Sanders warns U.S. against ‘quagmire’ of ‘perpetual warfare’ in Mideast for 20, 30 years

Anyone hoping for a more realist U.S. foreign policy had to be buoyed by Senator Bernie Sanders’s performance in the New Hampshire debate last night. He said that the United States should stay out of the “quagmire” of “perpetual war” in the Middle East. He called out Hillary Clinton for backing “regime change” that just fosters turmoil. He said that Assad must stay in Syria. And he mentioned great interventionist foreign policy mistakes, from removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq to toppling Allende in Chile in 1973 to removing Mohammed Mossadegh as Iranian Prime Minister in 1953.

Mohammed Mossadegh
Mohammed Mossadegh

Indeed, the Mossadegh mistake of more than 60 years ago was trending last night; former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley also mentioned the Mossadegh coup as a foreign policy error.

Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton directly, saying that a “fundamental difference” between himself and the former secretary of state is that she is “too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.” The Iraq war, he pointed out, created turmoil, instability and terrorism.

He opened the night with the warning about perpetual warfare, albeit with the inevitable political gestures on ISIS:

I’m running for president because I want a new foreign policy, one that takes on ISIS, one that destroys ISIS, but one that does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East, but rather works around a major coalition of wealthy and powerful nations supporting Muslim troops on the ground.

The quagmire language was reminiscent of the Vietnam War, of course. Sanders’s challenge also goes to all the hawks of the Republican Party. Sanders is putting out ideas that we can only hope gain traction in the political process. Though, no, he is not going so far as to say what so many thoughtful scholars of the realist left are saying, that terrorism is an understandable response to western intervention in the region. Today Sanders talks about Mossadegh, maybe he will talk about Sykes Picot tomorrow….

Sanders has sounded these anti-interventionist themes for a long time. A year ago he said he’d be damned if the U.S. led the fight against ISIS.

“I’ll be damned if kids in the state of Vermont — or taxpayers in the state of Vermont — have to defend the royal Saudi family, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”

But last night he said so openly and forcefully with a national audience. He denounced the idea that the U.S. must be the policeman of the world, and did so in populist, almost isolationist scorn:

What I believe right now, and I believe this is terribly important, is the United States of American cannot succeed or be thought of as the policeman of the world, that when there’s an international crisis all over the world, in France, or in the UK– Hey just call up the American military and the American taxpayers, they’re going to send their troops, and if they have to be in the Middle East for 20 or 30 years, no problem.  I have a problem with that.

He challenged Saudia Arabia to go to war against ISIS rather than in Yemen and also called out Qatar:

Tell Qatar, instead of spending $200 billion on the World Cup, maybe they should pay attention to ISIS.

He said that the terrible blunder of the Iraq war had generated terrorism; and he called for an international coalition with Russia to deal with Syria, which means keeping Assad.

Yes we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS…. Yeah, regime change is easy. Getting rid of dictators is easy… The truth is it is relatively easy for a powerful nation like American to overthrow a dictator…

But in the Syrian case, “the primary focus now must be on destroying ISIS and working over the years to get rid of Assad.” International coalitions, he said, would “move steadily and maybe slowly toward democratic societies.” Steadily but maybe slowly. That means about never.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su9f3x_dtgw

Israel barely got one mention in the debate last night. Of course, we keep waiting for Sanders to mention that the Israeli quagmire of 50 years of occupation is fostering terrorism (which he understands; he went out to live in Israel when it was the socialist utopia of his youth). He does hint at the truth on his foreign policy web page:

Moreover, the failure to resolve that crisis [the Israel Palestine conflict] has helped fuel other conflicts in the region.

Crisis– a helpful world. In his piece on Sanders’s appeal at the National Journal, John Judis says the middle/upper-middle professionals who support Sanders are antiwar, and not at all troubled by his socialism. They throw around the word “revolution”:

What excited them is the belief that a “polit­ic­al re­volu­tion” is ne­ces­sary.

