Help us Bernie Sanders — You’re our only hope
Two years after Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor in 2007 to denounce waterboarding as torture and calling for George W Bush to be held accountable for violating the Constitution with his illegal war, Barack Obama instructed his attorney general Eric Holder not to investigate George W Bush and Dick Cheney for their war crimes in Iraq, instead saying “we need to look forwards instead of looking backwards”.
That flippant and politically expedient attitude excusing an illegal war based on false pretenses, and Obama’s subsequent abuse of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, has put us in a precarious position in which a president can do just about anything to a Muslim nation or its leaders without fear of reproach.
Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic House voted overwhelmingly to approve a military budget that was stripped of an amendment authored by Bernie Sanders that would end our complicity in Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen as well as restore The War Powers Act which requires a president to go through Congress before they start dropping bombs and deploying troops.
That unwillingness of Democrats to stand up to Trump and against interventional war has all but given the green light to Trump to start a war with Iran, a war telegraphed by Trump’s breaching our commitment to the Iran Nuclear Deal along with crippling sanctions on Iranian oil exports that have crashed the economy and broadened anti-American sentiment. Trump’s assassination of vaunted military leader Qassam Soleimani has drawn stern warnings from Iranian allies Russia and China, an eerie flashback to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand which ignited World War I.
Once again, Bernie Sanders was and is right. We are seeing a government controlled by war profiteers and the financial industry, so committed to working in their interest over ours that they would literally have us obliterated instead of admitting that the “War on Terror” is a complete hoax (as if the Afghanistan Papers don’t prove that point). The United States has killed at least half a million Muslim civilians as the result of our interventions in the Middle East since 2003. And since the the “War on Terror” began 16 years ago, not only have Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks skyrocketed in the region, but the number of Islamist-inspired foreign terrorist organizations has increased four hundred percent.
In March of this year, the Senate passed Sanders’ “War Powers Act on Yemen”, a bill designed not only to end our participation in Saudi Arabia’s assault on the impoverished people of that country, but to assure that our “elected representatives take back their constitutional responsibilities on the issues of war”. In returning the decision to deploy the US military on foreign soil to Congress, Sanders’ immediate hope was not only to end our involvement in Yemen but to prevent what appeared at the time to be an impending confrontation with Iran. Yet it was a Democrat, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Adam Smith, who negotiated with Mohammed Bin Salman’s BFF Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, to strip the “War Powers Act” from the military budget bill, as well as to include billions in spending for Trump’s “Space Force”. Smith then went on to proclaim that this military spending bill was “the most progressive defense bill we have passed in ages,” reinforcing the fact that much of the Democratic Party knows as much about the tenets of progressivism as Hillary Clinton knows about peace.
Perhaps Smith is alluding to the “pragmatic progressivism” of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, those revered Democratic leaders who “get stuff done” like bombing Libya and Syria into the stone age and escalating drone strikes to 10 times the level of the Bush administration. The Afghanistan Papers show that Obama was well aware of the utter futility of the Afghanistan War when he ordered a troop surge in 2009, sending more young Americans to to their deaths in order not to appear “weak on terror” to appease Fox News Islamaphobes and the Republicans who despised him. While Bernie Sanders voted in favor of the original authorization for use of military force in Afghanistan to seek out Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaueida, he did so with the caution, noting that “I will vote for this resolution because I believe that the use of force is one tool that we have at our disposal to fight against the horror of terrorism and mass murder. One tool but it is not our only tool, and it is something that must be used wisely… and with great discretion.” When Sanders saw that the military was not being used wisely at all in this instance, he voted against the next Defense Authorization Bill, which included over $600 billion more to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, calling these wars “unwinnable” and labeling Obama’s theatrical “surge” of 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan as “a very, very, very bad idea”.
Meanwhile, when Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not arming terrorists in Syria, her State Department was selling a record number of weapons to nations classified as “terrorist nations”. This included $163 billion in weapons sales Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emerates, all of which donated millions of dollars to The Clinton Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State. Perhaps arming terrorist nations in a destabilized region was not the greatest strategy for troops or civilians in the Middle East, but it did very well for the military contractors who donated to the Clinton Foundation and those who made payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements.
While George W Bush and Dick Cheney ignited the flame that put us on the brink of World War III, the Democrats have done everything to fan it and absolutely nothing to extinguish it. They have played into the hands of political expediency to deadly effect, trying to please Republicans by climbing all over one another to prove they are “tough on terror”, appeasing nationalist tendencies fueled by toxic patriotism while caving to a military industrial complex and corporate media that thrives on perpetual war.
