Juan Cole recently posted an interesting piece today on Jeff Weaver who Josh Marshall seems to think is the person pulling the strings which has been triggering the angry persona of Sanders. It been an interesting week of non-stop lying and we have another gem:
“I think if you look at her record and campaign, her campaign is funded by millions and millions of dollars from Wall Street and other special interests. She’s made a deal with the devil, and we all know the devil wants his money in the end. So that’s the kind of campaign she’s running. She supported the terrible trade deals which have devastated American manufacturing in the country. She supported the war in Iraq. She continues to have a very, very hawkish foreign policy that has led to the rise and expansion of ISIS throughout the Middle East.”
So that’s pretty much Donald Trump stupid and it’s far more common now in the Sanders campaign that it’s been in the Trump campaign.
Cole explains what is obvious:
Although Clinton did vote to authorize the Iraq War, it wasn’t the war per se that created Daesh there but rather the US backing for Shiite policies of political reprisals against the Sunnis. Clinton did not have anything to do with policy-making in Iraq.
He goes on to detail that the Obama prevented Clinton from getting involved in Syria, so the argument that Clinton allowed ISIL to expand is non-sense, he continued:
Clinton was out of office during Sisi’s coup and crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and had nothing to do with it. That radical groups among the Sinai bedouin declared for Daesh (and then apparently dissociated themselves from it) has nothing to do with Sec. Clinton.
While I understand that Sanders and his team think that the NYDN Editorial Board was devastating , it more devastating to a campaign what reacts in this manner. If something doesn’t go right, becoming unhinged is probably not the best reaction when you are running for President.
Most of the messages are signed by Jeff Weaver and he does seem over the top at times, and very good at playing the victim.
As a self described Mideast expert he should know better. The Iraq War was the most destabilizing and ill conceived foreign policy in American history. It’s negative repercussions will last far longer and have weakened America far more than even the Vietnam War. That war was obviously more devastating in terms of the number of service men and women lost and the division it sowed in our country, but this foreign policy was actually even more tragic than that one. It created the chose that led directly to ISIl and leading experts at the time predicted the consequences. Senator Sanders and President Obama heeded their advice, Sec. Clinton did not.
Then Rep. Bernie Sanders used the same prescient arguments then state Sen. Barack Obama used echoing the critique of realist Republicans like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker that overthrowing Saddam would cause massive power vaccuumns in the Middle East and give rise to greater terrorist threats and embolden Iran. What none of us anticipated at the time was that the removal of Iraq also removed a buffer zone between Iran and Saudi Arabia and ISIL is a Saudi sponsored and funded entity deliberately designed to fight a proxy war against Iran and its allies.
Hillary voted for that war and neither she nor Cole can argue it could’ve been better managed under a different administration, no amount of administrative competency can make up for a strategic blunder of that proportion.
Hillary the humanitarian was the leading proponent of intervention in Libya, which undoubtedly saved civilian lives in the short term but has made the stability of Libya and the security of the US and EU substantially worse off. Libya was one of the few diplomatic bright spots in the Bush years going from a pariah to a peacefully disarmed participant in the global community. She was the head figure in the administration pushing for that intervention and now ISIl has a beach head 90 miles off the coast of Southern Europe. That fact is far more devastating to her credibility than any of the Benghazi bullshit.
Granted Sanders has no knowledge, experience or even basic interest in global affairs. But let us not sugar coat what has been a very checkered record at best on the part of Sec. Clinton in that part of the world. I hope for the sake of the progressive movements chances in November and the future of our country that she has learned from them this time. No other candidate left in this race can command the instant success and credibility that she has on the global stage, but no other candidate has made the high level mistakes she has either.
Cole was very vocal in his opposition to the Iraq War, better categorized as outspoken. His characterization is accurate.
And he should know better than to peddle the myth that Hillary and others have that with the right management it would’ve been successful. That’s what I meant, and he was quite vocal in calling her out on this during the 2008 campaign. I am not surprised he is going after Sanders, he annoys a lot of wonks including me with his overly simplistic view of complex issues and lack of interest in foreign affairs. On foreign policy Clinton is far more capable and experienced, but it is entirely fair for Sanders to question her judgment in places where it has led her to make costly mistakes. And we cannot deny that is exactly what Iraq and Libya are at this point.
the Bernistas will just dismiss this comment as politics, but maybe, just maybe, Bernie doesn’t have the detailed mastery of issues and policies we’re accustomed to hearing from other Democratic front runners.
Juan Cole would be more likely to support Bernie. He’s pretty far to the Left, particularly on Israel. His website features articles by Amy Goodman and Common Dreams.
