Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton & America's Endless War

Hillary Clinton's National Security Address (C-SPAN)

by Gaius Publius

I mentioned near the end of a piece called "Blowback, Money & the Washington War Party" that I would compare Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton with respect to its main subject, America and its wars. For context, I'd like to repeat the start of that piece:

In a provocative piece called, "Blowback -- the Washington War Party's Folly Comes Home to Roost," David Stockman asks, in effect — "Does America have the wars it seeks and deserves?"

Whatever your answer might be, or mine, I think Stockman's answer is Yes, and he details that answer in an excellent looking-back and looking-forward essay about the U.S. and its Middle East "involvement." I have excerpted several sections below, but the whole is worth a full top-to-bottom read.

Before we turn to Stockman's points, though, I just want to highlight two semi-hidden ideas in his essay. One is about money. What Stockman calls the "War Party" in Washington is really the bipartisan Money Party, since the largest-by-far pile of cash looted from the federal budget (in other words, from taxpayers) goes to fund our military and its suppliers and enablers. Which means that most of it is stolen and diverted in some way. Which means that those who do the stealing have a lot of "skin in the game" — the game that keeps the money flowing in the first place.

Recall that what's now called the Money Party was what Gore Vidal called the "Property Party": “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

Which means the Washington War Party is a bipartisan gig. Thus our bipartisan wars, which for Stockman answers the first part of the imputed question above. Yes, America does have the wars it seeks. ...

It concludes with this:

How Will This End?

It's easy to see that this ends in either of two ways. It will end when we stop sending money and arms into the region — i.e., when we impoverish our wealth-drunk arms industry and starve the fighting — or it will not end.

Which means, it will lead to continuous tears, American ones. And when, again, you factor in the continuing spiral toward chaos guaranteed by continuing global warming, we may look back and say, "Paris was our generation's Sarajevo." It's hard to stop a war when only a nation's people don't want it. It's almost impossible to stop a war when the people unite with the wealthy to promote it.

Which brings me to Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, war, and speeches each gave recently. But that's for later. ...

Later is now. I'm providing this context because I don't want to leave the impression this piece is about Sanders and Clinton. It's not. This piece is about us, our future, and that of our children ... the future of all of us, in other words, who may choose to live in Washington's endless war-profiteering environment — until that war comes home with a vengeance.

Do we have I choice? I believe we do, for now. I don't think that choice will persist, will be available forever.

Sanders, Clinton & America's Endless War

In a piece by Tom Cahill in usuncut.com, which starts with a report of Bernie Sanders' "socialism" speech, we find this near the middle, a comparison of the foreign policy statements in Sanders' speech with a speech given at nearly the same time by Hillary Clinton.

First, about Sanders, Cahill writes:

Sanders Acknowledges Error of CIA-Sponsored Coups

Sanders’ [socialism] speech also surprised many viewers with exhaustive foreign policy proposals aimed at reaching peace in the Middle East, while letting Muslim countries lead the fight against ISIS. the Vermont senator cautioned against using the military to force regime change, citing past CIA-sponsored coups in Latin America and the Middle East as examples of forced regime change gone wrong.

“Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy,” Sanders said. “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 Árbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sorts of policies do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”

To defeat ISIS, Sanders urged the US to form a new NATO-like coalition with Russia and enemies of ISIS in the Middle East, and force Muslim countries to lead the fight with support from the West. ...

“Saudi Arabia has the 3rd largest defense budget in the world, yet instead of fighting ISIS they have focused more on a campaign to oust Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen,” Sanders said. “Kuwait, a country whose ruling family was restored to power by U.S. troops after the first Gulf War, has been a well-known source of financing for ISIS and other violent extremists. It has been reported that Qatar will spend $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup, including the construction of an enormous number of facilities to host that event – $200 billion on hosting a soccer event, yet very little to fight against ISIS.”

“All of this has got to change. Wealthy and powerful Muslim nations in the region can no longer sit on the sidelines and expect the United States to do their work for them,” Sanders continued.

Not perfect if you're strongly pro-peace, but this would nonetheless represent a major shift in both policy and spending, if implemented — something that can be done, I remind you, by our commander-in-chief, acting alone. It may take Congress, or the illusion of congressional approval, to make war. It doesn't require a single Republican (or war-making Democratic) vote to make peace.

Now about Clinton, from the same piece (my emphasis):

Hillary Clinton: U.S. Should Lead War on ISIS

Sanders’ Georgetown address was a stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York[.]

