Taking a Closer Look at Vivek Ramaswamy's Supposed Anti-War Record

By Jon Reynolds

With a stiff drink, a heavy heart, and a strong sense of masochism, I recently subjected myself to the first round of Republican presidential debates. While the clown show lived up to expectations of being a tragic showcase of democracy gone wrong, the aftermath has been even more disturbing, particularly the flood of pundits and news stories claiming that Vivek Ramaswamy is anti-war.

Ramaswamy himself has even adopted the title, telling Israeli media in late August that “Israel needs to be in a strong position to defend itself. And the United States will be at Israel’s back. But I think that that’s a very different thing from automatically sleepwalking ourselves into war. I’m an anti-war president. And the way I’m going to do it is by deterring war, be it ending the war in Ukraine and deterring China.”

And yet, as is often the case with supposedly “anti-war” politicians operating in the two major political parties, there is more to the story, and Ramaswamy, like every other Republican on the GOP debate stage — and every other Democrat currently running for president — is far from anti-war.

IRAN AND CUTTING AID TO ISRAEL

During the debates — which were hosted by Fox News — Goddess of War, Nikki Haley, worked eagerly to out-hawk Ramaswamy on foreign policy:

“You want to go and defund Israel. You want to give Taiwan to China. You want to go and give Ukraine to Russia. You will make America less safe.”

Like clockwork, Ramaswamy played right into it:

“I will lead Abraham Accords 2.0,” he said. “I will partner with Israel to make sure Iran never is nuclear armed.”

Nevermind that politicians have been fearmongering about Iran building a bomb for decades, or that Iran has said it does not want to build a bomb, or the consensus of US intelligence agencies, which have repeatedly stated Iran is not pursuing nukes.

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, Ramaswamy doesn’t actually want to flat-out cut aid to Israel.

First, Ramaswamy said Israel should not get more aid than its other neighbors after the year 2028, when the current US aid package of $38 billion expires. But secondly, and perhaps most crucial to his comments about Israel, is that it’s questionable if he actually wants to cut aid to the country at all. Shortly after the Republican debate, Ramaswamy appeared on Israeli TV and offered a very different view:

“I said that if Israel was so strong that it would not need our assistance anymore, it would be a sign of success for inter-country companies. I want to be clear: we will never stop aid to Israel until Israel says it is ready for it. Relations between Israel and the US will be stronger at the end of my term than they have ever been, and more than they will be under the other contestants.”

In other words: don't count on Ramaswamy to break the decades-long, bipartisan tradition of arming Israel to the teeth.

“I love [Israel’s] border policies,” Ramaswamy said during the GOP debate. “I love their tough on crime policies. I love that they have a national identity and an Iron Dome to protect their homeland."

Or, put another way, the border policies which routinely cost Palestinians their lives are the same border policies “anti-war” Ramaswamy admires.

And if that's the case, just imagine the horrors awaiting Mexican people living along the southern border of the United States.

RAIDING MEXICO

“A lot of what he [Trump] did makes total sense to me," Ramaswamy told Russel Brand in early August. “I’m saying a lot of the same things.” But, in some cases, “I’m going further than he ever did. I said I’d use the military on our southern border."

Ramaswamy’s proposal apparently involves exploiting the fentanyl crisis and using it as justification to launch drone strikes into Mexico to “eliminate” drug cartels.

As reported by Politico in April, Ramaswamy said using military force on cartels without permission from Mexico “would not be the preferred option” but we would “absolutely” be willing to do it, adding that what the cartels are doing “is a form of attack” on the United States. “If those cartels meet the test for qualifying as a domestic terrorist organization for the purpose of freezing their assets, I think that qualifies them for the US president to view them as an eligible target for the use of authorized military force.”

And what could possibly go wrong considering how much success the US has endured trying to kill its way to victory in the decades-long failure known as the drug war.

Perhaps it would be more surprising that Ramaswamy wants to take Trump’s border policies to the “next level” if he wasn't so utterly infatuated with the former president and obsessed with strengthening his legacy.

