02/04/16 – Derek Davison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Right now on CNN, it's Hillary tries to justify vote for the Iraq war.
Because it just goes without saying, even on CNN now, that what a terrible decision she and everyone at CNN made to support that war back then, huh?
But they don't ever have to say they're sorry, and they don't ever have to say that everybody who opposed them back then was right.
But at least it goes without saying now that, boy, should not have done that.
Small victory, I guess.
All right, so this morning I saw on my website, someone said, any criticism of Bernie Sanders is objective support for Hillary.
And I thought, oh, yeah, well, then I'm just going to interview somebody who's good on Bernie Sanders again today, if that's how it's got to be.
And Derek Davison wrote this piece for Jim Loeb's blog.
We were just talking about Jim with Grant a minute ago.
At loeblog.com, let's talk about Bernie Sanders and the Middle East.
And Derek is a Washington-based researcher and writer on international affairs and American politics.
Again, writes for loeblog.com.
And then this is also reprinted at foreign policy and focus, fpif.org.
And we're going to run it tomorrow on antiwar.com, because FPIF says we can.
Hey, welcome back to the show for the first time.
Derek, how are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Sorry, I'm used to saying welcome back to everybody all the time, because there's so few people who are good on all this stuff.
But anyway, when I read your article, I didn't think for a minute that this was objective support for Hillary.
Obviously, you are coming at Bernie Sanders from the left, and it would be a safe assumption that you are even more critical of Hillary Clinton's positions on the very same subjects you take Bernie Sanders to task for.
Is that fair?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, good.
So I'm just so tired of all of that.
Who you must be supporting by opposing anyone at any particular time is completely ridiculous.
It's to the point now where I'd kind of like somebody to put me in a coma and wake me up in October.
Exactly.
I'm with you.
All right.
Well, so we can't do that without putting our loved ones in legal danger or whatever.
We've got to talk about it.
Let's talk about it.
Tell me everything about Bernie Sanders.
He was good on Vietnam, probably, right?
Bernie, I think he was probably good on Vietnam.
I think that my macro criticism about this primary in general is that neither one of them seems to want to talk too much about foreign policy, and I understand why.
It doesn't poll very highly as a priority for voters, particularly in the Democratic voter base.
Hillary doesn't want to talk about it because her foreign policy instincts are to the right of the average Democratic voter in 2016.
And Sanders, I think, just isn't comfortable on the topic.
It's not what he's made his career focus, and it is something that he needs to start addressing, I think, in a more systematic way if he wants to be a serious presidential candidate.
Well, you know, there's something there about how this guy is just too much of an intellectual to possibly plead ignorance on this stuff.
You're right that he's not chosen it to be his focus.
But do any of us believe that he reads less than 50,000 words of news per day or per week at least?
This is a guy who knows what's going on, who is paying attention.
Well, he's a United States senator, so you would think, right?
I mean, just as a general rule, he's going to want to be in Congress.
I'm not calling the guy brilliant.
I'm just saying he's not George W. Bush, right?
Right.
He's not some dumbass who just showed up.
He's been interested in national political issues for generations on end.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And, you know, the interesting thing is when he was mayor of Lincoln, he was very outspoken on Israel-Palestine in a way that he hasn't been in years.
He was much more, which seems counterintuitive.
It's intuitive in a way because you kind of have to moderate when you're very pro-Palestinian.
That's okay for the mayor of Burlington, but maybe you struggle with that on the national level.
But he's certainly tamped down his discussions on his rhetoric on that issue in particular since becoming a national politician.
Yeah.
And now, so, well, he came to Congress in the early 90s, is that it?
Yes.
And then, so, do you know how he was on Bosnia in 94, on the no-fly zones over Iraq, the blockade and the bombing over the no-fly zones in the 1990s?
I don't know how he was on the no-fly zones.
I think he supported the 1999 intervention in Kosovo.
I assume that he was in support of the Bosnia intervention before that, but I have no basis to say that other than if he's for one, he's probably for the other.
I think the fact that he doesn't talk about the no-fly zones, which were, you know, would be something that maybe would distinguish him from Clinton, suggests that he was probably for them.