The primary is catching up with Bernie. His asshat manager Jeffrey Weaver His statement: “don’t destroy the Democratic party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions to become president of the United States.” This statement is so wrong in so many ways. Running for president is inherently ambitious. Some people have criticized the statement for sexism; I don’t see it, but I’m not a women.
The primary is over and I voted for him, my role in it is done and it’s unlikely anyone on this forum hasn’t already voted on this nomination. The chips will fall where they may. This is about revisionist history on the part of Juan Cole, an expert I admire on some issues and critique on many others. For me the charge from the Sanders camp is pretty accurate, ISIL would not exist if the Iraq War had not taken place. Many of us have made that charge here before. I think that’s a hard point to dispute, and I am surprised to see Hillary partisans use this accusation against Sanders to impugn his credibility.
He has none on foreign policy and that’s a mistake entirely his own making, but backing policies that directly created the conditions for ISIL to flourish in Iraq is on Hillary, with ISIL in Libya even more directly her responsibility. If Cole and the rest of us here blamed Bush for failing to anticipate the insurgency, a fair critique in my view, it’s just as fair for Sanders to blame her for failing to anticipate the rise of ISIL in either theater. She didn’t, that’s the judgment of history not politics.
Iterations of isil have existed in Islam going back to the time of the Almohads in North Africa and the Iberian wars. I know people on here don’t want to think the west is at war with them, but they may not have the same view ( and assign whatever number/percentage you want to count radical extremists, if recent attacks count for anything it shows there are more than you might think).
A relative handful have engaged in such activity, and yes THEY want to turn this into a clash of civilizations, but it hurts everyone if we take their bait and agree with them.
There are a billion. Quite a few of whom gathered to mourn Malik Hussain Qadri. Where do you think their loyalty would lie if given the opportunity, with ISIL or Western style democracy and rule of law?
America has millions of fervent anti-abortionists driven by religious passion. Quite a few of them celebrated each time an abortion clinic was bombed or a health-care provider was murdered.
Are you similarly proposing that each and every American who opposes abortion for religious reasons (including a great many Catholics) be treated as likely terrorist? Do you, for example, agree that the US government should create a registry where each Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant should be required by law to sign up for?
When you allow your “sentiments” to turn into the hysteria that produces the anti-Muslim bigotry that we are talking about, you respond EXACTLY the way Muslim extremists hope you will. That is WHY they behead innocent children on video.
They WANT you to hate ALL Muslims. America, led by George W. Bush, enthusiastically jumped into this trap after 9/11. Our hysteria transformed AQ from a tiny sect into a huge international terror organization. Our ignorance (or blind ambition) doubled down on that hysteria to invade Iraq — the largest secular nation in the region — and metastasize the extremists in the region into ISIS.
The best way to “fight terrorism” is to refuse to allow ourselves to be seduced into such hysteria and fear.
I agree that our foolhardy invasion of Iraq, and our utterly inept handling of the situation afterwards, created ISIS. With respect to the comment from scott12mass, a multitude of sources confirm that the current ISIS is more a quasi-political/criminal organization than a religious sect. While it is repeating phraseology generations of Muslims, there is little or no apparent substance to those claims. ISIS is a political organization that recruits by sheer force (and terror), is paid for by captured oil money, and is operated by warlords and thugs. It exists primarily because of the power vacuum created when we destroyed the regime of Saddam and failed to replace it with a functioning government. There is little or no evidence that ISIS is any sort of religious organization AT ALL.
The situation in Libya and Syria were and are far worse, and I think it is unfair to blame either on Ms. Clinton. There simply were no viable options in either place. There were no “moderate” factions for us to support — both Khadaffi and Assad had long since neutralized such opposition with our implicit blessing long before Mr. Obama took office.
By the time Ms. Clinton was Secretary of State, any effective military assistance we might have provided in either place — especially in Libya — would have meant that the US was arming and aiding forces supported by Iran. Those same groups were loudly and steadfastly dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
It would have been political suicide for the US to provide military aid and support to any explicit enemy of Israel and ally of Iran — and yet, by the time Ms. Clinton took office, those were the ONLY groups that had even a remote chance of success against Mr. Khadaffi. The same situation repeated itself in Syria. That situation is even worse today.
The plain fact is that Israel is HATED by Muslims throughout the Middle East. Some parties in this discussion present a delusional fantasy that there is somehow a democratic grass-roots movement in the Middle East that will accept US help, will not oppose Israel, and will fight the forces of ISIS and “terror”. No such movements exist.
