Exclusive: Sen. Sanders finds
himself on the defensive in his uphill primary fight against Hillary Clinton
for the Democratic presidential nomination in part because he shies away from
defining himself as a “realist” and asking if she is a “neocon,” writes Robert
Parry.
By Robert Parry
Hillary Clinton has scored
points against Bernie Sanders by tagging him as a “single-issue candidate” who
harps again and again on income inequality. Though the “single-issue” charge is
false– the Vermont Senator actually addresses a wide range of topics from
global warming to health care to college costs – Clinton’s attack line has been
effective nonetheless
It works, in part, because
Sanders shies away from thorough discussions about his views on foreign policy
while Clinton can tout her résumé as a globetrotter both as First Lady and
Secretary of State.
Sanders also has left himself
open to attacks from neoconservatives and liberal interventionists that he is a
“closet realist.” For instance, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote
recently: “Is Bernie Sanders a closet foreign policy ‘realist’? Reading his few
pronouncements on foreign policy, you sense that he embraces the realists’ deep
skepticism about U.S. military intervention.”
But what if Sanders came out
of the closet and “confessed” to being a “realist” while posing the alternative
question: Is Hillary Clinton a “closet neocon” who is seen by key neocons as
“the vessel” in which they have placed their hopes for extending their power
and expanding their policies? Might that question reenergize Sanders’s suddenly
flagging campaign and force Clinton to venture beyond a few talking points on
foreign policy?
Rather than largely ceding the
field to Clinton – except in noting her Iraq War vote while he opposed that
disastrous war of choice – Sanders could say, “yes, I’m a realist when it comes
to foreign policy. I’m in line with early presidents – Washington, Adams,
Jefferson – who warned about the dangers of foreign entanglements. While I
believe America should lead in the world, it should not go ‘abroad in search of
monsters to destroy,’ as John Quincy Adams wisely noted.
“I’m also in agreement with
Dwight Eisenhower who warned about the dangers to the Republic from the
Military-Industrial Complex – and I agree with John Kennedy who recognized
the many legitimate concerns of Third World countries emerging from
colonialism. I have learned from my own years in Congress that there’s no
faster way to destroy a Republic than to behave as an Empire.”
Hiding Facts
Sanders could note, too, that
the other way to destroy a Republic is to use the secrecy stamp too liberally,
to hide too many key facts from the American people, not because of legitimate
national security concerns but because it’s easier to manipulate a public that
is fed a steady diet of propaganda. The American people, he might say, are
citizens deserving respect, not mushrooms kept in the dark and fertilized.
On that point, Sanders might
even note that he and Hillary Clinton may be in agreement, since the former
Secretary of State’s team has complained that some of her infamous emails are
now being classified retroactively in what her aides complain is an exercise in
over-classification. Of course, the key reason for Clinton using a private
server was to keep her communications hidden from later public scrutiny.
If Sanders is asked about
specifics regarding where the line is between legitimate secrets and
propagandistic manipulation, he could cite how President George W. Bush played
games with intelligence by hyping claims about Iraq’s WMD and Saddam Hussein’s
ties to Al Qaeda.
Or Sanders could note the case
of the sarin-gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, which almost drew
President Barack Obama into a full-scale war in Syria.
If indeed Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad was responsible – as the Obama administration claimed and the
mainstream U.S. news media repeats endlessly – then the U.S. government should
present the evidence to the American people. Or, if one of the jihadist rebel
groups was behind the attack – trying to trick the U.S. into joining the war on
the jihadist side – lay that evidence out even if it means admitting to a
rush-to-judgment against Assad’s forces. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]
Similarly, on the issue of
Ukraine: if the former government of President Viktor Yanukovych was at fault
for the Maidan sniper attacks on Feb. 20, 2014, as was widely alleged at the
time, put forward the evidence. If the snipers were extremists
among the Maidan protesters trying to create a provocation – as more recent
evidence suggests – give those facts to the American people.
The same applies to the
shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17,
2014. Yes, the suggestion that Russia was responsible has proved to be an
effective propaganda club to beat Vladimir Putin over the head, but if the
tragedy was really the fault of some element of the U.S.-backed Ukrainian
regime – and if
U.S. intelligence knows that – fess up. Stop the game-playing.
Who’s in Charge?
It should not be the job of
the U.S. government to mislead and confuse the American people. That reverses
the proper order of a Republic in which “We the People” are the sovereigns and
government officials are the servants.
Sanders might say, too, that
he realizes neoconservatives believe in tricking the American people to support
preordained policies that the neocons have cooked up in one of their think
tanks, as happened with the Iraq War and the Project for the New American
Century.
But a Sanders administration,
he might say, would show respect for the citizenry, putting the people back in
charge and putting the think tanks – which live off the largesse of the
Military-Industrial Complex – back in their subordinate place.
Yes, it’s true that such a
call for democracy, truth and pragmatism would infuriate the mainstream media,
which has largely accepted its role as a propaganda organ for the neocons. But
Sanders could take on that fight, much as Donald Trump has on the Republican
side.
It was Trump who finally
confronted the Republican Party with the reality about George W. Bush’s
negligence prior to the 9/11 attacks and his deceptions about Iraq’s WMD. So
far, it appears that the Republican base can handle the truth.
The GOP establishment’s
frantic efforts to sustain the fictions that Bush “kept us safe” and his
supposed sincerity in believing his WMD falsehoods fell flat in South Carolina
where Trump trounced the Republican field and forced Bush’s brother Jeb to drop
out of the race.
Does Sanders have the courage
to believe that the Democratic base is at least as ready for the truth about
Hillary Clinton’s entanglement in the serial deceptions that have justified a
host of U.S. imperial wars, including the current ones in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya and Syria? Sanders might even respond to the accusations that he is a
“closet realist” by not just admitting to his foreign policy pragmatism but
asking whether Hillary
Clinton is a “closet neocon.”
After all, Robert Kagan, who
co-founded the neocon Project for the American Century, told
The New York Times in 2014 that he hoped that his neocon views – which he now
prefers to call “liberal interventionist” – would prevail in a possible Hillary
Clinton administration.
Secretary of State Clinton
named Kagan to one of her State Department advisory boards and promoted his
wife, neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland,
who oversaw
the provocative “regime change” in Ukraine in 2014.
The Times reported that
Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their
hopes” and quoted Kagan as saying: “I feel comfortable with her on foreign
policy. … If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it’s
something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are
not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
Indeed, with populist
billionaire Donald Trump seizing control of the Republican race with victories
in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the neocons may find themselves
fully siding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign as it becomes the last hope for
their interventionist strategies. Ironically, too, many “realists” and anti-war
activists may find Trump’s rejection of neocon orthodoxy and readiness to
cooperate with Moscow to resolve conflicts more appealing than Clinton’s
hopped-up belligerence.
Obviously, many anti-war
Democrats would prefer that Sanders step forward as their champion and offer a
cogent explanation about how the neocons and liberal hawks have harmed U.S. and
world interests by spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into North
Africa and Europe. But that would require Sanders embracing the word “realist”
and asking whether his rival is a “neocon.”
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
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