candidates raise the prospect of a political role-reversal in the general election, in which the Democratic nominee could be more hawkish than the Republican.
Cruz, a Texas senator popular among the most conservative Republicans, is among the most vocal in challenging the idea that the US should depose dictators - or support others' efforts to do so - to fight extremists in the Muslim world.
"We need to learn from history," Cruz said in a Republican debate last week. "Obama, Clinton and far too many Republicans want to topple Assad." The Syrian president is a "bad man," he added, but so too was Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, whom the US helped overthrow in 2011. And Cruz noted that Gadhafi and former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak assisted the US "in fighting terrorists."
Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, echoed that sentiment in Saturday's Democratic debate, saying it is "relatively easy for a powerful nation like America to overthrow a dictator." What is very hard, he said, is "to predict the unintended consequences and the turmoil and the instability that follows after you overthrow
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