Bernie Sanders’ Troubling History of Supporting US Military Violence Abroad
Notably he supported NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, a stance which caused one of his staffers to resign in protest. …The attack on Kosovo is hardly the extent of Sanders’ hawkishness. While it’s true he voted against the Iraq War, he also voted in favor of authorizing funds for that war and the one in Afghanistan. More recently, he voted in favor of a $1 billion aid package for the coup government Ukraine and supported Israel’s assault on Gaza. At a town hall meeting he admitted that Israel may have “overreacted”, but blamed Hamas for the entire conflict. After a woman asked why he refused to condemn Israel’s actions, he told critics: “Excuse me! Shut up! You don’t have the microphone.”
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/what-you-should-know-about-bernie-sanders-dark-side
And this is not all Bernie’s baggage: Sanders’ positions on Gaza, U. S. Wars of Choice and munitions profiteering are right-leaning conservative options for maintaining the status quo. This is not acceptable.
Bernie Sanders, George Bush, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronnie Reagan, Elizabeth Warren and the rest of the Millionaires’ Glee Club agree on continued aggression abroad to enhance the corporate bottom line. Perhaps we can learn from the past 36 years of macho-male misadventures and mistakes.
“Had I done my research, I would have discovered Sanders’ frankly hawkish positions on foreign policy. It only takes a brief search to uncover his ardent support for Israeli apartheid, his repeated authorizations of funding for the U.S. military budget, and even his initial vote for Bush’s original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that began the war on Afghanistan. I would have even discovered pictures in the local newspaper of activists I knew being thrown out of Sanders’ office for protesting his support of the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.” .
http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/01/what-i-learned-about-bernie-sanders
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Everyone has baggage.
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But we have had war-profiteers in the White House for 36 years. Is it working for you?
Bernie Sanders’ Troubling History of Supporting US Military Violence Abroad
Notably he supported NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, a stance which caused one of his staffers to resign in protest. …The attack on Kosovo is hardly the extent of Sanders’ hawkishness. While it’s true he voted against the Iraq War, he also voted in favor of authorizing funds for that war and the one in Afghanistan. More recently, he voted in favor of a $1 billion aid package for the coup government Ukraine and supported Israel’s assault on Gaza. At a town hall meeting he admitted that Israel may have “overreacted”, but blamed Hamas for the entire conflict. After a woman asked why he refused to condemn Israel’s actions, he told critics: “Excuse me! Shut up! You don’t have the microphone.”
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/what-you-should-know-about-bernie-sanders-dark-side
And this is not all Bernie’s baggage: His positions on Gaza, U. S. Wars of Choice and munitions profiteering are right-leaning conservative options for maintaining the status quo. This is not acceptable.
Bernie Sanders, George Bush, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, Bernie2George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronnie Reagan, Elizabeth Warren and the rest of the Millionaires’ Glee Club agree on continued aggression abroad to enhance the corporate bottom line. Perhaps we can learn from the past 36 years of macho-male misadventures and mistakes.
https://thewordsmithcollection.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/militarized-police-and-endless-war-vs-president-jill-stein-a-doctor-for-a-nation-at-risk/
Had I done my research, I would have discovered Sanders’ frankly hawkish positions on foreign policy. It only takes a brief search to uncover his ardent support for Israeli apartheid, his repeated authorizations of funding for the U.S. military budget, and even his initial vote for Bush’s original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that began the war on Afghanistan. I would have even discovered pictures in the local newspaper of activists I knew being thrown out of Sanders’ office for protesting his support of the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.” .
http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/01/what-i-learned-about-bernie-sanders
1Perhaps we can learn from the past 36 years of macho-male misadventures and mistakes.
https://thewordsmithcollection.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/militarized-police-and-endless-war-vs-president-jill-stein-a-doctor-for-a-nation-at-risk/
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Supporting airstrikes in Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing is not hawkishness and 95% of the people who fled Serbia’s onslaught returned to their homes inside of Kosovo within 1 year of NATO’s campaign.
Hawkishness would be calling for ground troops as McCain and company did.
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Setting aside Bernie’s support for the murders in Gaza, wall-building outside of the borders of Israel, illegal settlements and more than two dozen wars of choice currently costing hundreds of thousands of lives (as well as Bernie’s investments in war-profiteering), the war on Kosovo has proven to have been unnecessary and the subsequent developments devastating. We need a president with more guts and less of an itchy trigger finger prompted by munitions sales:
It was found after the war that Air StRikes killed thousands of innocents are would not have been necessary were the U. S. to have pursued diplomatic solutions that were working.
