GOP War Against the Insufficiently Pro-War in the GOP

James Antle III at American Conservative
sums up some of the opposition facing Republican Party
politicians seen by some financiers and interest groups as
insufficiently hawkish on foreign policy.

North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones is up against:

a primary challenge from former George W. Bush aide Taylor
Griffin—and a barrage of hostile spending from outside
groups.

The Emergency Committee for Israel has launched a
six-figure ad campaign describing Jones as a convert to liberalism.
“Once upon a time, Walter Jones was right for North Carolina but
he’s changed,” says the narrator in the 30-second spot. “Isn’t it
time your vote changed as well?”

A super PAC formed by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts is
also spending$156,000
on ads attacking Jones as some kind of liberal….

As Antle points out, despite developing a dislike for foreign
entanglements, Jones remains:

pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-gun, and has compiled
one of the most reliable socially conservative records in Congress.
He voted to repeal and defund Obamacare. He’s also voted against
many big-ticket spending items supported by most Republicans,
including Bush’s deficit-financed Medicare prescription-drug
benefit, No Child Left Behind, and last year’s farm bill.

Jones’ sin, though, is that he has come “to doubt the
intelligence used to justify the war and turned sharply against
it—and most of the subsequent military interventions pushed by the
bipartisan establishment.”

Michigan’s Justin Amash, Antle points out, is under attack for
generally lacking the willingness to go along to get along and
being an intransigent contributor to “gridlock” (that is, trying to
stop government from doing dumb, unconstitutional things). But his
primary challenger, funded by many wealthy Michiganers, Brian
Willis is also

quick to pounce on Amash’s “bizarre” vote against
tightening Iran sanctions. Amash has supported some carefully
targeted sanctions against Iran. “Sanctions that are directed
toward preventing them from getting weapons of mass destruction, I
think those sanctions are useful and helpful in the short run. I’m
not sure you’d want to use them for 20 years,”
he told Reason.
“But there are other sanctions that are targeted at the people of
Iran. Those are not beneficial to the United States.”

Antle goes on to discuss, as Matthew Feeney
has written about here at Reason, that Sheldon Adelson
thinks Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is bad for Israel and the United
States and intends to spend all he must to make sure Paul never
becomes the GOP presidential nominee.

Antle’s stinging conclusion:

Former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer says of
Paul, “there’s still a naiveté that’s going to be a problem. He
represents a departure from something a lot of Republicans are used
to.”

Hopefully a departure from losing wars and elections.