Iraq
In 2003, President Bush began the war in Iraq against the advice of many military experts and despite calls for restraint from the American people and members of Congress. Then-congressman Sanders was among those to voice strong opposition to the war then, and now. At the time, President Bush told the American people that the war was necessary because Saddam Hussein was hoarding weapons of mass destruction. He insisted the war would be short, and that his strategy would insure a smooth and rapid transition to a stable, democratic government in Iraq. President Bush was, as we all know now, wrong on all counts.
Now years later, thousands of American soldiers are dead and tens of thousands have been wounded. No evidence that weapons of mass destruction ever existed has been found. The president’s strategy has left our soldiers and the Iraqi people mired in violence, chaos, and civil war.
This misguided war has had an alarming toll on the people of Iraq. According to UN estimates, millions of Iraqis have been displaced by violence. The Iraqi refugee diaspora includes more than a million people in Syria and many more in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and elsewhere. The government of Prime Minister al-Maliki is basically paralyzed, not capable of moving Iraq seriously forward. These political impasses and the sectarian violence has forced millions of Iraqis out of their homes and country.
Also, the war is costing the United States $12 billion a month, and there are estimates that the ultimate cost of the war will be more than $1 trillion. This war is putting us deeper and deeper in debt as we rebuild Iraq while we ignore the urgent need to rebuild our aging infrastructure and other unmet needs here at home.
Time and again, Senator Sanders has voted for legislation to bring an end to the war and safely redeploy our troops. Senator Sanders believes that American troops should be safely withdrawn from Iraq as soon as possible. Practically all American troops should redeploy out of Iraq within a year. Senator Sanders has said: “Enough is enough. We must bring our troops home as soon as possible.”
From the Press
Is agreement near on a new security agreement that would pave the way for a U.S. military exit from Iraq? Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Monday that the agreement must include a specific deadline for the withdrawal of American troops. Iraq insists on setting 2011 as the target date for the withdrawal of the last U.S. soldier. The Bush administration, after years of denouncing timetables for a US withdrawal from Iraq, is now talking of “flexible goals” and "time horizons," which The Associated Press said is unacceptable to the Iraq government. “The American people want to bring our troops home,” Senator Bernie Sanders told Air America Radio. “The Iraqi people have to take responsibility for their own country.”
Read More »The Senate Intelligence Committee reported Thursday that the Bush administration took the nation to war in Iraq with a coordinated propaganda campaign by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and some of their most senior advisers. They exaggerated evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. They used innuendo and implication, and they ignored significant dissent within the intelligence community, the select committee concluded in a 171-page report. As a member of the House of Representatives, Bernie Sanders voted against the congressional resolution that Bush used to take the country to war more than five years ago. The senator has long favored bringing American troops home as soon as possible.
Read More »In the sixth year of the third-longest war in American history, more than 4,000 American servicemen and women have been killed. More than 150,000 U.S. troops are now deployed, up from 132,000 in Iraq before President Bush’s “surge.” While the administration originally estimated that the war would cost less than $60 billion, the long-term price tag is now $3 trillion. No wonder that in our online survey more than 80 percent of you oppose continuing the war. In the news media, meanwhile, there has been a “staggering” decline in coverage of Iraq, according to an article in the American Journalism Review.
Read More »Armando Acuna, public editor of the Sacramento Bee, turned a Sunday column into a public flogging for both his editors and the nation’s news media. They had allowed the third-longest war in American history to slip off the radar screen, and he had the numbers to prove it.
Read More »The Senate passed legislation to begin reining in rising gasoline prices and a farm bill that will help people struggling to afford groceries. It was none too soon. New Consumer Price Index data out on Wednesday showed food prices shot up by 0.9 percent in April, the biggest one-month gain in nearly two decades. Gasoline prices, continuing an unrelenting rise, shot up 5.6 percent. Not everything was up. The nation's industrial output plunged in April. As the news media glossed over those and other stories affecting the reality of a collapsing American middle class, the Senate formally disapproved a decision by government regulators to allow even more corporate media consolidation.
Read More »Congress, alarmed and saddened by the high number of military people driven to committing suicide to end the mental pain they suffer during and after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, is moving toward making it the law of the land that the Pentagon and Veterans Administration do more to treat the invisible wounds inflicted in wars that have no fronts nor straightforward commands like "take the hill."
