New Hampshire has refocused the race for president a bit, and now we’re bracing for the contests to come. As I write, another Democratic debate is scheduled for this evening. My hope is that Senator Sanders will have worked out a way of speaking about foreign policy that will make him less of a target on that score. I’m not suggesting that he adopt more hawkish positions – quite the opposite. He just needs to articulate some of the quite nuanced views that he has held for many years. If ever we needed an alternative take on foreign policy, that time is now.
{Later that evening … }
Okay, I did hear some encouraging words from Senator Sanders on war and peace. Not enough, in my opinion, but certainly better than last time. I am glad that he gave some historical perspective to a position that is just as relevant today as it was in the 1950s: the conviction that the United States should not be acting like an empire, overthrowing disobedient regimes whenever we feel like it, bombing wherever we please, always opting early for the sword. Clinton did what she always does – offer a set of proposals that extend the bad policy we are currently implementing. Could Sanders have disagreed more with the underlying premises of her positions? Oh, yes … but you have to pick your fights in a television debate.
It was heartening to hear Sanders call Clinton out on her bragging about being endorsed, in a sense, by Henry Kissinger. I’m very glad he addressed that, because it counteracts Clinton’s attempt at arguing that political fights of previous decades have no bearing on the current policy debate. Kissinger is still a player and continues to undergo a kind of rehabilitation promoted by both Republicans and – shamefully – Democrats. Sanders was right to denounce him as in essence a war criminal, with the blood of many thousands on his hands. Maybe I was in the minority in being gobsmacked by Clinton’s invocation of Kissinger at the last debate – she tried to minimize it a bit during the PBS debate somewhat, but that fell kind of flat.
It’s incumbent upon us, the other America, to push Sanders and, yes, Clinton to the left on these and other issues. We cannot afford to continue these bankrupt policies overseas; if we just accept the comforting lies, we can look forward to another decade or more of pointless war.
luv u,
jp
This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn’t find on a globe with both hands. I’ve lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, to the embassy bombings in the late 1990s and on into the 9/11 era. I can remember a Muslim friend from Bosnia being a bit taken aback by the rhetoric and the kind of full-on nationalism pushed through the corporate media that came about after Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. It’s times like these when Muslims – and yes, people with beards and headscarves more generally – feel compelled to start looking over their shoulders.
Okay, that was a sobering sign, to be sure. Even more infuriating than the sideshow atmospherics was the framing of the questions, delivered for the most part by Anderson Cooper. While the Democratic field is decidedly to the left, at least from a rhetorical perspective, of where they were even eight years ago, the corporate media questioners proceeded through the lens of Reagan’s America. The signal example of this for me was Cooper’s comment to Bernie Sanders about his support for the Sandinista government in Nicargua in the 1980s, as if that was a particularly controversial position in retrospect. (This can be equated with opposition to the Contra terror war against that government being pursued by the Reagan administration at the time – a war so broadly opposed by the American people that Congress had explicitly banned funding for the Contra forces.)