But I, again, I do not know.
Yeah.
You know, I think I just saw an accusation that he was for them, but it didn't have any evidence for it and I put off looking it up.
But there was plenty of room to criticize there with the various U.N. officials resigning over it and, you know, Operation Desert Fox and the Iraq Liberation Act and all these things.
Well, I mean, the embargo, the sanctions, you know, I mean, are directly responsible for countless Iraqi deaths from the end of the first Gulf War to the second.
So, yeah, there's a lot of room to criticize.
Yeah.
All right.
And now, so, he voted for the AUMF after 9-11, huh?
I guess everybody did except Barbara Lee in the entire Congress, right?
Exactly.
All right.
So that kind of goes without saying.
But now, you know, Ron Paul even voted for it and I really wish he hadn't.
And he had even introduced a letter of mark and reprisal, which was the actual constitutional thing that you're supposed to do to declare war against a group smaller than a state, like some pirates or some terrorists.
Madison thought of that.
It's in there.
And he actually introduced one.
But then he voted for the AUMF.
But then he immediately started writing anti-war stuff, you know, that September or at least by October, he was saying, out of Afghanistan, you know.
So, and he was consistent ever after that.
And I don't guess Sanders really has taken much of an anti-war position.
Sanders still talks about his support for Afghanistan.
It's how I think he tries to deflect the idea that he's a pacifist because, you know, God forbid, we should have a pacifist running for president.
Right.
Yeah, that's for his credibility.
He cites the longest, most failed war ever by anyone.
But I mean, yeah, that's how he sort of plants his I will use force if necessary.
Totem, I think.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and then so at least he was good on on Iraq War Two.
Did he do much to oppose Iraq War Two when they were in the middle of planning it there in 02 and 03?
You know, I think he was, you know, I can remember him being, you know, he wasn't shy about having about voting against it.
I don't remember his opposition being a big deal, but I don't you know, you can't separate that from the fact that Bernie Sanders in general is not a guy who's ever really gotten a lot of media attention until now.
So, I mean, that's a hard that's a tough question to answer.
I it doesn't stick in my head that there was a lot of talk about.
Oh, Bernie Sanders is opposed to this.
Bernie Sanders is opposed to this.
But, you know, as I said, Bernie Sanders has never really been a big deal for the national media until recently.
Yeah, that's true, too.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
We got to take this break.
When we get back, we'll talk more with Derek Davison from low blog dot com.
Jim Loeb's blog about Bernie Sanders and his views and actions, his voting record on foreign policy.
After this.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
So, oops, got chainsaws out back.
I don't know if you guys can hear that.
I hope not.
These things happen.
Some interviews have chainsaws in them.
That's all.
You know, it's a radio show with chainsaws.
Derek Davison, he wrote this piece taking a critical look at Bernie Sanders and his positions in the Middle East.
I think people just assume, well, he calls himself a socialist.
And he seems like such a – like he always means what he says.
I don't know exactly how you characterize that.
It doesn't seem that trustworthy to me.
But I can see the appeal where he seems so honest and further to the left than the center.
And so he must be a peacenik, right?
But then, geez, not so much.
It doesn't look like here.
So we're talking about the terror war while we're going back through the 90s and other history.
But would it be all right with you, Derek, if we get back to his position on Israel and Palestine?
As you say, he was apparently really hard-nosed about the two-state solution back when he was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
So what all has changed and over what period of time here?
Well, there was a good piece on Alternet not that long ago about this, about the evolution, if you want to call it that, in his Israel-Palestine position.
He started to change.
I mean, you have a hard time finding much beyond the sort of standard defense of the two-state solution once he got into Congress in the early 90s.
You know, when he was mayor of Burlington, he was outspoken about mistreatment of Palestinians.
Since then, he's been more even-handed about it in his rhetoric.
And since he became senator, it's moved even more in that direction.
I mean, during the 2014 war in Gaza, there's this video on YouTube that you can check out of him at a town hall meeting where he's confronting people who are opposed to Israel's bombing campaign and shouting them down and trying to explain that Israel has a right to be doing this.