The former Secretary of State outlined her proposal to fight ISIS, which primarily consisted of the US military taking and maintaining a leading role for an undetermined period of time.

“It is time to begin a new phase and intensify and broaden our efforts to smash the would-be caliphate and deny ISIS control of territory in Iraq and Syria,” Clinton said early in the speech. “That starts with a more effective coalition air campaign, with more allied planes, more strikes, and a broader target set.”

“The Iraqi national army has struggled. It is going to take more work to get it up to fighting shape,” Clinton continued. “As part of that process, we may have to give our own troops advising and training the Iraqis greater freedom of movement and flexibility, including embedding in local units and helping target airstrikes.”

Clinton's entire speech (about 30 minutes) is above.

Endless War or a Move Toward Peace — Last Chance to Decide?

I'm not suggesting to you what to want. If you really want to enrich billionaire arms manufacturers and their enablers in and out of office, that's up to you. If you want to give a well-organized foreign fighting force yet more reason to encourage the same acts in the U.S. as their local sympathizers perform in Europe, that's also up to you. If you want to remove American fingerprints — and national entanglement — from foreign feuds, that's also your choice as well.

I merely want to point out that for once, there is a choice, and you can make that choice by choosing between these two candidates, just as you can choose, using these two candidates, whether to aggressively reign in carbon use or continue to serve the wealthy who serve up global warming.

Withdraw from foreign wars, or expand into them? Sanders or Clinton? The day is coming soon when this will have mattered, and not just on late-night comedy shows. It's entirely likely that within the term of the next president, our foreign policy chickens will come home to roost.

Me, I'd prefer those chickens not be armed.

(Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. If you'd like to help him, click here. This page also lists every progressive incumbent and candidate who has endorsed him. You can adjust the split in any way you wish.)

GP

Does Endless War Define All Our Elite Political Groupings Regardless Of Party?

I wish I could say that Leon Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights, will be the capstone of his wretched political career. But with Hillary likely to be the next president, I suspect Panetta’s repulsive attacks on Obama will only guarantee him position and influence to come. Everyone knows the 76 year old Panetta was Bill Clinton’s OMB Director and then Chief of Staff and then Obama’s Director of the CIA and then Secretary of Defense. Fe people know that earlier Panetta, a conservative by nature, was a Republican who worked for California Republican Senator Tom Kuchel and then for President Nixon. Always the opportunist, he switched parties in 1971, claiming the GOP had turned too extreme, ands was soon elected to Congress, where he was the typical New Dem/Blue Dog type DLC hack. He was another personnel mistake Obama blundered into. I’m sure he’s sorry now.

Panetta confides that he thought Obama was wrong on some key decisions, just as Gates and Clinton did in their memoirs. Which makes this reader ask: Why did these officials continue to serve a president with whose policies they often seemed to disagree? Retrospective candor is fine, but wouldn’t it have been better to speak out at the time and perhaps even resign on principle? The country would have been poorer without their service, but we need officials who will tell the truth publicly, in real time, before they make the book deal.

…What has already made news is Panetta’s criticism of Obama. It clearly troubled Panetta, who loved his time in Congress, that Obama “was believed not to have found his time as a senator very rewarding and to be disdainful of Congress generally.” He writes that Obama’s “decision-making apparatus was centralized in the White House” far more than that of any other administration he had seen, reducing the importance of Cabinet posts.

The comments on Iraq and Syria are blistering. As Panetta saw it, the White House was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw [in 2011] rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.” Obama’s departure left Iraq to its sectarian misleaders and prefigured the disastrous explosion this year of the Islamic State.

As for Syria, Panetta says that Obama “vacillated” on his “red line” pledge to take military action against chemical weapons in 2013. He writes, “The result, I felt, was a blow to American credibility.”

So he and Hillary— both vile corporate Dems of the worst kind— are on record “warning” Obama. I’m sure Team Clinton is delighted and, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in a post for The Intercept this week, the glorification of endless war as the official policy of America— will be front and center again, just as soon as they get rid of the conflicted interloper and an appropriately warmongery Clinton is back in the White House.

Leon Panetta… said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama— who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed)— for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.

It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).

Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?

This war— in all its ever-changing permutations— thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes… The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.

I’m going to finish up my thoughts on this first thing tomorrow morning. This one was going way too long already.