Bernie Sanders Just Gave His Best Speech in 2 Years

[Hassin Bin Sober]

who am I kiddin' this is a 10

This is a couple days old but with the read.

Bernie Sanders Just Gave His Best Speech in 2 Years

He established liberal internationalism as a coherent foreign policy.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/24/bernie-sanders-just-gave-his-best-speech-2-years

There’s a lot of tsuris all over the place over the fact that Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar will be putting on a show-pony debate next week on CNN with the Clueless Twins, Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, on the subject of healthcare. Most of said tsuris revolves around the fear that the debate will get framed as Dog’s Breakfast vs. Eeek! Socialism! I’m not wholly convinced that these fears are groundless; the elite political press is hungering to turn the Graham-Cassidy calamity into a Both Sides failure—here’s all the evidence you’ll ever need of that—and this might indeed be the vehicle through which they do that.

But what I do know is that Bernie Sanders is better versed on his position than either Graham or Cassidy are on the bill that bears their name. Also, there are more than a few signs that Sanders—who must always be kept separate from the more febrile of his followers—is more with the Democratic program than he’s ever been. On Thursday, he gave a speech in which he set out a progressive approach to foreign policy that was clear, coherent, and was probably the best speech I’ve seen him give in two years.

He called out regime change for its own sake while, at the same time, defending the role of the United States in championing international human rights. (He did this by shrewdly pairing the catastrophic Iraq War with the Iran nuclear deal.) But the most impressive passage was the one in which Sanders pointed out that American foreign policy must now take into account the ongoing international effort to undermine liberal democracy being undertaken by Russia and other transnational oligarchical operations.

[ehrnst]

1. So is this, and still worth the read.

Yet he decries both full-scale US military intervention and the use of drone strikes and other airstrikes to kill terrorists around the world. That’s all well and good, but then how does he plan to address the threat — both to the US directly and to the security, stability, and prosperity of people around the world — from groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, if not by some combination of military intervention or drone and airstrikes?

Does he have an alternative idea of how to approach the threat from international terrorist groups, beyond the vague notion that if everyone is happy and prosperous, terrorism will automatically disappear? If he does, he failed to share it with the rest of us during his speech.


Similarly, while Sanders sang the praises of the Iran nuclear deal and encouraged Trump not to pull the US out of it — which would essentially destroy the deal — he never mentions the very real concerns the Trump administration and many of the deal’s supporters and detractors have raised about Iran’s other dangerous and destabilizing actions, such as its support for terrorist groups and sectarian militias throughout the Middle East, its atrocious human rights record at home, and its continued testing of ballistic missiles.

And while he rightly slams the US for supporting Saudi Arabia in its disastrous war in Yemen, he fails to acknowledge that the Obama administration gave that support in the first place in order to convince Saudi Arabia to support the Iran nuclear deal and to do more to help fight ISIS in Syria.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/21/16345602/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-speech-westminster