Again, great coverage. I couldn’t watch the whole thing, then relied on the NYT to summarize. No mention of Mossadegh, there. In searching to see what coverage there was, I couldn’t find any about the debate, and precious little about Sanders Foreign Policy in the MSM. But here’s a fine article at Salon.com about his recent speech at Georgetown, and the tendency to dismiss him as not serious on foreign policy, because he’s not saying what hawks (i.e., the Elite Establishment) want to hear:
“Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgement that unilateral military action should be a last resort…and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. It begins with the reflection that the failed policy decisions of the past – rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Arbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sort of policies that do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.”
link to salon.com
This seems like an indictment of CIA covert operations as generally applied to engineering regime change through violence with “plausible deniability.” And there are several different forms in his bag of “failed policy decisions.”
Iraq involved “fixing the intelligence” to match the policy, adopted very publicly. I believe many of those other actions were taken covertly, without public debate, blamed on locals to preserve “plausible deniability,” and who knows how much the President or the Congress, which alone has constitutional authority to declare war, knew about these decisions. Certainly, killing a foreign ruler is an act of war.
So Sanders seems very much on board with holding the Elite Establishment accountable, but can he do that without mentioning AIPAC? or what his own Zionism means to him as an American politician?
I still think Hillary has the best shot, but it is tantalizing to imagine that, at some point, she and Sanders will have a donnybrook on her pledge of allegiance to “neoliberalism,” its money men, and their “policy advisors.” And, surviving this, will have to do it all over again, against Trump, who won’t be so nice, in how he discusses these issues and people.