Bill Scher writes:

Ploughshares Fund President Joseph Cirincione, an anti-nuclear weapons activist who informally advises Sanders, told me: “I think Senator Sanders would not hesitate to use military force to defend the country from attack, to defend our vital interests, to prevent atrocities like genocide. But he’s made clear that military force should be the very, very last option.”

For a small but noticeable anti-Bernie strain on the far left, that wiggle room for military strikes makes Sanders a hypocrite. For example, Ajamu Baraka, the last vice presidential nominee for the Green Party, said in an interview that Sanders’ openness to military action amounts to “saying one thing publicly but then appearing to have a different position that is reflected sometimes in his legislative decisions, and I think the Kosovo situation was a very important example of that.”

But most of the anti-interventionist left aren’t quibbling about the smattering of past disagreements with Sanders such as Kosovo. They are mostly enthralled at how Sanders’ campaign rhetoric is broadening the foreign policy debate. In particular, they are bowled over by how, earlier this year, Sanders used the War Powers Resolution to move a bipartisan bill through Congress demanding Trump end American military involvement in the Yemeni civil war, where the U.S. has supported Saudi Arabia’s intervention. Although the bill was vetoed, the fact that it got to Trump’s desk both legitimized the War Powers Resolution and bolstered Sanders’ case that he can get things done in Washington.

Most of the activists with whom I spoke put more emphasis on Yemen than Kosovo when gauging how a President Sanders would involve Congress in his foreign policy. Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy, raved over email: “Sanders was the first to introduce a privileged resolution invoking the War Powers Resolution to force a vote to end unconstitutional U.S. participation in the war and lead it to completion, passage by Congress. That never happened before in the whole history of the War Powers Resolution since 1973.”

But Sanders’ proud defense of his Kosovo stance to his antiwar allies should not be ignored. He thundered at the May 1999 Montpelier town hall: “What do you do to a war criminal who has led, for the first time in modern history, the organized rape as an agent of war, of tens of thousands of women? What do you do to a butcher who has lined up people and shot them? Do you say to them, ‘You have won Mr. Milosevic. We are not going to stand up to you. We are going home’?” Sanders once put the end of genocide ahead of a strict adherence to the War Powers Resolution, and his foreign policy adviser [Matt Duss] has now left the door open to him doing it again as president. [Continue reading…]