A second plain fact is that the US is hated throughout the Middle East, especially after our blunder in Iraq. We are hated for our decades-long support of tyrants and monarchs. We are hated for our support of Israel. We are hated for support of Saddam while he was alive because of his abuse, and hated for bringing him down when we did because, to our detractors, it says we don’t even stand by our “friends”. Any assistance we might provide to uprising in the region, then and now, would have to be VERY “discrete” (as in top secret). Any recipient of US assistance would have been mortified to admit to accepting it.
There IS NO solution in the Middle East, at least so long as our relationship to Israel remains as-is and Israel’s behavior and posture remains as-is. There WAS NO solution in the Middle East when Ms. Clinton took over.
In my view, the judgement of history will be very harsh with US policy going all the way back to the founding of Israel, and CERTAINLY from the beginning of OPEC and our shameful support of the Shah of Iran. The catastrophic blunder of George W. Bush was not that he didn’t foresee ISIS, it was that he arbitrarily and cavalierly took out the strongest bulwark against Iranian expansion — and Muslim extremism — in the region when he took down the Saddam Hussein regime.
In my view these, these issues are far larger than either Mr. Sanders or Ms. Clinton. Whatever the mistakes or shortcomings of Ms. Clinton in the ME were, I see ZERO evidence that Mr. Sanders has even the faintest clue about what a better approach might have been.
In fact, the only political leader I can think of who has been talking sense about the Middle East since the Bush era is Joe Biden — and neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama has paid very much attention to him.
Have you ever been to the Middle East? I am there often. We are loved by young people in Tehran, worshipped by the Kurds of Iraq. Democracy activists in Cairo like us but want more help, not weapons for their government. The same is true in Lebanon.
Where do you get your info from? A tourist brochure?
Sorry, I don’t accept the experience claimed by one energetically hostile blogger as the final word.
I don’t doubt your experiences. I suggest that those experiences are not representative, especially regarding Iraq, Libya, and Syria (the focus of this thread).
I assume the answer is no, that you have never been to any of the places you blog about and claim expertise over, so all of your commentary is based on second or third hand info, filtered through your lenses.
You can visit any of those places if you want to learn about them. Hell, you can even visit a cushy spot like Amman in Jordan, see Petra and float in the Dead Sea and it would increase your knowledge manifold.
Here is the visa application form for Iran but I don’t think I will ever meet you there doing real political learning.
http://www.daftar.org/forms/visas/101.pdf
Feel free to visit one of the refugee camps outside Amman. The old ones are Palestinian, the new ones an amalgam of south Asia.
Petra alone is worth a visit, one of the greatest creations of humanity, even if you don’t care to learn first hand about the Islamic world. BTW, it is Nabatean.
Please don’t jump to some stupid claim about the Arab world since the Islamic wold is, wait wait, all over the planet. And most of it is beautiful. I will treat your commentary on Muslims with respect when you meet them at their homes.
We are talking about ISIL and the Middle East. The world is a very large place, and nearly all the information ALL of us, including you, work with is second or third hand info. My experience has been that the more loudly somebody proclaims the depth and breadth of their knowledge, the less reliable those claims.
While I’m sure your life story is fascinating (at least to you), it is mostly irrelevant to this discussion. I’m glad that you found people who loved and “worshiped” you in the ME. It doesn’t change the reality of Libya and Syria that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton inherited when they took office. It also doesn’t change the reality of what our next President faces.
No, I have not been to the Middle East. That means that I, like an overwhelming majority of Americans, must get my information from other sources. I remind you that all of your information is anecdotal, and the plural of anecdote is NOT “data” or “truth”.
…is there such a thing as reliable polling in these countries that either of you can point to that would back up how you think the ME thinks about us, rather than relying on your experience or media reports?
My wife reads several German-language Euro newspapers (on the web), I follow the US media.
Here are two perhaps interesting and somewhat dated Pew polls (I’m not sure how reliable Pew actually is, but it at least strives for accuracy and objectivity) — America’s Global Image (from June of 2015) and The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (from April of 2013).
The opening paragraph of the second is notable:
The first link provides a different perspective from some of assertions offered upthread (emphasis mine):
Given the centrality of these issue in world affairs, I am disappointed (but not really surprised) that it is so hard to find objective polling data.
I guess when I think “Do they like us”, I wander back to episodes like the Achille Lauro, the Marines in Lebanon, and think “I guess not”.
The Achille Lauro hijacking happened in 1985 and the Marines in Lebanon died in 1982.
..Not to mention that both incidents were explicitly politically motivated and not about being liked or disliked in High School…
I could think of a recent instance where someone was attacked by madmen over something as innocuous as creating a cartoon.
