Bernie Sanders came out of his meeting at the White House with the president yesterday talking, hoarsely, about the price young people paid for the terrible decision to invade Iraq. He reminded the press that he had differed with Hillary Clinton about the wisdom of that undertaking 13 years ago.
Look frankly, and we did talk about this– as you all know, I voted against the war in Iraq. And that’s a major point of difference between Secretary Clinton and myself. We both received the same information, and we came to a different conclusion. And as I mentioned to the president, I, In my small state of Vermont went to too, too many funerals of wonderful young people. And I’m very happy to tell you that in the last few years I have not gone to funerals of young men or women in our military. I think what the president is trying to do is the right thing. And what he’s trying to do is keep our young people out of a perpetual war in the the quagmire of the Middle East.
Sanders also highlighted his opposition to the war at the Democratic town hall in Iowa on Monday night, and in his hoarse speech in Mason City, IA, last night.
The Iraq war was supposed to be over years ago. But it is hanging around this year’s election. In fact, it is propelling the two leading insurgents in their respective parties, Sanders and Donald Trump. Notwithstanding Trump’s bigotry on Hispanics and Muslims, both he and Sanders are “anti-establishment” candidates who were thought to have no chance in Iowa last spring, the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel asserted to NPR’s Terry Gross yesterday. And both are mounting serious runs.
I believe that the war is having such staying power because there has never been true accountability for that decision. The establishment that brought it to us is still largely in power. Many leading politicians were for the war, as were so many of the knowledge producers. All the liberal-hawk pundits are still around– Jeffrey Goldberg attended the president’s speech last night at the Israeli Embassy. The neoconservative thinkers who dreamed it up are still all over the thinktanks and the Republican establishment.
Last week Chris Matthews went on a tear against the neoconservatives for attacking Trump. Matthews argued that all the writers behind the “Against Trump” issue of the National Review, as well as the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trump issue, were neoconservatives who had supported the Iraq War.
“These guys are all war hawks. That’s why they don’t like Trump. Because he’s the only guy on the right who says it was a stupid war, we shouldn’t have fought it. And these guys’ heart and soul is with that war…. Regime change is in their blood stream. And Trump’s saying it’s stupid for us to play that war… All these guys are hawks. And Donald Trump says no.
As Trump did in this tweet that helped knock down Jeb Bush:
FLASHBACK via @Reuters from 2004: “Donald Trump Would ‘Fire’ Bush Over Iraq Invasion” It’s called great vision.
Bill Kristol is leading the charge against Trump– and for Marco Rubio– with such hopeful tweets as this one:
Re-upping my IA prediction from yesterday: Cruz 30, Trump 25, Rubio 22, no one else above 6%.
Or this plaintive appeal:
Trump supporters:You want to send a message, defy political correctness, etc. Fine. But do you really think Trump would be a good president?
Today on NPR Jonah Goldberg said that Trump is standing in the way of the best Republican talent in a generation. He means Rubio, the neoconservative favorite– who has taken time off the presidential campaign to sponsor legislation to condemn European measures to label Israeli settlement goods as such.
Back to Sanders: last night again he cited his 2002 speech on the House floor against the Iraq War. He said it gave him no pleasure to say it was prescient. But it was. He said:
I am concerned about the problems of so-called unintended consequences. Who will govern Iraq when Saddam Hussein is removed, and what role will the US play in an ensuing civil war that could develop in that country? Will moderate governments in that region who have large Islamic fundamentalist populations be overthrown and replaced by extremists?
Extremists? Sanders can now say that the establishment that gave us the Iraq War also gave us ISIS.
And there has never been any real accountability for that horrible decision. Which is why the presidential race looks the way it does.
Buchanan column making parallel point. Enjoy PJB’s shout out to Sanders.
WASHINGTON, D.C. [1/22/16] — The lights are burning late in Davos tonight.
At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.”
Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in the third parties arising across Europe, and in the U.S. primaries.
But set aside Joe’s slurs — demagogues, xenophobia.
Who really belongs in the dock here? Who caused this crisis of political legitimacy now gripping the nations of the West?
Was it Donald Trump, who gives voice to the anger of those who believe themselves to have been betrayed? Or the elites who betrayed them?