Both parties and their respective medias not only have the blood of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Muslims on their hands, but they have escalated their fabricated wars to the point that our entire country is at risk. They are all guilty of reinforcing a petrifying fear of Muslims and linking that to terrorism, a terrorism that in reality is of minimal risk to the average American. In fact, the evidence shows that there is absolutely no correlation between offensive counterterrorism efforts to the rate of terrorism in the US, but there is a direct correlation between our occupations and an escalation in terrorist-related deaths in those occupied countries as well as in the US itself. In fact, it is 1,000 times more likely that an American will die from poverty, lack of access to health care, or gun violence than an act of international terrorism, causes of mortality that neither party will stand
It might already be too late for that leader who is not afraid to stand up to the military industrial complex, the faux patriotism of both political parties and a media that promotes war as fodder for raucous panel discussions populated by surrogates from the military industrial complex. If nobody will stop the use of military force for the common offense rather than the common defense, the political parties interested solely in the maintenance of their own power will surely kill us all. It is bad enough they passively let us die through their unwillingness to stand up to the health care conglomerates, the gun lobby, the private prison industry and the fossil fuel companies, but now they equip and enable a madman to escalate conflict with a country allied with two nuclear superpowers.
There was a point in the 2016 presidential primary that graphically illustrated the difference between the hypocrisy and and shortsightedness of a candidate whose rhetoric foments perpetual war and a candidate with a vision to completely transform the fearmongering and profit-taking that guides our involvement in the Middle East towards one of diplomacy and respect. During this primary, Hillary Clinton was the one who was looked upon by Democratic Party media as the foreign policy “expert”, never pointing out that all of the foreign policy “experts” backing Clinton (and the media as well) supported every war in the Middle East, while Bernie Sanders was portrayed as someone who avoided discussing foreign policy because he was naive and inexperienced. That same media talked little about Clinton’s uninformed and fearmongering floor speech pushing for an invasion of Iraq in 2002, a speech in which she predicted the exact opposite of what was true about Saddam Hussein as well as the eventual outcome of the invasion.
But the corporate media talked even less about her disastrous performance as Secretary of State under Obama. She lied in order to justify bombing Libya, which is now a failed state embroiled in chronic civil war and holding auctions of African slaves, and found Qadaffi’s death to be a laugh riot. She supported a program to arm “rebels” in Syria, only to arm the very terrorists cells we were fighting against. Her State Department sold billions of dollars in weaponry to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while leaked e-mails explicitly show that she was aware that these two countries were major state sponsors of ISIS and Al Qeaida. She supported Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, despite evidence that the past seven years of US occupation had further destabilized that country. In fact, while there is no debating her wealth of knowledge about the situation in the region, Clinton supported all seven of our failed military interventions in the Middle East.
Then it is to be expected when Bernie Sanders suggested in the 2016 campaign that we try to normalize relations with Iran by building upon the progress made by Obama’s nuclear agreement, Clinton and the media were all over him, suggesting that his desire to normalize relations with a country that is a major state sponsor of terrorism and discussion of foreign policy in general was outside of Sanders’ “comfort zone”. But that same media, and the ten former Obama and Clinton administration diplomats who chimed in against Sanders, failed to mention that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other US allies that Clinton was so enthusiastic about selling weapons to are also major state sponsors of terrorism, yet the power elite seem to have a very cozy relationship with them. When Clinton ridiculed Sanders for not having nearly as much connection to the US foreign policy establishment as she did, it was of course portrayed as a liability rather than an opportunity for a much needed fresh start and a potential drawdown of our seven wars, all of which have increased terrorism and instability in those countries. And it seems that we would indeed be safer today if we had heeded Sanders’ approach to build upon the “thaw in our relations with Iran” rather than repeating cliched chest-thumping rhetoric about the dangers Iran poses and how we have to remain “strong in the world”.
So when the Trump administration assassinates a military leader in another country, he is just capitalizing on the false narrative pushed by the warped ideology of muscular American imperialism enthusiastically supported by both political parties and their media, an ideology that is just a house of cards, bound to be toppled when the wrong card is turned. While we have been lucky, our luck is about to run out. Someone who a vision of diplomacy over war, a vested interest in humanity and is not influenced by the consistently wrong and deceptive foreign policy establishment must intervene now. Someone unafraid to introduce legislation to ward off World War III, legislation that Republicans and the majority of Democrats would not dare propose.
Bernie Sanders understands the power of the pursestrings in Congress, which is why he joined with Rho Khanna in reintroducing their joint legislation in the Senate which would block funding for a war with Iran. Bernie Sanders was doing something about the potential end of the world as we know it before it became a crisis, as he seems to do about everything from the financial crisis to the war in Iraq. His sense of decency and integrity, along with his freedom from the shackles of big-donor influence, will foster a transformative diplomacy unencumbered by the saber rattling and profit-taking necessitated by a fabricated “War on Terror”. Bernie Sanders is the antidote for the political expediency that threatens to make good on that mushroom cloud George W Bush promised courtesy of Iraq back in 2002. His foreign policy priorities will not be dictated by Fox News, MSNBC, either political party, corporate America, lying generals who end up as talking heads on corporate media, or the hundred millionaires and billionaires, so he will be free to de-escalate conflicts and the military budget that fuels them.
Which is why Bernie Sanders, are you indeed our only hope.
