Last June, on the occassion of CPUSA's endorsement of Mrs.Clinton, we were pointing out: "Hillary Clinton, like Donald Trump, is a choice of the U.S. monopoly capital, of the country's bourgeois class, for the position of the President. Mrs.Clinton's service as Obama government's Foreign Secretary is known and has been proved disastrous: Libya, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. The people of these countries know, better than anyone, what Imperialism means and what was Clinton's contribution in war crimes".
If we had to draw Clinton's political portrait that would be a portrait of an imperialist war-monger, a champion of hawkish aggression.
From her stance as a First Lady to her voting record as a Senator and from her service as Obama's Secretary of State to her Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has proved her role as a ruthless promoter of U.S. Imperialism.
In this post we republish two articles from progressive- but, nonetheless, bourgeois- sources which contain quite interesting information about the role of Hillary Clinton, especially in Foreign Policy issues - IDC.
Hilary Clinton’s Israel, Iran, Iraq &
Libya Record Indicates She’s A Proven Warmonger.
By Prof. Muhammad Sahimi / Source: mintpressnews.com, January 27, 2016.
Hilary Clinton’s Israel, Iran, Iraq &
Libya Record Indicates She’s A Proven Warmonger.
By Prof. Muhammad Sahimi / Source: mintpressnews.com, January 27, 2016.
By Prof. Muhammad Sahimi / Source: mintpressnews.com, January 27, 2016.
LOS ANGELES — (ANALYSIS) Ever since Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president, she has tried to present herself as a progressive whose “inevitable” election will be a historic moment for the United States, and perhaps even the world. After Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders entered the race and began talking about his relatively progressive agenda, Mrs. Clinton tried to outdo him and take on positions that not only completely contradict her history as first lady, U.S. senator from New York, and secretary of state, but force her to make totally ridiculous statements that only demonstrate the facts that she believes in no principle and is only hungry for power.
A
good example of this was when she tried to explain her
cozy relations with the Wall Street and
the millions of dollars that she
has either made as a speaker or
received as
campaign contributions.
During her second debate with Sanders and other Democratic
candidates, the senator
from Vermont said:
“I
have never heard of a candidate, never, who has received huge amounts
of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street, from the
military-industrial complex, not one candidate say, oh, these
campaign contributions will not influence me. Why do they make
millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get
something. Everybody knows that.”
Mrs.
Clinton retorted:
“I
represented New York on 9/11, when we were attacked. Where were we
attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street
is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild.
That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a
way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”
This
is on par Sarah Palin’s 2008 response to a question about her
foreign policy experience. Mrs.
Palin said that
because “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”
she is experienced in foreign policy. If elected president, Mrs.
Clinton would be as much of a fighter for the ordinary Americans
against the Wall Street as Palin would have been as a politician with
experience in foreign policy.
Mrs.
Clinton has
been bragging about
her achievements as first lady, and what her husband
accomplished in that era.
So it is only fair to recall the terrible things that also happened
during Bill Clinton’s “co-presidency” with Hillary. Oddly, what
is not mentioned, for example, is that in 1996, Bill and Hillary
Clinton gutted
the welfare program for
the poor in the name of reform, just to appease the right and ensure
that Bill’s re-election. The program
failed miserably.
It cut off help to millions of poor people, but delighted many on the
right who had not been able to accomplish it themselves.
Mrs.
Clinton didn’t move to offer her full support to same-sex
marriage until
2013. Though she voiced some support for civil unions throughout the
early 2000s, in both 2000 and 2004 she defined marriage as a union
“between
a man and a woman.”
Regarding
punishment for violent offenders and criminals she
said in 1994,
“We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. We
need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes
to keep them off the streets.” But in April last year she declared
that, “We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of
balance,” calling for an end
to mass incarceration.
How
about the economic sanctions that were imposed on Iraq by the Clinton
administration, which
killed at least 576,000 Iraqi infants and children?
If Hillary Clinton wants to brag about her husband’s work as
president, she should also accept the responsibility for his
misdeeds. But, then again, perhaps we shouldn’t expect that from
someone who
admires a war criminal like Henry Kissinger.
 |
| Hillary Clinton with the ex-Secretary of State and notorious war criminal Henry Kissinger. |
There
are many other social and political issues about which Mrs.
Clinton was either aligned with the right wing, or at most centrists,
in the past, but is now running to the left to catch up with Mr.
Sanders. Her social progressivism is phony and it undergoes changes
all the time just for her expediency. She
has lied so many times about
so many issues that she has lost track of what she has said, and
where and when she’s said it.
But
what I would like to discuss is Hillary Clinton’s record on foreign
policy, and what she would do if elected president. As an
Iranian-American I am particularly concerned about her views on the
Middle East and Iran. The review below indicates that she is neither
a progressive nor a liberal (a label that she
would like to avoid),
but a proven warmonger whose record has contributed greatly to war,
bloodshed and destruction in the Middle East and North Africa.
