By Daniel Larison
February 26, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - There was a statement
that Sanders made at the
debate last night that deserves more attention,
because it gets at the heart of the manufactured
controversy over Sanders’ own past statements and
the glaring hypocrisy that defines so many of our
foreign policy discussions. Sanders said this:
Excuse me, occasionally it might be a
good idea to be honest about American foreign
policy [bold mine-DL], and that
includes the fact that America has overthrown
governments all over the world in Chile, in
Guatemala, in Iran. And when dictatorships,
whether it is the Chinese or the Cubans do
something good, you acknowledge that. But you
don’t have to trade love letters with them.
Several of Sanders’ opponents last night were not
interested in being honest about U.S. foreign
policy. If they had been interested, they would have
to admit that U.S. politicians acknowledge positive
developments that take place under authoritarian
regimes all the time, and most of the time they do
this to justify U.S. support for those governments.
The fact is that both Bloomberg and Biden have
sometimes said very positive things about repressive
authoritarian states without any caveats. They
haven’t prefaced their praise by saying that this is
an oppressive government that violates human rights.
They didn’t say anything that could be construed as
a criticism. Biden
touted Mubarak as an ally and refused to call
him a dictator just weeks before his ouster.
Bloomberg
praised the Saudi crown prince and his Vision
2030 plan last year without qualification:
But Bloomberg has praised another murderous
dictator – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman, known as MBS – as recently as last year,
long after he was implicated in the murder of
Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
In a September 2019 interview with Arab News,
Bloomberg praised Mohammed bin Salman’s “Saudi
Vision 2030” plan, focusing especially on its
loosening of some restrictions on Saudi women.
“I have had a number of women come up to me and
say you don’t understand this is the best thing
that has ever happened to Saudi Arabia because
half the population was cut out and now they are
going in the right direction,” Bloomberg said.
He lauded King Salman and MBS for their efforts
“to take that country into the new world,”
saying, “They have made progress going in the
right direction.”
He didn’t acknowledge that MBS had jailed and
tortured some prominent Saudi women activists.
And Bloomberg didn’t mention that 11 months
earlier, U.S. permanent resident and Saudi
journalist Khashoggi was murdered and
dismembered by MBS’s own henchmen. International
investigators and the CIA later concluded that
the killing was a premeditated crime ordered by
MBS himself.
This wasn’t just a case of Bloomberg letting
optimism get the better of him. By the time he said
these things, the increasingly repressive nature of
the Saudi government under Mohammed bin Salman was
well-known. The many war crimes and atrocities
committed by his government in Yemen had been in the
news for years (and
they continue to happen), Khashoggi’s murder had
happened almost a year earlier, and he could not
have missed the stories about the ongoing detentions
and torture of political activists, including
Loujain al-Hathloul, who is still imprisoned to
this day. As far as political rights are concerned,
Saudi Arabia has clearly been moving in the wrong
direction, but Bloomberg chose to ignore all of
that.
It would be fair to acknowledge that there have
been some positive changes in Saudi Arabia over the
last few years at the same time that the crown
prince has been cracking down on dissent, killing
critics, and consolidating power, but if you’re
going to talk about those changes it would be
important to state opposition and condemnation of
the Saudi government’s myriad abuses. On that
occasion, Bloomberg only offered praise, and there
is no evidence that he expressed any concern about
Saudi government crimes and abuses until he was
starting to run for president. The Saudi Arabia
example is a telling one, because for the last
several years many American politicians and media
outlets embarrassed themselves by lavishing nothing
but praise on the Saudi crown prince for his
“reforms.”
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As a matter of U.S. policy, Saudi
Arabia has been given a pass for the
many atrocities it has committed in
Yemen because the current administration
places more value on selling them
weapons and the previous administration
wanted to “reassure” them of our
support. The issue here is not just the
double standard applied to U.S. clients,
but that many of our leaders give these
governments a pass on their human rights
violations and war crimes in order to
justify U.S. policies of support for
those clients that cause even more death
and destruction. In other words, when
U.S. politicians praise authoritarian
clients, it is usually part of an effort
to whitewash the client government’s
record and to justify providing them
with more weapons and aid. There are
real consequences and human costs when
politicians turn into cheerleaders for
these governments.
Biden was vice president when the shameful policy
of supporting the war on Yemen began, and when he
was part of the Obama administration there is no
evidence that he opposed this policy or spoke
against it at any point. He has since turned against
that policy, but he had nothing to say about it when
he could have done something about it. While
Bloomberg was singing the crown prince’s praises,
Sanders has been one of the leading critics of the
Saudi government’s crimes and an opponent of U.S.
enabling of those crimes. Which one would you rather
have making foreign policy decisions as president:
Mohammed bin Salman’s cheerleader or one of his most
vocal critics?
Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where
he also keeps a solo
blog. He has been published in the New York
Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World
Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life,
Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and
Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He
holds a PhD in history from the University of
Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on
Twitter.
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