“At least this much seems clear. NATO chose to reject diplomatic options that were not exhausted, and to launch a military campaign that had terrible consequences for Kosovar Albanians, as anticipated. Other consequences are of little concern in the West, including the devastation of the civilian economy of Serbia by military operations that severely violate the laws of war. Though the matter was brought to the War Crimes Tribunal long ago, it is hard to imagine that it will be seriously addressed. For similar reasons, there is little likelihood that the Tribunal will pay attention to its 150-page “Indictment Operation Storm: A Prima Facie Case,” reviewing the war crimes committed by Croatian forces that drove some 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995 with crucial U.S. involvement that elicited “almost total lack of interest in the U.S. press and in the U.S. Congress,” New York Times Balkans correspondent David Binder observes.
The suffering of Kosovars did not end with the arrival of the NATO (KFOR) occupying army and the UN mission. Though billions of dollars were readily available for bombing, as of October the U.S. “has yet to pay any of the $37.9 million assessed for the start-up costs of the United Nations civilian operation in Kosovo”
…Current indications are that Kosovo under NATO occupation has reverted to what was developing in the early 1980s, after the death of Tito, when nationalist forces undertook to create an “ethnically clean Albanian republic,” taking over Serb lands, attacking churches, and engaging in “protracted violence” to attain the goal of an “ethnically pure” Albanian region, with “almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo’s remaining indigenous Slavs…out of the province.” This “seemingly intractable” problem, another phase in an ugly history of intercommunal violence, led to Milosevic’s characteristically brutal response, withdrawing Kosovo’s autonomy and the heavy federal subsidies on which it depended, and imposing an “Apartheid” regime. Kosovo may also come to resemble Bosnia, “a den of thieves and tax cheats” with no functioning economy, dominated by “a wealthy criminal class that wields enormous political influence and annually diverts hundreds of millions of dollars in potential tax revenue to itself.” Much worse may be in store as independence for Kosovo becomes entangled in pressures for a “greater Albania,” with dim portents.
The poorer countries of the region have incurred enormous losses from the blocking of the Danube by bombing at Novi Sad, another center of opposition to Milosevic. They were already suffering from protectionist barriers that “prevent the ships from plying their trade in the EU,” as well as “a barrage of Western quotas and tariffs on their exports.” But “blockage of the [Danube] is actually a boon” for Western Europe, particularly Germany, which benefits from increased activity on the Rhine and at Atlantic ports.
There are other winners. At the war’s end, the business press described “the real winners” as Western military industry, meaning high-tech industry generally. Moscow is looking forward to a “banner year for Russian weapons exports” as “the world is rearming apprehensively largely thanks to NATO’s Balkans adventure,” seeking a deterrent, as widely predicted during the war. More important, the U.S. was able to enforce its domination over the strategic Balkans region, displacing EU initiatives at least temporarily, a primary reason for the insistence that the operation be in the hands of NATO, a U.S subsidiary. A destitute Serbia remains the last holdout, probably not for long.
A further consequence is another blow to the fragile principles of world order. The NATO action represents a threat to the “very core of the international security system” founded on the UN Charter, Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed in his annual report to the UN in September. That matters little to the rich and powerful, who will act as they please, rejecting World Court decisions and vetoing Security Council resolutions if that becomes necessary; it is useful to remember that, contrary to much mythology, the U.S. has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions on a wide range of issues, including terror and aggression, ever since it lost control of the UN in the course of decolonization, with Britain second and France a distant third. But the traditional victims take these matters more seriously, as the global reaction to the Kosovo war indicated.
The essential point—not very obscure—is that the world faces two choices with regard to the use of force: (1) some semblance of world order, either the Charter or something better if it can gain a degree of legitimacy; or (2) the powerful states do as they wish unless constrained from within, guided by interests of power and profit, as in the past. It makes good sense to struggle for a better world, but not to indulge in pretense and illusion about the one in which we live.
Archival and other sources should provide a good deal more information about the latest Balkans war. Any conclusions reached today are at best partial and tentative. As of now, however, the “lessons learned” do not appear to be particularly attractive.
https://chomsky.info/200005__/
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But when people have baggage like war and profiteering, it makes no sense to put them in the White House, especially when we have better choices. Jill Stein is younger, smarter, better-educated, more progressive and better informed than Bernie… And she can win this election if people would stop wasting time on a a pro-war poseur.
“Dr. Jill Stein can provide the critical transition from exporting munitions, terror and war… to exporting knowledge, technology and medical and agricultural expertise… along with peace in our time.
Let’s allow her to help heal a nation in distress. She has taken an oath to do no harm and can improve our health as a nation and a people. We can endure, survive and prevail over the war-mongers and profiteers who betrayed us.
Stein is endorsed for President in 2012 by Noam Chomsky, a linguist, author and activist, and by Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent, among others. Courage is the cure for fear and Stein is as real as it gets.”
https://thepeaceresource.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/if-war-is-working-for-you-vote-sanders-but-if-you-want-peace-justice-and-freedom-shine-with-stein/
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