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.

The Great Bernie Bust and Why It Was Seemingly Inevitable

By Daniel Lazare

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

It is now all but certain that Joe Biden will be the Democratic candidate. 

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? The Bernie Sanders boom captivated the global left. Everywhere else, social democrats seemed to be on the rocks. Britain’s Labour Party was a shambles, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise was losing steam, while Syriza and Podemos were hardly more than memories of radical opportunities lost. Only in the United States did the story seem any different, thanks to Sanders’ long march through the Democratic Party.

But that was before the ‘Super Tuesday’ cataclysm on March 3 and then ‘mini-Tuesday’ a week later, when six states voted, including the all-important Michigan. After losing 10 of 14 states in the first, Sanders needed a sharp rebound in the second to remain viable. He did not get it. He came in 16 points behind Joe Biden in Michigan, 25 points behind in Missouri, six points behind in Idaho, and a whopping 66 behind in Mississippi. Only in North Dakota and Washington state did he eke out victories by 6.1 and 0.2 points respectively.

Sanders will still have a sizable bloc of delegates going into the Democratic national convention in July. But since he has promised to rally around whoever gets the nomination, he will have no choice but to pay homage to the odious Biden on bended knee.

This is certainly a dramatic turnabout. Hillary Clinton messed up so badly in 2016 that even the most skeptical Marxists assumed that the nomination was Sanders’ for the asking. But they proved to be wrong. What happened?

One possibility is that American exceptionalism turns out yet again to be nothing more than a myth and that any notion of the US left bucking international trends is a pipedream. Comparisons with Britain are striking. Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide leadership victory in September 2015 presaged Sanders’ dramatic breakthrough in the 2016 Michigan primary, while Corbyn’s disastrous performance last December paved the way for the latest debacle.

But in another sense the Bernie bust shows that the US is exceptional after all -- in a purely negative sense, that is. Not only is the American two-party system exceptionally old and suffocating, but it is exceptionally entrenched. In 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Party to run as a Progressive, he was able to gain ballot access in all of the then 48 states. Today, the same feat would be impossible, thanks to sky-high registration requirements, designed to cripple upstart parties before they can even get off the ground.

Indeed, 1912 would be the last time that one of the two top vote-getters would be anyone other than a Republican or Democrat. (Roosevelt came in second behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson, while Republican William Howard Taft was third.) Since then, Americans have voted ‘Repocratic’ with depressing regularity. Since polls show overwhelming support for a third-party alternative, it is not because they want to, but because they effectively have no choice.

But the US system is not only restrictive, but exceptionally regulated. “Normally, democracies regard political parties as voluntary associations entitled to the usual rights of freedom of association,” the social democratic website, Jacobin.com, observed in 2016. “But US state laws dictate not only a ballot-qualified party’s nominating process, but also its leadership structure, leadership selection process and many of its internal rules ...”1  Rather than parties, as the rest of the world understands the term, the result is more akin to a couple of state-sponsored churches with intricate government-imposed rules concerning the selection of bishops and parish priests, weekly services, and so on.

It is a travesty of democracy every step of the way. Nonetheless, Sanders hoped to use a free and unbiased primary system to somehow leapfrog to a higher stage of development. He was wrong, not only because the party establishment turned against him at a crucial moment, but because primaries turn out to be shaped by moral assumptions that powerfully affect what voters say and do.

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist blessed with occasional moments of insight into America’s unique political system, summed up the problem neatly in the wake of Super Tuesday. The primaries, he wrote, showed that:

“Democrats are not just a party; they’re a community. In my years of covering politics, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like what happened in the 48 hours after South Carolina - millions of Democrats from all around the country, from many different demographics, turning as one and arriving at a common decision. It was like watching a flock of geese or a school of fish, seemingly leaderless, sensing some shift in conditions, sensing each other’s intuitions, and smoothly shifting direction en masse. A community is more than the sum of its parts. It is a shared sensibility and a pattern of response.2 ”

All those geese and fish call to mind Edmund Burke’s famous description of the people as “thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak,” as they silently chew their cud. But Brooks is right: rather than rational and deliberative, political parties in America are indeed leaderless mobs, held together not by a common program and ideology, but by a shared sensibility. In the case of the Democrats, that means devotion to the tradition of Franklin D Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Martin Luther King junior, even though they stood for very different things. But anyone who dares point out that FDR refused to support an anti-lynching bill or that King opposed LBJ’s war in Vietnam will be accused of failing to participate in the higher consciousness that the Democratic Party demands.