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TRUMP "THE SINGLE GREATEST" PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME

During an August News Nation Town Hall, Ramaswamy referred to Trump as “the single greatest president” in his lifetime.

However, the problem with Ramaswamy’s love for Trump — and a seriously gigantic red flag — is that Trump is not anti-war.

While in office, Trump amped up Obama's drone wars, boosted military spending, bombed Syria and pledged to “keep” their oil, cut up the Iran nuclear deal, and dropped the largest non nuclear bomb in America's arsenal on Afghanistan.

Trump also mulled killing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whereas Ramaswamy claims he wants to pardon him, and they both share the same views on Chelsea Manning, who shared classified info with Wikileaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq:

“I will pardon Julian Assange because his prosecution was fundamentally unjust,” Ramaswamy tweeted in June. “Chelsea Manning, the government officer who actually leaked the information to Assange, had ‘her’ sentence commuted by President Obama because ‘she’ was part of a politically favored class: she’s trans — yet Assange now sits in a foreign prison for doing what the DC press corps does every day. This is wrong & I will fix it. We can’t have two tiers of justice: one for trans people, one for everyone else; one for violent Antifa/BLM rioters, one for everyone else; one for Trump on government document retention, another for Biden.”

COLD WARRIOR

It’s in our “vital interest” to make sure China “doesn't control the global semi-conductor supply chain in Taiwan,” Ramaswamy said in June, adding: “until we achieve semi-conductor independence, we will ensure Taiwan is not invaded by China” by ending the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

This should be good news, right? Ramaswamy wants to end the war in Ukraine. But how, you ask? By convincing Russia to break their alliance with “our enemy” China:

“The Russia-China military partnership outmatches the US on nuclear capabilities, on hypersonic missiles, on China’s naval capacities,” Ramaswamy said, later adding: “Worst of all, through the Ukraine war, we’re actually pushing Russia further into China’s hands. So, I will end that war.”

“The top military threat we face is the Russia-China alliance,” he said during an early August interview with PBS. “Our top adversary today is communist China.”

“I’m a George Washington America First conservative,” he tweeted on August 21. “Just as Nixon opened China to win the Cold War against Russia, the next president must open Russia to defeat China, starting with a peace settlement in Ukraine.”

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

“We talk about nation building,” Ramaswamy said during the early August News Nation Town Hall. “We have a nation to build right here back at home.”

But 23 years ago, another politician running for president also made this promise:

“I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations,” George W. Bush said during the 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore. “Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”

Three years later, he was nation-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

While on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end the US war in Iraq:

“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”

In early 2008, Obama reiterated that he was “opposed to this war in 2002. I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009.”

Well, the war in Iraq didn’t end. In fact, Obama added more conflicts to the tally while his other anti-war campaign promises slowly fizzled out, such as investigating torture under the Bush administration or closing down Guantanamo Bay.

Trump was a deviation from Obama and Bush in the way that he campaigned and the things he campaigned on. Unlike Obama and Bush, Trump made comments about “loving” torture and wanting to “bomb the hell” out of ISIS. Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — was US imperialism with the mask off.

And still, the bulk of his campaigning had less to do with promoting actual policy and more to do with promoting his own image as a businessman, a non-politician, and most importantly, as an “outsider” to the establishment. Yet once elected, Trump’s promises of “draining the swamp” came to an abrupt halt as he spent his first term adding Bush-era neocons like John Bolton to his cabinet while dutifully continuing all of the wars started by Bush and Obama since 9/11.

Ramaswamy, like Bush, claims he is against nation building. Like Obama, he makes comments that are passable on a surface level as anti-war. And like Trump, he is marketing himself as a businessman, a non politician, and an outsider.

With recent polling showing a majority of Americans turning against the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and general burnout from other wars such as the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s not at all surprising that so many of us desperately latch on to any politician who even remotely seems to promote a message of peace.

Unfortunately, between parroting neocon talking points about Iran, praising Israel’s oppressive border policies, regurgitating cold war propaganda about China and Russia, pledging to launch drone strikes inside Mexico, and praising hawkish presidents such as Trump, Ramaswamy hardly deserves to be called anti-war.