Dur­ing the past two dec­ades… the pro­gress­ive Left has again be­gun to stir. The con­trib­ut­ing factors have been var­ied—op­pos­i­tion to the Ir­aq war; the in­creas­ing power (es­pe­cially at the state level) of an ever-more-con­ser­vat­ive GOP; a grow­ing sense, in the wake of the Great Re­ces­sion, that con­spicu­ous con­sump­tion, polit­ic­al cor­rup­tion, and un­der-reg­u­lated cap­it­al­ism were all out of con­trol.

It is reminiscent of the Ron Paul revolution in the last presidential race, which also had a populist, anti-war character. Ron Paul’s son Rand has sold out to the hawks, alas, but there is surely a lot of antiwar feeling in the country that requires leadership and instruction. By talking about Mossadegh, Sanders (along with O’Malley) is doing that.

 

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Sorry, but I don’t see a professed Zionist such as Sanders making any real difference in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in the long run. He will tow the Israeli line. So he wants Saudia Arabia to be our proxy war criminal against ISIS instead of against Yemen. Nice for the suffering innocents in Yemen, but how does that really improve the situation overall? Plus, it reflects his overall support of the illegal and immoral machinations of our fetid Empire .He’ll slaughter different innocents in different places, but the blood will continue to flow.

Again, great coverage. I couldn’t watch the whole thing, then relied on the NYT to summarize. No mention of Mossadegh, there. In searching to see what coverage there was, I couldn’t find any about the debate, and precious little about Sanders Foreign Policy in the MSM. But here’s a fine article at Salon.com about his recent speech at Georgetown, and the tendency to dismiss him as not serious on foreign policy, because he’s not saying what hawks (i.e., the Elite Establishment) want to hear:

“Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgement that unilateral military action should be a last resort…and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. It begins with the reflection that the failed policy decisions of the past – rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Arbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sort of policies that do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/25/bernie_sanderss_refreshingly_sane_foreign_policy/

This seems like an indictment of CIA covert operations as generally applied to engineering regime change through violence with “plausible deniability.” And there are several different forms in his bag of “failed policy decisions.”

Iraq involved “fixing the intelligence” to match the policy, adopted very publicly. I believe many of those other actions were taken covertly, without public debate, blamed on locals to preserve “plausible deniability,” and who knows how much the President or the Congress, which alone has constitutional authority to declare war, knew about these decisions. Certainly, killing a foreign ruler is an act of war.

So Sanders seems very much on board with holding the Elite Establishment accountable, but can he do that without mentioning AIPAC? or what his own Zionism means to him as an American politician?

I still think Hillary has the best shot, but it is tantalizing to imagine that, at some point, she and Sanders will have a donnybrook on her pledge of allegiance to “neoliberalism,” its money men, and their “policy advisors.” And, surviving this, will have to do it all over again, against Trump, who won’t be so nice, in how he discusses these issues and people.

the good news is we have a little time. the bad news is there’s a sense of inevitability and defeatism regarding clinton. she’s like the huge shopping center w/ walmart, barnes&noble and petco with a full parking lot plopped down right outside of a small town where the small businesses are going out of business. how do you compete with that? i just don’t see anyone overtaking her before the primary even tho we have a little bit of time. but i think we’ll have 2 conservatives on the ticket, no choice for someone like myself.

He was pretty good, though it could have been better. Here’s a suggestion: https://twitter.com/michaelbd/status/678402357026283521

“Indeed, the Mossadegh mistake of more than 60 years ago was trending last night; former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley also mentioned the Mossadegh coup as a foreign policy error.”

Interesting – but not surprising – that these people see the toppling of a popular leaderonly in terms of what is and isn’t good for the US.

Besides, I’m not sure if the Mossadeq coup d’etat was an ‘error’ for US foreign policy. The Pahlavis served US – and Israeli – interests very well until the Islamic revolution in 1979. Neither the Americans nor the Israelis want an independent, democratic Iran, whatever they might say for public consumption. A return to the Pahlavis, or similar, would suit them much, much better than the genuine democracy Iran may have been becoming back in the Mossadeq days.