Here in Orlando I flipped the rental car radio on for a trip to Chick-fil-A. I found an NPR host interviewing Victoria Coates, a PhD art historian (LinkedIn profile) now working as an advisor to Ted Cruz. The host plainly wants to celebrate Barack Obama’s achievements in negotiating a deal with Iran. Start listening to the audio at about 6 minutes in for how Coates responds. It is interesting even if you don’t have a strong opinion on the subject.
Worth playing if your parents are questioning your decision to major in art history!
Thank you for the link, Phil.
I have newfound respect for how one can traverse from art to politics. (But maybe that in and of itself isn’t such a large bridge to cross.)
I’d also like to nominate Ms. Coates for president, based singularly on her Middle East policy opinions.
Very interesting position on the Iran deal. Thanks for sharing.
Mark: I don’t think Dr. Coates would make a viable presidential candidate, though it would be cool to have a second PhD in the White House (Woodrow Wilson being the last one and he is not fondly remembered). The interview didn’t wander into economic territory but somehow I don’t see her telling American voters what they want to hear on the subjects of minimum wage, entitlement to various kinds of paid leaves, etc. Also she seems to be more interested in facts and rational analysis than in feelings. Americans want a president with a big heart and if things go horribly wrong they can say “her heart was in the right place.”
(And can you see Dr. Coates joining Sheryl Sandberg to complain about how women can’t get ahead in a world dominated by men? Talking about how women are ridiculously underpaid compared to men and yet profit-seeking companies haven’t figured this out and responded by hiring only women? If not, she can’t win. Look how frequently Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and other successful politicians talk about the gender pay gap and what they’re doing to close it.)
Is she doing too many magic mushrooms? Last time I checked the US *lost* money by going to war in Iraq, and destabilised the country enough to let ISIS flourish. Also, you lost that war by any metric. Is Teddy just desperate to wast your tax money (given that the might US armed forces are still a tax founded institution of the state) putting an army down against a terrorist/guerrilla enemy? I presume Teddy did not serve in Vietnam… wikipedia could tell me, but checking Teddy out on wiki seems creepy.
Federico: We lost the Vietnam War in 1975. If we assume the youngest soldier who served in that war was 18 in 1975, he or she would today be a minimum of 59 years old.
Dr. Coates proposed sending in ground troops to fight against ISIS? Where in the audio clip is that? I didn’t hear that on the radio (she said the opposite, when asked about the idea of an Army base in Turkey).
The US cannot revoke the “Iran deal.” The deal is between UN P5+1 and Iran. US can act alone and re-impose sanctions limited to US corps only, or go to war with Iran. If Iran is in compliance per IAEA inspections, Putin will not sit by while US (or Israel ) takes any war like action against Iran. Ted Cruz, or any President, will not risk war with Russia over Iran.
This women has never made a strategic decision involving national security in her life. And never will. Joint Chiefs will eat her alive.
Drones save lives. Collateral damage is part of war, whether declared or not.
Phil, did bombing the North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia made any difference to the outcome of the war? No. Any art historian thinking ‘we can start a war and win just by bombing from above’ would be better off shut up and bother to ask the US military for some advice — especially in respect to the fine point of ‘what are we trying to achieve?’. Does Teddy and this lady like dropping your tax money from the sky for no benefit whatsoever? I am all for fighting ISIS, I just prefer to use methods that might actually work without pushing me to bankruptcy,
@Federico @paul You are arguing against points not made in the interview. Ms. Coates did not propose bombing Iran. Revoking the recent agreement as she (and Cruz) suggested would mean returning to the pre-agreement diplomatic, economic, and financial sanctions. Iranian assets would remain frozen in New York, for example. Ms. Coates opposed U.S. ground troops against ISIS. In response to questions about Mr. Cruz’s campaign trail rhetoric about ISIS she implied that it would be okay to bomb ISIS without worrying as much as Obama (currently overseeing a bombing campaign against ISIS) about hitting non-ISIS targets nearby. Putin is also bombing ISIS targets. Cruz’s rhetoric on ISIS translates into a change in tactics but the same strategy currently being used by Obama and Putin. Ms. Coates advocated returning to our January 2015 position on Iran.
Do you want an art historian for president? Then you should vote for Carly!
Forget the art degree, consider the astounding political success of a merely amateur artist from Austria in the 1930s!
Forget Dr. Coates’ art history degree; note that, before Ted Cruz, she worked for Donald Rumsfeld and Rick Perry. So her C.V. etc. must carry a bevy of “right connections” and letters of recommendations from Our Kind of People (if not outright nepotism, of which we know nothing). Judging by that her NPR podcast, she’s quite competent as a spin doctor, for which occupation there really is no clear cut PhD education. Also, I wouldn’t pay much attention to Cruz’ political goals that she so glibly promotes… it’s the kind of positioning fodder that politicians must emit in order to distinguish themselves from one another. And for the Republicans in the running practically all of that comes down to trying to find holes in the Obama whole, even though, as #7 paul kramarchyk notes, the USA can not unilaterally revoke the Iran agreements. But let’s not expect coherence or logic from upstart pretenders, or from their überverbal advisors. Q.E.D.
ADMINISTRIVIA: the server substitutes a perfectly valid HTML link to a MP3 file by a rendered [+ Audio MP3] object (in the process destroying the link’s label). When that clicked, it shifts text column downwards, but does not render any audio player in MobileSafari. Here’s the suppressed link, which I now have to chop up to make it render as text (I hope)
http://www.podtrac.
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org/takeaway/takeaway012816-cruz.mp3
The Cruz audio at the start of the NPR clip is an almost perfect model of what the Australian conservative analyst Chris Berg has called the “it’s-the-thought-that-counts” school of military action.
This is the school that says that what matters is the US objective, and that all the obvious long-term and short-term negative consequences can therefore be ignored. When Cruz says “the object isn’t to level the city, the object is to kill the ISIS terrorists”, he seems to be saying that if things don’t go to plan, that’s just too bad – what matters is that our +goal+ was good. He’s reviving the pattern of the Iraq conversation: talk about US motivations, and avoid any mention of the Iraqi casualty figures, which were in the tens of thousands at least.
Yet problem of terrorists embedded in civilian populations is a real one, as plenty of people on both sides of politics realise. My hope is that Cruz knows this and is just trawling for votes.