She voted for the policy that directly created the sectarian violence and power vaccuumns that allowed ISIL to thrive.
Cole neglects to mention that she also was a key Maliki backer in the administration who insisted he stay in power even after he rigged elections and disinfranchised the Sunnis. Even if she was not there when the administration underestimated the threat and mismanaged dealing with its rise she is not absolved of the responsibility that resulted from her decades long support for bad policies in the Middle East. And yes, Sanders probably got lucky being a dove and doesn’t have the knowledge or credibility to make this argument, that doesn’t make it wrong.
She voted with more than half the Democrats to authorize Bush to go to war. Because she’s running for president, she takes responsibility for the entire war and all of its effects? In the words of Anton Scalia, “Get over it.” She was one of 29 Democratic Senators to support the resolution, one of 77 senators overall. If she hadn’t voted, she’d be more pure, but you overstate her responsibility. If her vote says something about how she’ll run the country, that’s fine. Absolving her of the responsibility? What about all the voters who voted for Bush?
And you’ve agreed with my argument in the recent past before the heat of the campaign cycle. I am not arguing the vote to go to war caused ISIL. I am arguog the Iraq War created the choatic conditions for ISIL to flourish. Without that war, it wouldn’t exist. This can’t be denied. Votes aside, she was in the executive branch when she backed Maliki and was the main backer for the overthrow of Qadaffi, more recent decisions that more directly contributed to the rise ISIL than the AUMF. Her intentions were good, and these consequences were not anticipated, but to argue there was no cause and effect is to engage in revisionist history.
I backed that Libya policy by the way, not just on this blog but in pieces I wrote published in a national foreign affairs journal, so I do hold myself accountable as well. What I won’t do is argue the policy I supported has nothing to do with the negative consequences that followed it. It’s not a question of purity, Bernie has the luxury of not having ever been in a position of power to make or influence these decisions and can be an armchair critic. Hillary has not, but honestly examining the consequences of her decisions has no bearing on whether Sanders will make better ones. He is really irrelevant to the point I am making.
The media and candidates have a very hard time handling honesty. That’s the reality. How often does a politician apologize or accept responsibility? People don’t like to accept responsibility. None of us do, but politicians don’t often have the luxury of having a choice in the matter. Apologies are ammo for the other side, a sign of weakness. Should they be? No. It would be nice if the media, the public, and politicians could handle the truth, but they are difficult at best to do and they don’t change the past. Decisions in the past affect the future. But
Absolved? Responsibility? For a senate vote? A little perspective is needed. The resolution would have passed without her vote. As Secretary of State, however, she bears responsibility for her actions.
…and I am familiar with his credentials. Nothing personal, but I do think I’m going to take his word over yours on these matters.
n/t
But I’ve had higher national security clearances than he has and have been a sworn Foreign Service Officer in the United States Department of State. I’ve directly studied under Bob Pape and John Mearsheimer who are more highly regarded foreign affairs experts than Juan Cole. My friend who ironically had a Clinton School Fellowship to set up civics education programs in Tunisia and water cleaning programs in Syria just got backed and has briefed me on these conflicts. I’m not as qualified as Cole, but I know more about these topics than anyone on this blog.
Careful with your braggadocio there. You really don’t know what some of us have done in real life, more than just being briefed by “somebody who was there.”
…specifically in reference to you. However, none of us should assume we’ve done more or know more than others here, even those we know personally. Even the BMGers I know offline have a lot more to their background than I am aware of, and I’m sure that’s true for everyone.
By appreciate the admonishment, it was earned here. Have a good weekend folks, I got wedding samples to taste 🙂
I’ve been married for 27 years and was so nervous and uptight about my wedding that I didn’t really enjoy it.
So… Have Fun!
I’m the one who’s stressed out about keeping everyone happy, but your advice is well recieved and your own experience is not uncommon. The wedding and honeymoon will be a really nice break from the job and the first time we’ve spent three straight weeks together since the New Year. I’m looking forward to it!
I knew he was fluent in Arabic, but from his bio it sounds like he also learned French in childhood and has a working knowledge of German, Persian, and Urdu. I don’t know how good his scholarship is, but this has to count for something. His biography on the blog is quite self-promotional, but a full professorship at Michigan, an editorship at Cambridge UP, several books and a successful blog can’t be completely dismissed as qualifications.
As commentators on current events go, he’s reliably to the left, but not as rigorous as I prefer. I visit his site a couple of time a week for links to Middle East news.
Before Best Defense chimes in, he’s been to far more places including Iraq. He beats me for sure.