To my friends who are supporting Bernie Sanders: Please Read In my discussions with my Sanders-supporting friends, I have frequently noted the distorted arguments of the articles they send me. However, usually they're written by "some dude". Recently however someone sent me an article from the Huffington Post, by someone well known - Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs. The article has the shrillness I have come to expect, starting with the title "Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine". But the content is actually shocking, coming as it does from someone with a reputation. Two sections particularly stand out: "On October 31, 1998 President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act that made it official US policy to support 'regime change' in Iraq. [...] Thus were laid the foundations for the Iraq War in 2003." and "After the Iraq Liberation Act came the 1999 Kosovo War, in which Bill Clinton called in NATO to bomb Belgrade, in the heart of Europe, and unleashing another decade of unrest in the Balkans." These are both gross misrepresentations of history. 1) In 1998, the resolution calling to support those trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein was about as controversial as a bill to name a post office, partly because the US had notably failed to do so after the Gulf War. The bill passed the senate with unanimous consent, and in the house by a vote of 360-38 - with Bernie Sanders in the yea column. In case that alone does not make it clear that this act was not intended to form the basis of any war, the last sentence was "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of United States Armed Forces [...] in carrying out this Act." In fact, the GW Bush administration did claim that this act had something to do with the war they pursued. But that's one example of many of the Bush administration's audacity and dishonesty, and has nothing to do with the act itself or the motives of the people who passed it. The Bush administration would have gone to war with or without this. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/105/hr4655/text https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/105-1998/h482 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act 2) The war in the Balkans started in the early 1990s after Yugoslavia fell apart, first in Croatia, where hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed, and then in Bosnia which was ghastly. During this lengthy period, Europe, the US, and the UN did not intervene effectively, partly because Russia was protecting the Serbians and blocked action. When in 1998 Kosovo militants tried to secede, Serbian army forces and paramilitaries carried out a bloody retribution. The NATO bombing of Belgrade forced the Serbians to relent, and the war ended. Shortly thereafter, the Serbs ejected the Milosevic government, in the so-called Bulldozer Revolution. The end of Milosevic's power in Serbia brought an end to most of the violence in the region. While it was not all sweetness and light after that, the worst was over. The bombing did not "unleash" violence; the reverse was more or less true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia#Political_outcome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87 ---- What does it say that a well-known academic would so distort history in order to persuade people to vote for Sanders? Why did my friend send me this? I can only assume it is making the rounds in the Sanders echo chambers. Why would so many people believe this nonsense, when the facts are so easily found? Look, if you want to vote for Sanders, by all means do. But please, DON'T become the mirror image of your own worst enemy - the Fox-News-watching dittohead who "knows" all sorts of things that just aren't true.