Read More »Soldiers who have completed tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have been stuck there because of a military transportation snafu. Vermont's congressional delegation on Wednesday wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "The parents of two Vermont soldiers have contacted our offices to express frustration that their sons are facing delays in coming home. After completing their service to our country overseas, our men and women deserve a safe return home without delays," Senators Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch said in the letter to the Pentagon.
Read More »How has the United States economy gotten to this point?
It's not just the apparent recession. Recessions happen. If you tried to build an economy immune to the human emotions that produce boom and bust, you would end up with something that looked like East Germany.
Read More »As Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq came to Capitol Hill to testify before Senate committees, Vermont's congressional delegation reaffirmed support for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. "The war in Iraq," said Senator Sanders, "has been a disaster in terms of the number of dead and wounded, the loss of focus on al Qaeda and Afghanistan, and the cost that eventually will exceed $1 trillion. It is unacceptable that we have an administration that refuses to tell us how many more years we will be in Iraq or how many billions of dollars will be added to the national debt. The United States has a moral obligation to support the Iraqi government and military, but we must bring our troops home as soon as possible."
Read More »The members of Vermont's Congressional Delegation - U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) - Tuesday renewed their support for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and disagreed with Gen. David Petraeus' call for freezing troop levels in Iraq and for keeping the door open to U.S. involvement in the Iraq conflict for the foreseeable future.
Read More »"It is bizarre that the Defense Department relies on private contractors to handle oversight of private contractors," Senator Bernie Sanders said of a new Government Accountability Office report that highlighted the potential loss of government control and accountability. What's more, the GAO also found that in-house personnel provide better oversight at less cost than outside contractors. "At a time when this country has a $9.4 trillion national debt, this issue cannot be ignored," Sanders told The Washington Post. "The GAO reviewed just one Army office. It is not known how widespread and damaging this practice has become, but with $695 billion in defense spending this year, taxpayers must be assured that money for the military is going to its designated purposes, not to waste or fraud. This Pentagon practice of letting the fox guard the henhouse has got to stop."
Read More »Our nation observed two very tragic milestones in the war in Iraq this month. First, the war has now gone on for five years, more time than it took us to win WWII and defeat Nazi Germany and Japan. Second, the 4,000th American soldier died in Iraq. This is in addition to more than 29,000 wounded and tens of thousands more coming home with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Further, of course, there have been huge casualties among the Iraqi population, and more than 4 million of their people have been displaced.
Read More »After wildly lowballing the cost of the Iraq conflict at a mere $50 to $60 billion, the Bush administration has been concealing the full economic toll. The spending on military operations is merely the tip of a vast fiscal iceberg. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors calculate the grim bottom line.
Read More »In the sixth year of the war in Iraq, U.S. planes at week's end bombed insurgent targets in the southern port city of Basra. Iraqis, acting alone, began their attempted show of strength on Wednesday in what had been billed by President Bush as an important test of whether the government and military could succeed on their own. In the more critical war on global warming, Al Gore, interviewed for Sunday's 60 Minutes, likened those who deny climate change to people who clung to a belief that the earth was flat. In South Royalton, Vt., Sanders told a Vermont Law School symposium that meeting the challenge of climate change merits a commitment like the program that put men on the moon. And from Copenhagen to Burlington, the ambassador to the United States from Finland accepted the senator's invitation to a town meeting in City Hall on Monday.
Read More »Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Read More »I know that my story is the same as many of my fellow soldiers who left to serve our country return only to be lost. I will speak of myself, for everyone's story over there is different and yet many have the same result.
Read More »A grim milestone - 4,000 U.S. service members killed in Iraq -- was reached on Sunday when four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. The death toll continued to climb less than one week after the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq. In the United States, new government research has found "large and growing" disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans. In a separate report on soaring health costs, the Labor Department said benefits now devour 30 percent of employers' compensation costs. In Vermont, Senator Bernie Sanders said the United States has the technology to reverse global warming but lacks the political resolve to make it happen. "With existing knowledge and technology, we know how to address the challenge," Sanders said in a speech on Saturday at Vermont Law School in Royalton.
Read More »The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year.
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