“Choosing A Better Path”: Iran’s Moderate Reformists Performing Well in Elections, Validating Success Of Iran Deal
Good news out of Iran today: moderate reformists are performing well in early election results:
Early election results in Iran show reformists who favor expanding democratic freedoms and improving relations with the West are expanding their presence in parliament and a clerical body responsible for selecting the country’s next supreme leader.
Reports in the semi-official Fars and Mehr news agencies showed hard-liners losing ground in the 290-seat legislature. None of Iran’s three main political camps — reformist, conservative and hard-line — was expected to capture a majority, but the reformist camp is on track for its best showing in more than a decade.
It’s not just a victory for reform. It’s also a functional and political victory for the Iran deal. Contrary to the hyperventilating of the Republican message machine, it was not hardliners in Iran who pushed for the deal but rather moderates. Removing sanctions not only brings Iran closer to the West in exchange for nuclear concessions which is a great idea on its own merits, but the success of the deal itself politically empowers moderates over the strict Islamists:
A victory for reformists would be a boost for moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who championed the newly implemented Iranian nuclear deal with world powers in the face of hard-line opposition.
This is also, of course, a victory for the Obama Administration and for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who helped lay the groundwork for the eventual deal. In the fury of the presidential primaries it’s easy to overlook, but Democrats can and should hold the entire Republican Party accountable for its wrongheaded and frankly dangerous statements about the Iran deal. Everyone who supported the deal (and Clinton in particular) should do a victory lap and use the success of the deal as a political cudgel against every Republican candidate. It’s just another example of how liberal foreign policy creates better outcomes that improve the well-being of the world and make America safer as a result.
If anyone cares to make the case, it’s also another example in which American christian conservatives and Middle Eastern Islamist conservatives–despite claiming to be fierce enemies–yet again found themselves on the same side. They’re already quiet allies on issues like guns, gay rights, women’s sexual freedom, “political correctness,” religion in schools and the intervention of federal government in the affairs of local good old boys. In this case, neither side wanted a political rapprochement with the other: both American and Iranian conservatives benefit politically from treating their respective people not as fellow human beings but as agents of Satan, increasing the likelihood of a bloody war that would help strengthen radical conservative power in both countries.
Thankfully, both America and Iran chose a better path, and the success of more liberal forces in both nations is paying dividends.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 27, 2016
“Never As Consistently Anti-Intervention As Advertised”: Vetting Bernie: He Never Voted For Intervention In Iraq — Except Twice
The only topic that preoccupies Bernie Sanders more than income inequality is his vote against authorization of war in Iraq, which he mentions at every debate and whenever anyone questions his foreign policy credentials. Fair enough: Sanders turned out to be right on that vote and Hillary Clinton has admitted that she was wrong to trust George W. Bush.
But the socialist Vermont senator is under fresh scrutiny today on the (further) left, where his support for intervention in Bosnia and Afghanistan has raised sharp questions. In Counter-Punch, the online magazine founded by the late Alexander Cockburn, his longtime collaborator Jeffrey St. Clair complains that even on Iraq, Sanders is a “hypocrite” who was never as consistently anti-intervention as advertised:
In 1998 Sanders voted in favor of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.”
Later that same year, Sanders also backed a resolution that stated: “Congress reaffirms that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.”
According to St. Clair, Sanders has dismissed those votes as “almost unanimous,” but that implies an absurdly elastic definition of the term. Looking up the actual vote, St. Clair found that 38 members of varying ideology and party affiliation voted no. To him, this means Sanders should be held responsible for the bombing campaign that followed, as well as the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children who allegedly perished as a result of US sanctions (which seems to absolve the late dictator of any culpability for the sanctions regime, but never mind).
Certainly it is fair to ask Sanders — who strives to distance himself from his rival on foreign and security policy – why he cast those fateful votes to support Bill Clinton’s Iraq policy in 1998.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, The National Memo, February 17, 2016
“An Uncertain Record In Three Major Policy Areas”: Bernie Sanders Is Not Nearly As Progressive As You Think He Is
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been doing some serious sub-tweeting about Hillary Clinton.
Following her ever-so-narrow win in Iowa, Clinton touted her bona fides as a “progressive who gets things done,” much to Sanders’ distaste. “Most progressives I know were against the war in Iraq,” Sanders tweeted, without specifically naming Clinton. “One of the worst foreign policy blunders in the history of the United States.”
Indeed, measured against Clinton, Sanders is right to claim the mantle of progressivism. The former secretary of state is (and should be) dogged by her close and profitable ties to Wall Street and big business, and her foreign policy is consistently hawkish in a style Dick Cheney would admire.
But evaluated on the basis of his own lengthy record, Sanders is not as progressive as he makes himself out to be on at least three big issues: guns, criminal justice reform, and — despite the Iraq vote — foreign policy.
Sanders’ mixed history on guns is a chink in his progressive armor that Clinton aims at whenever she has the chance. “If we’re going to go into labels, I don’t think it was particularly progressive to vote against the Brady Bill five times,” she said at the latest debate. “I don’t think it was progressive to vote to give gun makers and sellers immunity.”
