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American historian Howard Zinn, a veteran of World War II, once wrote, “I wonder if people and governments would be so eager to fight if they were able to see what physical combat and its consequences truly look like. Too often the reality is concealed by faceless numbers.” After nearly two decades of military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States recently came dangerously close to another war. The alleged enemy this time is Iran. More than two years after unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), and after imposing multiple rounds of crippling sanctions on the Iranian economy, on January 2 the United States assassinated the highest-ranking military official of the Islamic Republic, General Qassem Soleimani. In the immediate aftermath of Soleimani’s killing, many Democratic politicians were quick to both rationalize and question the intent behind the decision. Joe Biden, for instance, emphasized that while Soleimani “deserved to be brought to justice,” the decision to assassinate him was an “escalatory move” in a volatile region. Pete Buttigieg, invoking a similar kind of both-sidesism in his statement, pointed out that Soleimani was a “threat to the safety and security” of Americans, but that the decision raised practical concerns about Iran’s response. But from this chorus of concern and criticism, it was Bernie Sanders who most emphatically called for opposition to yet more American war overseas. Unlike his colleagues, Sanders did not qualify his immediate response to the news of Soleimani’s killing with an evaluation of the Iranian general’s moral character. Instead, Sanders sought to make tangible the abstraction of war — to humanize the costs of military conflict both at home and overseas. Soon after the news broke, Sanders tweeted “The U.S. has lost approximately 4,500 brave troops, tens of thousands have been wounded and we’ve spent trillions.” He continued, “Trump’s dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars.” In subsequent days, Sanders elaborated that his opposition to war derived fundamentally from his understanding of the concrete brutalities of military conflict. During a late-night appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show, Sanders put his frustration with the obliviousness of the political elite to the terrors of war as follows: We sit in Congress in our beautiful rooms … and we do not know what war is about. I’ve met with the mothers of young men who lost their lives in the [Iraq] war. I’ve met with the wives. I’ve met with the kids. I’ve met with the soldiers who came back without arms and legs, who are dealing with PTSD today. War is a horror. And it is time that politicians understood that we should do everything humanly possible to avoid war. The heart of Sanders’s opposition to war was simple: wars are not faceless affairs that revolve around numbers. Rather, wars are fought by everyday people, amongst everyday people, and the atrocities that they bring about specifically involves human death, destruction, and misery. For Iranians like me, Sanders’s comments struck a chord. I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War in Southern Iran. I witnessed firsthand the consequences of death and destruction that wars invariably result in. Nearly one million Iranians perished during the eight years of conflict, with similarly needless casualties among Iraqis, while numerous other millions would return home with various physical and psychological injuries from which they’d never recover. And in recent years, the horrors of warfare have been supplanted with the brutalities of life around the economic sanctions’ stranglehold, which hurt working-class people the most. In October 2017, I lost my father because we could not procure life-saving medications that he needed, due to an artificially produced medical shortage resulting from US-imposed sanctions — sanctions that Bernie Sanders had singly opposed just a few months earlier. But if progressive politicians like Sanders want to forestall wars, they cannot be the lone and unsupported voices of opposition. Rather, they need activist and political allies to continue to amplify the message that wars—both economic and military—are horrors that destroy blameless lives. In short, Sanders needs an actual movement behind him, both on the streets and in the halls of power.

Organizer in Chief Bernie Sanders is not an ordinary politician. Unlike most of his colleagues in Washington, Sanders’s early career did not start at an elite law school, but in grassroots organizing and activism — from marching on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr, to protesting the war in Vietnam, to getting arrested for protesting segregation at University of Chicago. To appreciate the influence that activism had on Sanders’s political thought and character, we can observe the frequency with which Sanders’s critique of American imperialism draws on King’s critique of capitalism and militarism. Echoing King’s demand for a “radical revolution of values,” to reverse the trend wherein the United States “continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” Sanders reminds us that the “Pentagon is set to grow by $90 billion,” imploring us to stop “handing over billions to the military-industrial complex.” Much like King, Sanders is acutely attuned to the brutal reality that “it is rarely the children of the billionaire class who face the agony of reckless foreign policy. It is the children of working families.” But the influence of mass organizers like King is also deeply reflected in the ethos of movement building that Sanders has popularized in recent years. This was borne out by Sanders’s unique fundraising style during the 2016 primary. Sanders himself often emphasizes that his presidency will not be shaped around the authority of a Commander in Chief, but rather around the mass mobilizing of an “Organizer in Chief.” And this is a crucial reason behind Sanders’s appeals to young people, many of whom have followed his stead to themselves become organizers, agitating on the ground against income inequality, racial injustice, climate injustice, immigration injustice, and on other related fronts. Bernie Sanders has already laid the groundwork for a popular movement against all forms of inequality—including wars overseas that worsen inequality at home and abroad.