Washington (CNN) — Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the Senate’s leading doves, said Tuesday he doesn’t want the United States leading the fight against ISIS. Instead, said the Vermont senator, who is eyeing a 2016 presidential bid, the nation should be focused on helping the middle class.
Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats, said he doesn’t want to see the United States fall into another “quagmire in the Middle East,” and he put the onus on Muslim countries to take on ISIS.
“I’m sitting here wondering where Saudi Arabia is, where Kuwait is, where Qatar is,” Sanders said on CNN’s “New Day.” “I’ll be damned if kids in the state of Vermont — or taxpayers in the state of Vermont — have to defend the royal Saudi family, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are part of a five-country coalition of Middle Eastern nations that have joined the U.S. in airstrikes against ISIS in Syria, but Sanders suggested the U.S. should only be “supportive.”
Sanders also joined 21 other senators earlier this month in opposing a resolution to train and arm 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels to combat ISIS.
“It cannot be won and it will not be won by the United States alone,” Sanders said of the war on ISIS.
And like a candidate running for office, Sanders, who is not up for reelection this fall, quickly shifted the interview away from whether the Senate should declare war to the plight of the middle class and increasing income inequality.
“While we focus all of our attention on ISIS, the middle class in this country continues to collapse,” Sanders said. “And you know what the people tell me in Vermont and around the country? Let’s also start paying attention to the crises facing working families in America.”
H/t Ben Mann.
I wish independents of Bernie’s persuasion would hit the streets in my home state. They’d kill the Reich-wing nutjobs and scare the crap out of the DLC.
Good editorial cartoon on this very topic. A Jabba the Hutt-type Saudi on a throne is telling the little Uncle Sam at his feet to clean up the mess, ” and don’t get any blood on the carpet.”
The saying in Egypt for a number of years has been, “Saudi’s will fight Israel to the last -fill in a middle east country not named Saudi Arabia-.”
Bernie Sanders may be the last honest man or woman politician Left in the country. This man towers over all the other political pygmies in Washington and elsewhere.