And, of course, we know that the bombing campaign in Gaza caused billions of dollars in damage.
Gaza's been leveled virtually.
People, you know, their lives have been completely ruined.
Yeah, I'd encourage people to go and look at that, too.
It's pretty outstanding.
Well, I mean, he didn't co-sponsor the sense of Congress resolution that praised Israel or reiterated Congress's sense of Israel's right to quote-unquote defend itself.
But, at the same time, he did very vocally, as you can see in the YouTube video, defend what was going on.
Yeah, I mean, it really was pretty bad from the very beginning of the thing.
All right, so here's the other thing, too.
We've been talking about this for a long time on the show.
And, you know, I kind of just don't even want to have a dog in the fight at all, but I've got to be honest, best analysis.
I think I agree with Philip Weiss and others in his camp that it's way too late for a two-state solution anyway.
That the annexation of the entire West Bank, and Gaza is sort of a different case.
It's been turned into a prison.
You know, it's not being colonized the same way as the West Bank is right now, at least.
But point being that, you know, it already is an apartheid single state.
And that now the question is, what are we going to do inside this one-state solution?
Is it going to stay two different rules, you know, one with law and one without?
Or what's going to happen there?
And so, yeah, I wonder what would be his position on that.
That does seem to be the reality of the situation when you just look at the size of Area C, and all the so-called security zone claimed by the Israelis on the West Bank.
Well, I think, I mean, you're right.
The viability of a two-state solution now is almost nil.
I mean, if you look at the way that they've sort of divided and conquered the West Bank, as you say.
And this is something, you know, Senator Sanders doesn't really need to comment on this, right?
I mean, Senator Sanders can take a position in favor of a two-state solution and not really think about the implications of that or about what's really happening on the ground.
But a President Sanders would have to address this at some point.
I mean, President Sanders is going to be the one dealing with Israel and setting policy.
And it would be nice to know what he really thinks about what's actually happening and not, you know, sort of the abstract throwaway American two-state.
Compared to Hillary or Cruz or Rubio or probably even Trump.
He's probably the less Zionist out of all of them.
Yeah, I think that's fair to say.
I mean, Hillary Clinton has a lot of ties to people like Haim Saban and, you know, pro-Israel donors.
And she's come out against the divestment movement, BDS.
So her position is pretty clear.
And the Republicans' positions, the remaining Republicans, I should say, are all pretty clear.
So, yes, I mean, I think you could say that he's better on Israel-Palestine than anybody else left in the race.
But that doesn't mean that he's good on Israel-Palestine from a Palestinian perspective.
Right.
Definitely not.
Yeah, or from just a basic, you know, human rights perspective.
Right.
And now, so I'm sorry because we are pretty short on time here, but could you at least just define the incoherence of the Islamic State-Saudi policy here real quick?
Sure.
I mean, Bernie's position on the Islamic State, his plan to confront the Islamic State, is coalition building.
It's not clear what he's going to do differently from Obama.
He talks about continuing airstrikes, no ground troops, and building coalitions, which is the same thing that we're already doing.
We've failed to build a coalition because every country that would need to be in that coalition has its own priorities, and they don't dovetail with America's, and they don't include really doing anything about the Islamic State, at least not right now.
And so my issue with, you know, when Sanders talks about fighting the Islamic State, he never explains how he's going to get over that hump, how he's going to convince these countries, you know, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and so on down the line, who all should be interested in fighting the Islamic State but are not, are more interested in fighting with each other, which is the problem the Obama administration has encountered.
Sanders never has yet to explain how he would fix that problem, how he would get over that hurdle.
It seems almost insurmountable to me.
I don't know there's anything that any American president could do, but if this is his, you know, the centerpiece of his plan for dealing with this group, then it would be nice if he would talk more about it.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry we're out of time.
There's more great stuff that we could have talked about in this article.
Let's talk about Bernie Sanders and the Middle East.
It's at loblog.com and fpif.org by Derek Davison.
Thanks very much for your time, Derek.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, Sheldon, we'll be right back with Sheldon after this.
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