Can that crowd at Davos not understand that it is despised because it is seen as having subordinated the interests of the nations and people in whose name it presumes to speak, to advance an agenda that serves, first and foremost, its own naked self-interest?
The political and economic elites of Davos have grow rich, fat and powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on the altars of globalization and a New World Order.
No more astute essay has been written this political season than that of Michael Brendan Dougherty in “The Week,” where he describes how, 20 years ago, my late friend Sam Francis predicted it all.
In Chronicles magazine, in March 1996 (“From Household To Nation”), Francis, a paleoconservative and proud son of the South, wrote:
“Sooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interest and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better.”
What we saw through a glass darkly then, we now see face to face.
Is not Trump the personification of the populist-nationalist revolt Francis predicted?
And was it not presidents and Congresses of both parties who mired us in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and negotiated the trade deals that have gutted American industry?
The bleeding of factories and manufacturing jobs abroad has produced the demoralization and decline of our middle class, along with the wage stagnation and shrinking participation in the labor force.
Is Trump responsible for that? Is Socialist Bernie Sanders, who voted against all those trade deals?
If not, who did this to us?
Was it not the Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats?
Americans never supported mass immigration.
It was against their will that scores of millions, here legally and illegally, almost all from Third World countries, whose masses have never been fully assimilated into any western nation, have poured into the USA.
Who voted for that?
Religious, racial, cultural diversity has put an end to the “bad” old America we grew up in, as we evolve into the “universal nation” of Ben Wattenberg, who once rhapsodized, “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”
James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyite and Cold War geo-strategist whose work Francis admired, called liberalism “the ideology of Western suicide.”
If the West embraces, internalizes and operates on the principles of liberalism, Burnham wrote, the West with meet an early death.
Among the dogmas of liberalism is the unproven assumption that peoples of all nationalities, tribes, cultures, creeds can coexist happily in nations, especially in a “creedal” nation like the USA, which has no ethnic core but rather is built upon ideas.
A corollary is that “diversity,” a new America and new Europe where all nations are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual, is the future of the west and the model for mankind.
Yet, large and growing minorities in every country of Europe, and now in America, believe that not only is this proposition absurd, the end result could be national suicide.
And when one considers the millions who are flocking to Trump and Sanders, it is hard to believe that the establishments of the two parties, even if they defeat these challengers, can return to same old interventionist, trade, immigration and war policies.
For Trump is not the last of the populist-nationalists.
Given his success, other Republicans will emulate him. Already, other candidates are incorporating his message. The day Francis predicted was coming appears to have arrived.
Angela Merkel may have been Time’s Person of the Year in 2016, but she will be lucky to survive in office in 2017, if she does not stop the invasion from Africa and the Middle East.
Yet Joe Biden’s dismissal that it is reactionaries who oppose what the progressives of Davos believe is not entirely wrong. For as Georges Bernanos wrote, when Europe was caught between Bolshevism and fascism: To be a reactionary means simply to be alive, because only a corpse does not react any more – against the maggots teeming on it.
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Bernie’s got a good point and Clinton should be made to smart for it, she the neocon hawk.
Trump may (perhaps) be making the same point, but I sense it is lost in the welter of his other complaints. Still, in a Trump v. Clinton election, pro-Iraq-war-ism is sure to come up, along with emails and the rather general hatred of Clinton (at least among Republicans).
I think that the economy: better than most of the western world but still really stagnant wages and thus a lukewarm recovery, is the primary mover of the anti establishment candidates. The war against Iraq is a factor, but I would put it behind the economy as the primary factor.
Rubio “has taken time off the US presidential campaign” to fight BDS in France on behalf of his Zionist masters?
Ummm, blindly supporting the Apartheid Terrorist state of Israel IS how you run for president in the US! It’s disgraceful and frightening, it makes NO sense – but that’s the way it is! However, with continued victories by organizations like BDS, we WILL eventually throw AIPAC out of DC and take our country back!
Bill Kristol and his fellow terrorist neocons need to be arrested for treason and put in Israeli spy Pollard’s former cell! And traitors like Kristol goon Sen. Cotton can join them!
The idiotic US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its destruction of that state’s security apparatus, indirectly led to the creation of Isis. The Israel lobby played a key role in setting up the idiotic US invasion of Iraq.