Bernie Sanders lacks foreign policy experience, but also his rivals' errors

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/06/bernie-sanders-lacks-foreign-policy-experience-but-also-his-rivals-errors

Trevor Timm

As Bernie Sanders has risen in the polls, he has been taking increasing heat for some of his apparently vague foreign policy positions and the fact that his campaign does not have a team of establishment foreign policy advisers, unlike typical front-running candidates.

Instead of just questioning Sanders’ choice, we should really be questioning why any of the candidates of either party are employing the same old foreign policy advisers – many of whom not only supported the Iraq war but every disastrous military intervention since. These are the same people who now think that yet another regional war will somehow fix the chaos in the Middle East.

After a series of disastrous wars overseas, we should be looking for someone who has better “judgment” rather than candidates who have “experience” but are calling for more of the same policies in the Middle East that have led us into the mess we’re in now in the first place.

Nothing exemplifies this more than Hillary Clinton seemingly bragging about her foreign policy credentials at Thursday’s Democratic debate by citing her friendship with Henry Kissinger, who Christopher Hitchens called a war criminal. The former Nixon and Ford administration national security advisor and secretary of state is revered in DC foreign policy establishment circles but reviled just about everywhere else for his role in building or perpetuating multiple atrocities in east Asia during the late 1960s and 70s.

FULL story at link.

OS

[PoliticAverse]

1. John McCain had a lot more "foreign policy experience" than Barack Obama...

but I still think the right decision was made in that election.

Judgement > Experience.

[EdwardBernays]

2. Judgement trumps experience

Clintons Campaign Chairman owns one of the biggest lobbying firms in DC. They represent big pharma, weapons manufacturers and Saudi Arabia.

Under Clinton the State Department sold billions in weapons to countries with authoritarian regimes. Many, many of those that got new contracts (selling to them reversed State policy in numerous cases) were donors to the Clinton Foundation.

Eg Saudi Arabia got a 29billion dollar deal from Clinton, after donating 10m to the Clinton Foundation.

That's her judgement.

A lot of those weapons are being used in war crimes in Yemen right now.

[Smarmie Doofus]

3. He's got foreign policy experience dating back to the 1990s when he was elected to congress.

So... what is this meme?

Candidate Obama had precisely four years of foreign policy experience, when elected president.

Clinton has a mountain of foreign policy experience and is leaving us with a world in flames.

Everything she touches *explodes*.

And she admires the stewardship of Henry Kissinger, for christ sakes.

Sanders is correct: the issue is not "experience". The relevant point of comparison is *judgement*.

He appears to have it; she manifestly does NOT.

[TwilightGardener]

4. I'm confused as to how a man who served in the House and Senate for decades, voting on

important issues like war and foreign aid, supposedly doesn't have sufficient foreign policy experience...but Ted Cruz does? Marco Rubio does? Yeah, the concern is that Bernie is not steeped in foreign policy establishment thinking and neocon interventionist ideas.

[ejbr]

5. [phone] n/t

[PonyUp]

6. But Hillary has Kissinger to advise her on foreign policy!!!

[starroute]

7. We should recall how strongly Bill Clinton promoted US arms sales abroad

I'm having trouble finding a single, concise source on this. The best I've come up with is a piece from 1995 titled "Bill Clinton's America: Arms Merchant to the World" at http://fas.org/asmp/library/articles/tnva595.html .

But the short version is that in the wake of the Cold War, the Bush administration started pushing US arms sales overseas -- and the Clinton administration only accelerated those efforts, both to provide income for US weapons manufacturers and as a way of increasing US influence in an increasingly unipolar world. Defense Secretary William Cohen -- a Republican senator who became Secretary of Defense during Clinton's second term -- was particularly associated with the aggressive pursuit of this policy.

I haven't thought about this stuff for several years, and I don't know how it fits in with Hillary's current associations and policies, but I suspect it would be worth looking into.

[malokvale77]

8. Here...

http://www.muckety.com/William-S-Cohen/2514.muckety