I was on the road for ten days in Iowa and Nevada, speaking for Bernie in small towns and cities, so I actually didn’t get to listen to Bernie’s speech on Thursday until I got back home over the weekend and caught it on C-SPAN yesterday. Though it was billed primarily as a speech focusing on domestic issues, there was one paragraph that, as far as I can tell, got very little attention.
Here it is:
Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgment that unilateral military action should be a last resort, not a first resort, and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. 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.
This was astonishing. A major presidential candidate who was willing publicly to admit, and understand, that the U.S. government plots, executed principally by the CIA, to overthrow democratically elected leaders were failures. I can’t imagine how many people at the CIA, past and present, had strokes reading those words.
This is the difference between a political revolution and the status quo. A political revolution has a leader who, by understanding the failures of those policies, would be far more likely to be able to build bridges around the world because he has a world view that synthesizes six decades of U.S. foreign policy and immoral intervention and understands why large sections of the world harbor deep, historical animus towards the U.S.--not to mention sees clearly the path that leads, for example, from overthrowing Mossadegh to the hated, brutal Shah to the Iran of today—a person more likely to chart a wise path in foreign policy than the status quo candidate, whose vote for the Iraq War—conveniently dismissed, without much explanation, as a “mistake” more than a decade later—makes it far more likely that the status quo would simply employ the same prism of past failures to blunder into similar disasters, with all the inevitable bloodshed and cost.
It’s a difference of principles and vision. Morality versus immorality. Wisdom versus blind pursuit of power. Understanding the right place in the world versus American exceptionalism.
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ORDER THE ESSENTIAL BERNIE SANDERS AND HIS VISION FOR AMERICA