Terrorism dominates GOP race

The intertwined issues of terrorism and national security are dominating the Republican presidential race with less than a month to go before the Iowa caucuses.

As campaigning recommenced in earnest on Monday after the holiday season, at least three major candidates were pitching their plans to deal with terrorism in general and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in particular.

{mosads}Front-runner Donald Trump released his first television ad of the election cycle, which emphasized his plan to temporarily suspend Muslim immigration to the United States. The ad also promised that Trump would “quickly cut the head off ISIS and take their oil.”

Marco Rubio delivered a major policy address at an American Legion in Hooksett, N.H., in which he slammed not only President Obama and his erstwhile Secretary of State — Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton — but also GOP rivals including Trump and Ted Cruz.

Another GOP contender, Jeb Bush, released an ad Monday asserting that “serious times require serious leadership” and insisting that “the United States should not delay in leading a global coalition to take out ISIS with overwhelming force.”

The candidates can be divided into those who revel in rhetorical combativeness toward ISIS and those who say the others are too intemperate to execute a successful strategy.

Joining Trump in the first camp is Cruz, who recently pledged, regarding ISIS, to “carpet bomb them into oblivion,” adding, “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re gonna find out.”

But just as notable as the division itself is the fact that so many candidates are placing focusing on terrorism with the first nominating contests so soon.

The terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., played the biggest role in moving the issue up the political agenda, according to many observers.

“Terrorism was always lurking as a major issue, but those two events forced it to the front of the Republican campaign,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a Boston University professor who specializes in political communication.

Trump’s pledge to bar Muslims from entering the United States was perhaps the most controversial of his statements, yet it appears to have done him no harm at all among Republican voters. He first made the proposal on Dec. 7, when the RealClearPolitics national polling average showed Trump drawing the support of 30 percent of GOP voters. Now, he is 5 points higher.

“Trump, who is so outspoken, can really express the anger that a lot of Americans feel about terrorism — and what they feel about America’s lack of an aggressive response to it,” Berkovitz said.

Some GOP insiders see it very differently.

Ric Grenell, who served as a spokesman for several U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations, insisted that Republican voters want to see credible plans to defeat ISIS and other terrorist organizations. 

Grenell also suggested that Obama’s fondness for high-flown rhetoric has left the Republican grass roots even more skeptical than they might otherwise be of any candidate who seems all talk and no action.

“After seven years of watching Barack Obama talk big and implement almost nothing, Republican voters are very sensitive to those who just want to talk bluster. They want to see plans and actions. They want someone who doesn’t just talk about lighting up the sand like a green lantern, or whatever Cruz said,” Grenell asserted with a laugh.

“If you say you want to bomb the hell out of ISIS, you need to have a plan to bomb the hell out of ISIS, and what that means is that you can’t just do an air campaign, because that has to be coordinated, with intelligence and boots on the ground,” he added.

Grenell and others acknowledge there is political complexity in adopting such a position. There is a clear belief in the United States that the fight against terrorism is not going well. In a CNN/ORC poll late last month, 74 percent of Americans indicated they were “not too satisfied” or “not at all satisfied” with “the way things are going for the U.S. in the war on terrorism.”

But that does not translate to widespread support for large-scale ground operations by U.S. troops in the Middle East — a reluctance presumably fueled by the experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same poll showed a split — 49 percent for each option — on the question of whether or not to commit ground troops against ISIS.

That could be part of the reason why leading candidates take very different positions on that question. Trump and Chris Christie support ground troops, while Cruz opposes them and Rubio would like the United States to get the job done with the use of special operations forces only.

For the moment, the main thing uniting Republicans is the belief that they can use national security issues to their advantage against Obama and Clinton, whose refusal to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” is a bugbear on the right.

“When someone refuses to use the words ‘Islamic terrorism,’ what they are really telling us is that they are more concerned about being politically correct rather than being focused on keeping everyone safe,” Grenell said.