Tom Cotton finally finds some tweets he objects to. Surprise: They’re from a Biden nominee.

Tom Cotton finally finds some tweets he objects to. Surprise: They’re from a Biden nominee.

Opinion by 

Max Boot

Columnist

March 12, 2021 at 4:34 a.m. GMT+9

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on Feb. 26. (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg)

I am really delighted to hear that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) is fed up with “intemperate and unbalanced remarks” made in the course of disagreements about public policy. So fed up, in fact, that he thinks such “harsh criticism” should be a disqualifier for holding high office. I assume that means that Cotton is rethinking his servile loyalty to former president Donald Trump.

After all, Trump’s entire presidency was characterized by his poisonous personal insults against people he disagreed with. Trump routinely characterized his critics, including members of Congress, as “losers,” “VERY LOW I.Q. individuals,” “Wack Jobs,” “dumb as a rock,” “stupid,” “crazy” and a “total disaster.” Even many of Cotton’s Republican colleagues have been on the receiving end of these juvenile taunts. Trump recently called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.” Cotton himself was targeted by a Trump tweet after he urged Trump to recognize that he lost the election.

But, of course, Cotton is not rethinking his loyalty to Trump. He is likely to run for president as a Trump mini-me — unless Trump runs again himself. Cotton’s faux concern for comity was merely an excuse to oppose Colin Kahl’s nomination as undersecretary of defense for policy.

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Kahl is one of the nation’s most respected international relations scholars and practitioners. He is a political scientist who has previously taught at Georgetown and is now co-director of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He first worked for the Defense Department during the George W. Bush administration. During the Obama administration, he became deputy assistant secretary of defense under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican holdover who awarded him a medal for outstanding public service.

Kahl was no softy. An Obama administration official tells me that he advocated keeping U.S. forces in Iraq past the 2011 withdrawal deadline if possible and hitting back against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq that attacked U.S. troops. He was also an early advocate of helping Israel to develop its Iron Dome rocket-defense system.

Kahl went on to serve then-Vice President Joe Biden as his national security adviser, earning Biden’s trust. In that position he worked on the Iran nuclear deal, which reduced Iran’s uranium stockpile by 98 percent. The right is furious with Kahl — described by the Wall Street Journal editorial board as “a dogmatic proponent of the Iran nuclear deal” — for wanting to revive the accord after Trump exited it and Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment.

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But the GOP couldn’t convince any Democrats to oppose Kahl on those grounds given that President Biden himself has pledged to revive the nuclear deal if possible. So Kahl’s GOP critics are focusing on his allegedly intemperate tweets — a strategy that already allowed them to derail the nomination of Neera Tanden as head of the Office of Management and Budget.

What is it that Kahl has tweeted that is so terrible?

He criticized some Republicans’ support for Trump’s 2019 decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria, abandoning our Kurdish allies: “The GOP used to pride itself as a party that put values front and center in US foreign policy. Now — as they debase themselves at the alter [sic] of Trump — they are the party of ethnic cleansing.” (Cotton himself warned that Trump’s decision could lead to “widespread bloodshed,” and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis quit in protest.)

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Kahl also wrote, in a comment that was obviously not intended to be taken literally, that “we are going to die” when John Bolton became national security adviser. That is a gibe that Trump would now presumably endorse: After Bolton left the administration, Trump tweeted that Bolton “likes dropping bombs on people.”

Kahl protested Trump’s decision to veto a bipartisan bill cutting off U.S. support for the catastrophic Saudi war in Yemen: “Every Republican Senator who upheld Trump’s veto now shares ownership of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and adds their signature to the blank check Trump has given to Saudi Arabia.”

And he quoted an op-ed criticizing Republicans for their “death cult fealty to Trump” during the covid-19 pandemic.

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During his confirmation hearing last week, Kahl apologized for his “sometimes disrespectful” tweets, but, really, he has nothing to be sorry for. He merely called out Republicans for their own extremism. The GOP really has become a Trump cult. Cotton, who wanted to deploy troops to suppress racial injustice protests, is sadly typical.

Republican senators are engaging in disingenuous blather when they try to compare Kahl to retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, whose nomination to the same Defense Department post was withdrawn last year in the face of bipartisan opposition. Tata is a conspiratorial nut who called former president Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and a “Manchurian candidate” with “Islamic roots.”

Kahl, by contrast, is a highly competent policymaker with moderate, mainstream views. Stopping his confirmation would not change the Biden administration’s policy one iota. It would merely allow Republicans to claim one more Democratic nominee at the cost of denying the Pentagon the leadership it urgently needs now to confront looming threats from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

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