Worst candidate

That is why the party leadership was able to turn the race around so neatly. The process began two days after Sanders’s impressive 47% win in the Nevada primary, when house majority whip Jim Clyburn intervened on Biden’s behalf. When CNN asked Clyburn what he was “hearing from the Democratic caucus in the house about having, potentially, Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, at the top of the ticket,” he replied:

“I was in Texas about three weeks ago … I talked to the faith community down there, and they were very, very concerned about whether or not we’ll have somebody on the ticket that will cause down-ballot carnage. That’s our biggest problem among my members. We want to see somebody on the ticket that will allow us to expand our numbers, not having to run as some kind of a rearguard campaign, in order to keep from being tarnished with a label. So our candidates are really concerned about that.3 ”

They were concerned, in other words, about seeing their careers go up in smoke, thanks to someone using an s-word that they regard as irrelevant, threatening and unnecessarily disruptive.

But it was Barack Obama’s phone call to Pete Buttigieg four days later that really did the trick. Despite Obama’s disastrous later years, Democrats remember his administration as a golden age, especially after Trump. Hence, his influence is overwhelming. After months of Yoda-like silence, therefore, all he had to do was make a single phone call to Buttigieg on March 1, telling him to withdraw in favor of Biden to trigger an avalanche. Suddenly, word was out that Sanders was getting ahead of himself and had to be reined in.

With that, David Brooks’ school of fish reversed course. As he says, the response was not deliberative or rational, but intuitive. Democrats felt that Sanders was heading in the wrong direction and that Biden would be the wiser course. So they acted on instinct -- and radical-left hopes were dashed.

The debacle bears out American exceptionalism in another way as well: ie, by showing that the direction of American politics is now exceptionally disastrous. To be sure, the US is not facing national break-up the way the UK is. But it is hard to imagine a worse Democratic nominee to go up against Trump. The list of Biden’s Jerry Lewis-like pratfalls and missteps is too long to go into. Suffice it to say that he joined with the notorious southern racist, Jesse Helms, to oppose school bussing as a remedy for de facto segregation in the 1970s and then authored key legislation in the 1980s that ramped up the war on drugs and led to the mass incarceration of millions of poor people and members of racial minorities. He voted in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, as vice-president, backed US intervention in Libya, Syria and Yemen -- all of which have turned out to be catastrophic. Thanks to a motor mouth he can never quite control, he let the cat out of the bag in 2014 regarding US policy with regard to Syria and al Qa’eda: “Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria,” he told a Harvard audience:

“The Turks … the Saudis, the emirates, etc - what were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad -- except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and al Qa’eda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.4

The fact that Obama ordered Biden to apologize to the Saudis and others for his indiscretion confirms that the administration was not only unable to control their pro-al Qa’eda activities, but was determined to cover them up.5 ”

All of which will provide Trump with more than enough ammunition in the fall. But Biden suffers from another problem as well: significant cognitive decline. The contrast with the smooth-talking politician of just a few years ago is startling. Words tumble out chaotically, non-sequiturs abound and ideas break off in mid-sentence. Here he is trying to explain how to make up for the effects of school segregation in a presidential debate in September:

“…Make sure that we bring into the help the -- the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need - we have one school psychologist for every 15 hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy … now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have to make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four and five-year-olds go to school - school, not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want - they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the -- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.6 ”

Exceptionalism

There are dozens of examples of such garbled word salads. Trump will undoubtedly make full use of them, just as he will make full use of Biden’s disastrous misadventures in the Middle East and his role in the Burisma scandal in the Ukraine. This does not mean that he will win -- after all, a lot can happen in the eight months prior to the November election. But, even if Biden prevails, he will be the American equivalent of a Konstantin Chernenko -- the semi-comatose commissar who ran the Soviet Union for 13 months in the mid-1980s and helped drive it into the ground.

That will be the final expression of American exceptionalism -- a brain-addled serial war criminal who is rushing the empire with exceptional speed to its demise.

Daniel Lazare is the author of, most recently, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (Verso).

