Sputnik: According to polls among 2016 Trump voters, there is massive support for withdrawal from Syria: 76 percent to 14 percent. Clinton voters, however, oppose the removal of troops from Syria by a margin of 59 percent to 26 percent in favour. Why do the Democrats who always tend to be anti-war appear to be supporting war?
I happen to disagree, however, that Democrats are new to this 'warmongering' role. From Bill Clinton to Obama, Democrats have supported devastatingly destructive wars framed as 'humanitarian interventions' — aggressive regime-change operations that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people across the world. We need to break through the self-serving language that frames the two main US political parties — there's barely any difference in their foreign policies, at least until recently.
Because in the past few years, global populations have begun to perceive their political interests differently. Republicans and Democrats, alike, have gravitated into two distinct camps — those who cling to establishment views and the old status quo, and those who reject the sustainability of stale policies and who now demand systemic change. So, in fact, we are seeing anti-war politicians emerge in both political parties — in opposition to the neoconservative and neoliberal types still clinging to their fraying reins.
In short, Democrats haven't suddenly become pro-war, they are merely determined to scuttle any and all Trump initiatives, including the troop withdrawal from Syria and any talk of military disengagement in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hotspots. Likewise, Republicans haven't suddenly become anti-war, they merely have a leader who won his election based on this new trend, which is to chuck out unsustainable policies that waste American money.
Democrats have taken an approach where anything against Trump's policies is their defensive line. They now portray all his efforts to establish less hostile relations with adversary countries as an indication of weakness or even treason just like neocons believe. Indeed, it seems that President Trump has been a great unifier of neoliberal Democrats and neoconservative Republicans, who have come to see only Russian plots against America at every turn. At the centre of this unity is not just a mutual antipathy for President Trump but a hostility towards Russia that recalls the paranoid years of the Cold War.
READ MORE: Prof Explains Why US Pull-Out From Syria Will Go on Longer Than Expected
Sputnik: This is not the first time that Democratic voters have shifted their beliefs based on the person sitting in the Oval Office. For example: Bush during his presidency was accused of keeping Guantanamo Bay open as well as using drones to assassinate terrorists. But the same policy had broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party during Obama days. What is your opinion on democratic bias, especially in media?
You know, it is Bill Clinton who first built a wall on the US-Mexican border, yet I've never seen the US mainstream media refer to that fact. Obama deported more immigrants than any other president and Clinton incarcerated black American males in unprecedented numbers, but it is Trump who is cast as the 'racist.' Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize before he even became president, such was the general media intoxication with his potential — yet he initiated half a dozen wars which killed thousands, and reignited a Cold War with Russia and China.
But Trump is an 'irrational hawk' for trying to wind down these confrontations, resolve those differences and remove US troops from endless conflicts. Yes, the US liberal media is biased. But these double standards are now punching a hole in the credibility of mainstream journalists who back establishment positions unquestioningly. 'Fake news,' as many now call it.
Take the Russophobia, for example, this Dem's interventionist ideology swung into the Republican party in the seventies and eighties, and now it's swung almost all the way back, and it's somehow managed to infect most of the Democratic party in the process. The creeping toward "humanitarian" regime change with Syria, the senseless escalations with a nuclear superpower in Russia, all to the cheerleading of Hillary Clinton's Libya disaster and other top Democrats' call for keeping US troops in Syria, means there's no reason to not call the democrats anything other than what they are, neoconservatives.
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