Delusions Shattered: How Democrats Lost Claims to a Moral High Ground by Ignoring Obama's Transformation Into Bush

By Jon Reynolds

When President Obama was sworn into office back in January 2009, and just a few months later agreed to " look forward" and disregard gross human rights violations committed by Bush officials (such as waterboarding, insect pits, solitary confinement, and more), they were quiet.

When President Obama oversaw the brutal force-feeding of untried prisoners at a detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they said nothing.

When President Obama's mass-deportations of undocumented immigrants in the US outpaced deportations under his predecessor, they stayed silent. As the Nation reported, "To pay for the ballooning enforcement-first approach, the budget for immigration enforcement grew 300 percent from the resources given at the time of its founding under Bush to $18 billion annually, more than all other federal law-enforcement agencies' budget combined."

When President Obama spent his first term in office outspending his predecessor on raids against legal marijuana dispensaries , his supporters had little to say. "There's no question that Obama's the worst president on medical marijuana," Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, told Rolling Stone magazine. "He's gone from first to worst."

When President Obama extended the US military occupation of Afghanistan until 2024, anti-war Democrats under George W. Bush were nowhere to be found.

When President Obama fabricated a reason to bomb oil-rich Libya in 2011, and then just a year later, reauthorized the US invasion of Iraq, they were voiceless, with the exception of a few scattered protests in the US, none of which came anywhere close to the size of those against the 2003 invasion of Iraq carried out by a Republican president.

When it was revealed that President Obama met weekly with his advisers for what was dubbed " Terror Tuesday" to decide who was worthy of being picked off by US predator drones around the world - and when it came to light that President Obama had a "kill list" and US citizens were on it, and were being killed, all without due process - again, barely a peep.

When Obama granted legal immunity to telecom companies that had conducted invasive spying during the George W. Bush years, when he extended the Patriot Act, when he prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all past presidents combined , when he expanded the NSA's surveillance programs , and when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and greenlit indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, Democrats remained complacent.

From January 2009 to the end of 2016, there has been a near-virtual silence from those identifying as Democrats against a variety of violations committed under President Obama, violations which were widely protested during the George W. Bush years, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by researchers at the University of Michigan, who released the results of an analysis of antiwar activity and found that after Obama's election, "Democratic participation in antiwar activities plunged, falling from 37 percent in January 2009 to a low of 19 percent in November 2009." Unsurprisingly, they also discovered that "anti-Republican attitudes had a significant, positive effect on the likelihood that Democrats attended antiwar rallies." Moreover, polling data from early 2012 showed Democrats supporting the same policies they heavily opposed during the Bush years, like keeping Guantanamo Bay open and drone warfare.

Under a Democratic president, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was continued, US boots hit the ground in Syria and Iraq, US bombs fell in Libya, US drones terrorized the skies over Pakistan and Yemen, America's nuclear arsenal was upgraded, and highly provocative military drills were conducted along the borders ofRussia and China. Eight years of warmongering by the Nobel Peace Prize winner has been met with eight years of silence by the very same members of his party who protested such activities under a president whose main difference was the political party he was affiliated with.

But the eight year drought of direct action by Democrats abruptly ended in November of 2016 when someone from the "other" party just barely managed to score a presidential nomination. Facing a loss of power, suddenly, Democrats reappointed themselves as the sole defenders of minorities everywhere and quickly attempted to seize the moral high ground. Faces familiar during the Bush years clawed their way out from under enormous piles of steaming hypocrisy to lecture the world on human rights, faces like Michael Moore , who for the past two elections (2008, 2012) encouraged everyone to go out and vote for the guy blowing the legs off Muslim teenagers in faraway lands with aerial death machines. Protests filled major cities across the US with demonstrators wielding signs about human rights, equality, and social justice, the irony lost on them that the candidate they wanted so badly to win would have been just as dangerous to the very minorities they attempted to champion.

