Bernie Sanders' Focus on Clinton's Iraq War Vote Isn't Harping -It's Necessary

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/11/bernie-sanders-focus-clintons-iraq-war-vote-isnt-harping-its-necessary

The response from some journalists and Clinton supporters has been to derisively question whether he has any other notes, with a tone of: when is he going to stop complaining about something that happened over a decade ago?

He shouldn’t stop. If anything, more politicians should be bringing up the Iraq war at every opportunity. The dismissive tone Clinton supporters have taken to the issue belies a callous indifference to the most disastrous foreign policy calamity in our lifetime – a decision that continues to directly affect US foreign policy across the entire Middle East. It is dangerously shortsighted and an insult to the countless people who died as a result. If anything, we should be talking about the Iraq war more, not less.

Four thousand five hundred members of the US military died in the Iraq, tens of thousands of Americans were injured or maimed, and at least a half million Iraqis died as a result of the decision to declare war (some estimates put it as high as one million), for starters. Should we stop talking about those unspeakably tragic deaths because most happened 10 years ago, or because the majority of them weren’t American?

But beyond the direct destruction caused by Congress and the Bush administration committing more than a $1tn of blood and treasure, it is beyond debate that the current chaos Isis is sowing across the Middle East can be directly attributed to the Iraq invasion, something that even the most hardcore Iraq war architects, like former British prime minister Tony Blair, readily admit.

Isis’s roots can be traced to the squalid US jails that sprouted up in Iraq in the early 2000s, and at least a portion of the terrorist group’s leadership consists of members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party who were excommunicated from the Iraqi army and civil society following the US invasion, widely considered to be one of the worst decisions by the US occupying forces.