He points out that Trump helped create the Iran crisis and that launching bombs and missiles against another country is an act of war and, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, reminds her that under the constitution, only the Congress has the power to declare war and that the president can only use military force in an emergency that calls for immediate defensive action, and that no one thinks that the situation with Iran fits that category.
“It’s like somebody setting fire to a basket full of paper and then putting it out. He helped create the crisis, and then he stopped the attacks,” Sanders said in an interview with “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan on Saturday. The full interview will air on “Face the Nation” this Sunday.
Sanders accused Mr. Trump of thinking “that a war with Iran is something that might be good for this country.” When Brennan pointed out that the strike considered by Mr. Trump was “limited,” Sanders responded sarcastically.
“Oh, just a limited strike. Oh, well, I’m sorry. I just didn’t know that it’s okay to simply attack another country with bombs,” Sanders said, incredulously. “Just a limited strike? That’s an act of warfare.”
It is extraordinary how the media simply buys into the way that the administration and the war hawks frame these issues.
It is amazing how casual the US is about crimes against humanity and violations of international law.
Marcus @1: I don’t know if you’ve heard of “lefty” blogger TBogg. I stopped reading his blog years ago when he and most of his commentariat started blindly defending Obama’s
continuedexpanded use of drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Any questioning of the wisdom, or humanity, of this would be met with mass mockery about “purity”, etc. They even used the “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here”, and “better than American boots on the ground” bullshit. Utterly sickening.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments
I wonder if the USA is bombing any of those places.
Rob: At this point in my life, my patriotism is somewhat…skeptical. Unless the Chinese have soldiers landing on the shores of California, eternal calls to “war” for “national defense” ring pretty hollow to me.
Bombs don’t have tightly controlled effects. But because they’re more accurate than simply dropping large masses of dead weight out of an airplane ala WWII, we pretend they’re precision implements.
I think the only way to consider what it’s really like and whether it might be a good idea to use them is to think about what it would look like if bombs were dropped at home. Even after shipping a lot of production overseas, we still have a lot of factories. Would another nation really know which ones to bomb and which ones to skip? Would they decide that it’s better to hit further up the supply chain rather than hit the facility that’s assembling the end product? Which government facilities are worth hitting? Probably not the local post office but likely anyplace that might be doing weapons research. There’s a lot of middle ground between those two. And what would casualties look like for any of the above?
Just to give a quick example, I live in northern Illinois near Chicago. Within about 50 miles of me there’s a huge chemical processing plant and two federal science facilities. One of them has a decommissioned particle collider and does a ton of computer processing for basic science experiments all around the world, the other wears many, many hats and does research in a whole lot of different fields from climate modelling to weaponry and I don’t even know what else. Plus I’m even closer to two telephone company facilities large enough they call them campuses. Everyone in all of these locations would be civilians except for the guards around the facility doing weapons research. So what would bombing any of them look like? Criminal. Horrendous. Catastrophic. And almost certainly pointless unless you create a humanitarian disaster by apocalyptically bombing the whole area back to the stone age, which would be a war crime.
“But we’re only murdering a small number of their citizens, who could possibly object??”
I would point out that the 9/11 attacks were also “limited strikes”.
“It is extraordinary how the media simply buys into …..”
No, it’s actually normal. Noam Chomsky already described it 30 years ago in his Manufacturing Consent. Last 20-25 years or so the same has happened to Dutch medial. The former quality papers don’t challenge political frames anymore either, like they used to do in the 1980’s..