Muslims, both domestic and foreign, would have continued to fall under the threat of persecution, violence, or radicalization under a Hillary Clinton administration. She supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and both the 2003 invasion and 2012 reinvasion of Iraq, she supported the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and she supported Obama's meddling in Egypt and Syria, as well as the bombardment of Libya in 2011. Where was the outcry during the Obama years? Where was the outcry when she took these positions as a presidential candidate? As Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian wrote back in 2013, "Does anyone doubt that if Obama's bombs were killing nice white British teenagers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp? Does it really take any debate to know that if the 16-year-old American suspiciously killed by the US government two weeks after killing his father had been Jimmy Martin in Sweden rather than Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen, the media interest and public outcry would be far more substantial?"

And let's not forget that Obama, like Bush before him, and certainly like Hillary Clinton after him had she won, offered support to regimes like Saudi Arabia , which are notorious for oppressing homosexuals and women.

Domestically, the War on Terror has also caused a variety of discriminatory problems for the same minorities Hillary Clinton and other Democrats claim to be interested in protecting. In early 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Obama administration over government surveillance programs allegedly aimed at curtailing domestic Muslim extremism. According to the ACLU, based on public documents, "the initiatives appear based on theories about so-called radicalization and violence that years of social science research have proven wrong. They also result in ineffective law enforcement and unfairly stigmatize American Muslims." Just a few years prior, it was also reported that the Obama administration was continuing to fund Bush-era programs in New York City that helped police departments spy on predominately Muslim American neighborhoods. As USA Today reported, money from Washington helped pay for "computers that store innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events." In the event of a Hillary Clinton victory, it seems likely that these types of policies wouldn't disappear given her passionate support for and involvement in the Obama administration.

And then there's the War on Drugs, another minority-crushing gem supported by both Republicans and Democrats alike. In 2010, just a year after Obama was sworn into office, black men and women were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession , even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates. African-Americans are 62 percent of drug offenders sent to state prisons, convicted at a rate 57 times higher than white men, yet they represent only 12 percent of the US population . In New York, Latinos are arrested at nearly 4 times the rate of whites for marijuana even though, as with blacks, the rates of use are nearly the same, and from 2008 to 2014, one-quarter of a million people were deported for nonviolent drug offenses, often due to low-level marijuana possession. Hillary Clinton vowed to continue failed drug prohibition policies and disregard the overwhelming evidence illustrating its blatantly racist overtones.

The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way, shape, or form entitled to the moral high ground over the equally horrific opposing party is a beyond ridiculous assertion without any basis in reality. To see crowds of people motivated to action by the loss of their party, protesting an archaic electoral college system that they would have likely accepted the results from had their candidate won, tests the limits of ones ability to empathize with their plight. Kill lists, defense of torture, mass surveillance, US citizens being picked off by drone missiles, the continued buildup of a vast empire - none of it prompted thousands upon thousands of American Democrats to fill cities across the US in a fit of anger because at the time, their chosen political racehorse was in Washington.

If Hillary had won, the drone strikes would have continued. The wars would have continued. The spying would continue. Prohibition would continue. Whistleblowers would continue being prosecuted and hunted down. And minorities would continue bearing the brunt of these policies, both in the US and across the world. The difference is that in such a scenario, Democrats, if the last eight years are any indication, would remain silent - as they did under Obama - offering bare minimum concern and vilifying anyone attacking their beloved president as some sort of hater. Cities across the US would remain free of protests, and for another 4-8 years, Democrats would continue doing absolutely nothing to end the same horrifying policies now promoted by a Republican.

Trump's victory, if there is anything good to say about it, will at least breathe much needed life into an antiwar sentiment that has been largely dormant since Bush left office. Issues like drone strikes, torture, military occupations, mass surveillance, and other hot button subjects once protested by Democratic partisans during the Bush era will again - hopefully - be criticized and fought against. Yet the shame about it all is that this time, those unaffiliated with either of the two major parties - those who have been focused on these issues while Democrats have offered pathetic excuses and baseless justifications in defense of them - won't make the mistake of thinking Democrats will stick around for the fight if they win office again in the next election.

This article was reprinted from the Screeching Kettle .