Sanders often sounds like a gun control hardliner. “The president is right: Condolences are not enough,” he said after a shooting this past fall. “We’ve got to do something … We need sensible gun control legislation.” But Clinton’s claims are still basically accurate. Per this Politifact tally of Sanders’ significant gun votes in Congress, he backs additional control about half the time, albeit with a trend toward more gun regulation in recent years. Sanders’ staff has tried to explain his comparative conservatism here as part and parcel of representing Vermont, a left-wing but gun-friendly state, but either way, his is hardly a super-progressive record on guns.
Then there’s criminal justice reform, an issue which has netted Sanders the endorsement of several well-known figures in the Black Lives Matter movement. Speaking in New Hampshire the same day as the subtweets, Sanders vowed, “There will be no president who will fight harder to end institutional racism” than he will.
“We have got to reform a very, very broken criminal justice system,” he added. “It breaks my heart, and I know it breaks the hearts of millions of people in this country, to see videos on television of unarmed people, often African-Americans, shot by police. That has got to end.”
The rhetoric is right. But Sanders’ record says otherwise.
For instance, Sanders sounded a similar note back in April 1994, decrying America’s ballooning prison population and its ties to poverty. But just one week later, he voted to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a centerpiece of Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” shtick, which, among other things, mandated a life sentence for anyone convicted of three drug crimes; expanded the list of death penalty crimes; lowered the age at which a juvenile could be tried as an adult to just 13; and appropriated billions to expand the prison system and hire 100,000 new police officers.
That’s the biggest blot on Sanders’ criminal justice record, but it’s not the only one. In 1995, he voted against a measure which would have prohibited police acquisition of tanks and armored vehicles like those he critiqued in Ferguson. Likewise, in 1998, Sanders prioritized gun control over prison reform and voted for mandatory minimum sentences for crimes where the offender carried, brandished, and/or fired a gun. The gun in question doesn’t have to be used for the criminal act, so, for example, a nonviolent crime like smoking pot while carrying a legally owned weapon would trigger the mandatory minimum.
Now that criminal justice reform is en vogue, Sanders has shifted — but it’s an uncomfortable fit. His responses to Ferguson highlighted poverty more than police brutality; and the bill to ban private federal prisons he introduced this past fall had a clearer connection to his socialist economic policies than anything else. Alex Friedmann of the Human Rights Defense Center, whom Sanders consulted in crafting the proposal, says, “It appears to be more for political purposes than to actually address the many problems in our criminal justice system.”
Finally, foreign policy. Sanders regularly touts his vote against invading Iraq in 2003, and that is unquestionably to his credit. But then there’s the rest of his record on matters of war and peace, which figures heavily into the wariness many actual socialists maintain toward Sanders’ campaign.
As Stephen M. Walt writes at Foreign Policy, Sanders is hardly “a reflexive dove.” He intends to retain President Obama’s drone program if elected. He voted in favor of Clinton’s pet intervention in Libya, in favor of the interminable war in Afghanistan, and even in favor of multiple funding measures to maintain the war in Iraq — a repeated “yes” to bankrolling the very conflict he so often boasts of opposing.
Sanders also speaks enthusiastically of coalition-based wars. “I would say that the key doctrine of the Sanders administration would be no, we cannot continue to do it alone; we need to work in coalition,” he said at the last debate. In practice, though, that doesn’t mean no more wars; it means non-Americans fighting and dying in pursuit of American goals.
Writing at the socialist Jacobin Magazine, Paul Heideman contends that though “Sanders is willing to criticize many of the most egregious over-extensions of American empire” — like the invasion of Iraq — “it seems he has no interest in contesting the American suppression of democracy across the globe.” The candidate cheered King Abdullah II of Jordan for his opposition to ISIS, of which Heideman snarks, “It is never a good look for a socialist to praise a monarch.”
More broadly, it is never a good look for a progressive to have such an uncertain record in three major policy areas. Running against Clinton, Sanders can rightfully lay claim to progressive voters’ support. But they could be forgiven for suspecting he is less one of their own than his tweeting suggests.
By: Bonnie Kristian, The Week, February 9, 2016
“Agent Of (Message) Change”: Hillary Clinton Went After Bernie Sanders’ Strengths In New Hampshire
Would it be impolitic (this being a Democratic debate and all) to say that Hillary Clinton came out with guns blazing? She may be on course to a Granite State thrashing, but she showed up at the University of New Hampshire loaded for Bern.
She tempered a broad hug of Sanders’ liberalism (“We have a vigorous agreement here,” she said at one point when discussing financial reform) with the assertion that she is better positioned to advance that agenda.
Beyond that, go through the issues that have animated the Democratic race recently or are central to the Sanders case: Is he running a more inspiring campaign? Only because it’s a more fantastical one: “Let’s go down a path where we can actually tell people what we will do,” she said. “A progressive is someone who makes progress.” (That’s better phraseology, by the way, than the “progressive with results” formulation she had been using, which sounded like a rip-off of George W. Bush’s “reformer with results” message from 2000.)
