The left worries about a ‘hawk’ as VP

There will be no floor fight at this year’s Democratic National Convention, and no “floor” to have it on. The messy details – the platform, Joe Biden’s running mate – are being hashed out in =oom meetings before a made-for-TV event this month. For the first time in 92 years, the party’s nominee won’t even appear in person to thank the delegates and dodge balloons.

That has not quieted the resistance to Biden’s policies and personnel inside his party, coming from activists who say they will work to get him elected but are still working to influence the type of president he’ll be. A coalition of Bernie Sanders delegates has made a series of futile but messy protests against Biden’s health-care agenda and the party’s donation rules. And as former national security adviser Susan Rice is touted as a potential vice president for Biden, hundreds of delegates out of nearly 4,000 are begging him not to, urging him to sideline “hawks” inside the party and warning that he will lose votes if he doesn’t.

“Susan E. Rice would be a travesty if she were chosen to be his VP candidate, or for any position in his Cabinet,” said Marcy Winograd, a California delegate for Sen. Sanders, I-Vt., who has distributed a letter urging Biden to ditch Rice and six other veterans of previous Democratic administrations. “She pushed for every war, against Iraq, Libya, Yemen. She has left a trail of carnage in her wake. Elevating her would be a death wish for the Democratic Party.”

Biden’s move to the left, which has drawn attacks from Republicans and fitful praise from liberals, has occurred largely on his own terms. Sanders, who won 46% of the party’s pledged delegates in the 2016 primaries, commands just over 25% of them now, and he has repeatedly praised Biden for the liberal policies he has adopted while declining to comment on the policies he hasn’t.

That has left a Biden-skeptical resistance fending for itself. The Bernie Delegates Network, an email group that grew out of complaints about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 nomination, has circulated two letters that criticize Biden. The first, reported last month by Politico, pledged delegates “to vote against any 2020 Platform that does not include a universal, single-payer, Medicare-ForAll, platform plank.” That vote would fail, as votes to add Medicare-for-all in the smaller platform committee failed, while giving Sanders delegates something to rally around.

The second, which was obtained by The Washington Post last week and partially detailed by HuffPost on Wednesday, named eight individuals “who have demonstrated poor judgment on national security issues” – seven high-profile veterans of the Clinton or Obama administrations, as well as Amit Jani, the campaign’s Asian American Pacific Islander outreach director. The others are former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken; former National Security Council staffer Nicholas Burns; former CIA deputy director Avril Haines; former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power; former State Department aide Jake Sullivan; former undersecretary of defense Michelle Flournoy; and Rice, the only member of the group being looked at for the vice presidency.

“Susan E. Rice argued for the war in Iraq, endorsing the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction,” the letter reads. “She supported the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya and argued for intervention in Syria and presided over the CIA program ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ that armed militants there; oversaw US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. She also asserted that ‘unwavering support for Israel’ – even as led by right-wing extremist Benjamin Netanyahu – was her imperative as UN Ambassador.”

Biden’s campaign declined to comment on the criticism of Rice. There’s no evidence that Rice “argued for the war” as carried out in 2002, when she was serving as a fellow for the Brookings Institution. While she advocated for limited military involvement, also opposed by the left, she stopped short of endorsing invasion. But her record on Libya and Syria is undisputed, and a source of bafflement for anti-interventionists as they watch the “veepstakes” unfold.

“I’m very concerned that her previous foreign policy stances have not been in favor of diplomatic solutions,” said Nadia Ahmed, a Sanders delegate who signed the letter. “She’s been duplicitous in the way she’s handled several issues. I question her judgment.”

Ahmed has also signed an anti-Rice letter organized by Muslim delegates to the convention – a group, she says, that came together as far-flung delegates pored over the lists of their peers and looked for other “Arabic-sounding names.” That makes the same allegations about Rice’s Iraq views, before saying that her response to the Arab Spring revealed instincts that should be kept out of the White House.

“One would have thought that following the carnage in Iraq, Rice would have learned the high cost of war required she choose another path with Libya,” the letter reads.

Like the delegates who signed the Medicare-for-all letter, the critics of Biden’s wider foreign policy circle don’t have the numbers to stop Biden from doing what he wants. As of Thursday afternoon, 388 delegates had signed the letter, fewer than 2 in 5 of the delegates Sanders brought into the convention.

Neither campaign includes a threat to withhold votes in November. As Bernie Delegates Network organizer Norman Solomon has helped these campaigns add to their numbers, he has launched a “Vote Trump Out” campaign to “urge progressives in the dozen battleground states to vote for Joe Biden rather than sit out the election or cast a third-party protest vote.”

The signers of the foreign policy letter have also scored some wins during the platform debate, led by the California delegation, which is dominated by Sanders supporters. Before the platform committee began meeting, it proposed additions that sometimes made it in, such as a commitment to “end the forever wars” (a reference to Iraq, Afghanistan and other interventions launched after 9/11) and to “end support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.”

Before that, Biden characterized Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” state and threatened to cut off arms sales, a position that was rarely discussed during the Democratic primary but was welcomed by the sort of activists who held on to an animus against Hillary Clinton.