Truthout: Bernie Sanders' Run Can Help the "Less War" Movement in the US

We recently passed the Anniversaries of the Fall of Saigon and the Kent State Killings, reminders of the My Lai Massacre [one of many].

The US covered fertile tropical countryside with Monsanto's AGENT ORANGE, causing long term health consequences, contaminating the land....

The US dropped NAPALM....

Vietnam tore a nation apart....

War Mongers have marched us to war for the last 50+  years, squandering our economy, sacrificing our youth, creating enemies around the globe, killing innocents and leaving rubble and devastation in our wake.

The CIA, Saudis, Israel arm, fund and create unrest, extremism and death across the globe, while the NeoCon Chicken Hawks nod their Bobble Heads in sync with the Project for the New American Century.

The Folly of Spreading Democracy has long since been trampled in the dust of ruins.

The article [excerpts below], one of many about Senator Bernie Sanders posted in this venue, should give us pause. What kind of a world do we want to leave behind?

Bernie Sanders' Run Can Help the "Less War" Movement in the US

  Monday, 04 May 2015 00:00 By Robert Naiman, Truthout | Op-Ed



Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming), right, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, lead a budget mark-up meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 19, 2015. Republican leaders were trying to quell a war between budget hawks and defense hawks that ground the House Budget Committee to a halt. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)




A key problem confronting Americans who would like to see the US involved in less war is that as Peter Beinart recently noted in The Atlantic:

It's also notoriously hard to mobilize Americans against wars until those wars begin. The anti-Vietnam movement didn't become a force inside the national Democratic Party until 1968, when more than 20,000 Americans had already died. And liberal activists only began putting real pressure on Democratic politicians over Iraq after the war began, when they powered Howard Dean's insurgent campaign. Since World War II, the general pattern has been that elites drive foreign policy--generally in an interventionist direction--until they make a mess big enough to make the public cry stop.

The pattern Beinart described is a recipe for a lot of war. It's as if the dial is automatically set to "more war" by default and we have to make a huge effort each time, for each war, to try to change the setting to less war. Each new war is treated in public discourse as "innocent until proven guilty": the initial burden of proof is on war critics to show that this war is a bad one, rather than the initial burden of proof being on war supporters to show that this war is a good one.




We're not starting from zero. Juan Cole notes:

Bernie Sanders opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation of that country.
Sanders wanted to get out of Afghanistan from 2011 much faster than the timetable announced by President Obama. Obama has now more or less extended a US military presence in Afghanistan, advertised as a training mission, indefinitely. My reading of Sanders is that he would get out of that country entirely.
A President Bernie Sanders would endorse the Iran negotiations of the Obama administration.

.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

[EXCERPTS REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION - CLICK ON LINK TO READ IN ITS ENTIRETY.]

Robert Naiman

Robert Naiman is policy director at Just Foreign Policy and president of Truthout's board of directors.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/30592-bernie-sanders-run-can-help-the-us-less-war-movement#