And is she indeed a real progressive? She had a whole soliloquy prepared in answer: “I have heard Senator Sanders’ comments, and it’s really caused me to wonder who is left in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” Clinton said. “Under his definition, President Obama is not progressive because he took donations from Wall Street.” Ditto Joe Biden (Keystone XL) and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota (Defense of Marriage Act). Then a pivot to Sanders’ progressive weak underbelly: “I don’t think it was particularly progressive to vote against the Brady [gun control] bill five times.”
Bonus points to moderator Chuck Todd for pressing Sanders on whether President Barack Obama is a progressive; the Vermonter’s answer seemed to be that Obama is progressive despite failing some litmus tests because he’s actually made progress. (Which is rather like the argument that Clinton is making.)
Is she in the establishment? Hell no – she’s a woman running for president which by definition means she’s not establishment. This answer was glib if, as Ezra Klein noted, nonsensical:
If Clinton is not part of the establishment than there is no such thing as the establishment. And there is such a thing as the establishment
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) February 5, 2016
Is she part of the corporate-money-corruption problem that is central to Sanders’ political message? That’s a “very artful smear,” an “insinuation unworthy” of the Vermont progressive, she fumed.
Did she vote for the Iraq War while he voted against it? “We did differ,” she said. “A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat [the Islamic State group].”
Indeed foreign policy was easily Sanders’ weakest portion of the evening. A question about Afghanistan sent him on a verbal tour through Syria, Iraq, Jordan and the battle with the Islamic State group, prompting Todd to follow up: “Can you address a question on Afghanistan?”
Saying we need allies is not foreign policy. Example: We can’t get Sunni allies w/o taking on Iran. What does Sanders suggest?
— Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) February 5, 2016
I hated the Iraq War as much as anyone, but “I made the right call on a vote 13 years ago” is really not a foreign policy vision for now.
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) February 5, 2016
If there’s one takeaway from this debate it is that Sanders is woefully unprepared, on foreign policy, to be president
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) February 5, 2016
For his part Sanders was standard-operating-Bernie. It’s a compelling message but it’s limited and he did little to address the arguments against it. Take the entirety of his agenda: How will he get something passed? “No, you just can’t negotiate with [Senate Republican Leader] Mitch McConnell,” Sanders said. “Mitch is gonna have to look out the window and see a whole lot of people saying, ‘Mitch, stop representing the billionaire class. Start listening to working families.'” The revolution will come and Mitch McConnell will cave.
Sanders believes a sufficiently large crowd outside McConnell’s window would make him support campaign finance reform. I do not.
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 5, 2016
Chait’s right; Sanders is basing his would-be presidency on the kind of tea party thinking that informed Ted Cruz and the shutdown crew. And it won’t work any better for the left than it did the right.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, February 5, 2016
“Congress Consorting To Thwart U.S. Diplomacy?”: The NSA Reportedly Spied On Congress. Is That The Real Scandal?
There’s a lot we don’t know beneath The Wall Street Journal‘s report today that the National Security Agency picked up intelligence on meetings with U.S. members of Congress and domestic political groups while spying on the Israeli government after credible reports (subsequently validated by the surveillance) that the Israelis were collecting and leaking intelligence on the sensitive U.S.-Iran nuclear talks.
The story has many dimensions. But, so far, virtually all of the reaction involves two questions: (1) Should the U.S. be spying on our ally Israel? (This was raised immediately if cautiously by Marco Rubio, who’s in a bit of a quandary because he’s normally a fan of surveillance.) And (2) should the Executive branch be spying, even incidentally, on the Legislative branch? (Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra called for an investigation of this possibility and for indictments if it turned out to be true.) These are both important and complex issues. But there should be a third question raised as well: Should members of Congress be consorting with agents of a foreign government to thwart U.S. diplomacy?
Perhaps this question seems obvious in the context of a situation where the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives invited a foreign prime minister to address Congress with the thinly veiled intention of building opposition to approval of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. But most Republicans and some Democrats have long adopted the habit of arguing that the U.S. should defer to Israel on all matters relating to the Middle East, to the point of abandoning any pretense of an independent point of view. The dominant position among Republicans was articulated by Mitt Romney in October of 2012: “The world must never see daylight between our two nations,” meaning the U.S. and Israel. No one was under the illusion that Romney was instructing Israelis to move closer to the U.S.
This was and remains a dangerous and largely unprecedented position. Even if one intends slavish obeisance to a foreign government, there’s something to be said for keeping up the appearance of independence. After all, a lot of the conservatives most determined to carry Bibi Netanyahu’s water in Washington are also outspoken about the U.S. being the unchallenged colossus of global affairs, unconstrained by alliances with Euro-weenie socialists or even friendly relations with Muslim countries. So it would be preferable if American politicians who want to signal to conservative Evangelicals or to Sheldon Adelson that Bibi’s policies will be their own could find a way to do so without meeting with people who are under U.S. intelligence surveillance. Their hatred of Barack Obama is no excuse for disloyalty to the United States.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 30, 2015
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