Notes

1. . S Ackerman, ‘A blueprint for a new party’ Jacobin August 11 2016.↩︎

2. . D Brooks, ‘Biden’s rise gives the establishment one last chance’ The New York Times March 5 2020.↩︎

3. . The full exchange can be viewed at www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/02/28/rep-james-clyburn-democrats-concerned-down-ballot-carnage-sot-newday-vpx.cnn.↩︎

4. . The quote begins at 53:30 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcKVCtg5dxM.↩︎

5. . M Landler, ‘Saudis are next on Biden’s Mideast apology list after Harvard remarks’ The New York Times October 6 2014.↩︎

6. . The full quote is available at www.youtube.com
   /watch?time_continue=6&v=4AYVwgcAOMY
   &feature=emb_logo.↩︎

Bernie Sanders Should Run Solo if Democrats Dirty-Break the Democratic Process

By David Goodner

Two nights ago in Tacoma, during a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders attended by thousands, Seattle City Councilor and Socialist Alternative leader Kshama Sawant called for an independent Third Party for the working class. 

Last night on the debate stage in Nevada, every Democratic presidential candidate except Sanders refused to commit support for a plurality primary winner, escalating the possibility of a screwjob during a potentially brokered convention in Milwaukee this summer.

Bernie Sanders is likely to continue to rise in popular support and cleanly win the Democratic party nomination and then the White House in November – making this a moot point. At this time, mass popular social movements should take advantage of the momentum and continue to work with or alongside the Sanders campaign to challenge the party from the inside, exposing the sharp contradictions that come with fighting for social justice in a system that is designed to cater to capital.

However, Sawant's call for a third party this year absolutely makes sense if billionaire Michael Bloomberg buys the nomination outright or there is convention fuckery in Milwaukee that robs Sanders of the nomination. 

If either of these happen, it is imperative that the movement respond in kind by winning a Sanders presidency on a third-party ballot. There is no time to wait. An independent Sanders run against two bipartisan billionaires could realistically win a plurality of the general election vote, but we don't just want an independent sitting-in as president, we also need a new party structure that grows and lives on beyond Bernie.

Independent candidates can gain ballot access in most states by submitting the required number of petition signatures by August or September. These numbers can range anywhere between a few hundred and twenty thousand, but all are doable for a movement that has already shown impressive turnouts on the ground.

Small groups need to quietly begin working in the few states with earlier ballot access requirements. This doesn't have to be widely advertised or become a distraction from our main work right now, but it must become a priority if and when the Democratic party sabotages the movement by obstructing Sanders’ ascendancy.

We also need to ramp up movement organizing around the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. If Sanders is going to win the nomination cleanly, he'll need backup inside and outside the convention hall. And if he loses, there must be a powerful and immediate response on the ground. The city itself will be militarized with riot police. We will need 50,000 or more people ready to contest for space in the streets in addition to all of our delegates and observers inside. 

If Bernie Sanders is not the nominee this year, the core of an independent workers (third) party must be formed from: 

1. Bernie Sanders and the Sanders campaign, including Squad surrogates AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Andrew Yang, and all of their followers; 

2. The Democratic Socialists of America;

3. The umbrella network of community organizations dedicated to electoral power independent of the Democratic Party, such as National Nurses United, People's Action, and their allies; 

4. the groundswell of Black, Arab, Muslim, Hispanic, and Latino organizations already backing Bernie this year;

5. The remnants of the Green Party and Libertarian parties.

The current momentum that has been generated by the Sanders campaign is impossible to ignore. More importantly, the corollary movement that is building alongside this momentum, which has radical characteristics that appear to be carrying folks beyond the limitations of not only the capitalist political arena and the Democratic party, but also beyond Sanders himself (a good thing), is setting a foundation that can successfully uproot capital’s grip on the public agenda.

The presidency of the United States has always served as the CEO of global capital and imperialism. Ignoring its occupant will inevitably bring us closer to a fascistic reality, something we are witnessing in real time. Getting Sanders in this office, while representing a small step in the right direction, can slow this tide. Therefore, it behooves us to keep our eyes on the prize and push to elect him state-by-state on the Democratic Party ballot - by doing electoral politics better and cleaner than everybody else. 

But we have to keep our eyes open, too. We need to start anticipating the rearguard and flank attacks inevitably coming our way, instead of always reacting to them after the fact like we have been doing. If Billionaire Bloomberg wins the Democratic party nomination, or a brokered DNC convention robs Sanders of the same, we have to respond in kind. The rhetorical and practical groundwork for a third party run needs to be laid now.