An Israel-Firster
To
begin with, Hillary Clinton is an Israel-firster. Every policy that
she espouses and every pronouncement that she makes on any part of
the Middle East benefit Israel in one way or another, at the expense
of the rest of that region. To see this, just consider recent
history.
After
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu did everything in his power
to prevent the nuclear agreement between Iran and P5+1 – a historic
diplomatic breakthrough for President Barack Obama for whichMrs.
Clinton also takes credit –
and after Netanyahu “sacrificed
much of his popularity with the Democratic Party by crusading against
the Iran nuclear deal,”
Clinton tried to rehabilitate Netanyahu’s image.
The
Center for American Progress and its president, Neera Tanden, invited
Netanyahu during the second week of November. Tanden and CAP founder
John Podesta are both very close to the Clintons. Just before
Netanyahu’s visit to the CAP, Mrs.
Clinton penned an article published
by the Jewish daily Forward, explaining how she would reaffirm the
unbreakable bond with Israel and
Netanyahu.
And, in a speech at the Saban Forum of Brookings Institution in
Washington on Dec. 6, she promised that, if elected, on
her first day in office she
would “extend an invitation to the Israeli prime minister to come
to the United States hopefully within the first month, certainly as
soon as it could be arranged.”
Consider
Mrs. Clinton’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In
a Jan. 6 article published
by the Jewish Journal, she talked about “taking the U.S.-Israel
relationship to the next level.” But what is the next level? Is $4
billion per year for Israel not enough? And, she wrote, “I’m
especially concerned about the new wave of violence inside Israel
itself – brutal stabbings, shootings, and vehicle attacks that seek
to sow fear among the innocent.” Mrs. Clinton did not write a
single word about Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the
Occupied West Bank, attacks that have killed many
Palestinians, including
toddlers,
attacks that have beencelebrated
by Israeli extremists.
Even U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro said
in a conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 18,
“Too much Israeli vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked.”
Regarding
the movement in Europe to pressure Israel to evacuate the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, Mrs. Clinton wrote:
“We
must continue to fight against global efforts to delegitimize
Israel. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, known
as BDS, is the latest front in this battle. BDS demonizes
Israeli scientists and intellectuals – even young students – and
compares Israel to South African apartheid. That’s wrong and
this campaign should end.”
On
Jan. 18, Shapiro also told the conference: “At times it seems
Israel has two standards of adherence to rule of law in the West Bank
– one for Jews and one for Palestinians.” This is precisely the
definition of an apartheid system.
Mrs.
Clinton also distorts the
nature of BDS,
which targets Israeli products produced in the West Bank and entities
that invest there. This is not a movement to “de-legitimize”
Israel, rather to force it to behave like any other state, abide by
international laws and U.N. Security Council resolutions, and
evacuate the territories it has been occupying and exploiting for
almost 50 years.
Mrs.
Clinton is even willing to completely distort established facts and
fabricate new ones in order to “prove” her support for Israel. In
a speech to Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 19, she
equated Hamas,
Iran and Daesh (an
Arabic acronym for the group commonly known as ISIS or ISIL). Yet
Iran has been fighting tooth and nail against Daesh, and despite some
terrorist operations in the past, Hamas is a liberation movement of
the Palestinian people (and elected by the people of Gaza) with no
ambitions whatsoever outside the historical Palestinian territories.
The
fact is, one can write books on Mrs. Clinton’s blind support for
Israel that even many true Israeli progressives totally
reject and consider as counterproductive to
their nation.
Iran
At
a time when the Middle East is changing due to the nuclear accord
between Iran and the P5+1, the slow rapprochement between Iran and
the U.S., and revelations which have made crystal clear the role of
Saudi Arabia and its allies in supporting terrorism in the region,
Mrs. Clinton is still espousing the same failed policies toward Iran:
more sanctions, more military threats, and more diplomatic pressure.
Of course, this is nothing new.
The
Clintons have always been Iran’s number one enemy in the U.S., on
par with the neocons and the Israel lobby. When it comes to Iran,
there are few politicians, if any, more hawkish than the two.
It
was Bill Clinton who
imposed the total trade embargo on
Iran (and Libya) in 1996. This embargo came after Iran made a gesture
of reconciliation toward the U.S. by awarding the American
oil company Conoco a major contract to
develop a large offshore oil field in the Persian Gulf in May 1995,
even though a European oil company had actually won the contract.
When asked during her first Democratic presidential debate in October
“which enemy are you most proud of,” Mrs.
Clinton included “the Iranians”
(emphasis mine) among them. This was truly disturbing. Was she
talking about 80 million Iranians? If she meant the Iranian
government, why did she not say so?
As
a senator Hillary Clinton supported every resolution by Congress to
impose more unilateral sanctions on Iran that had not been approved
by the Security Council. As the secretary of state she helped
assemble the coalition of nations that imposed “the toughest
sanctions in history” on Iran that hurt the lives of tens of
millions of ordinary Iranians, which is something that her
campaign brags about.
During
her first run for president in 2008, she
threatened in an interview:
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will
attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly
consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally
obliterate them.” This statement truly demonstrates the
warmongering nature of Hillary Clinton. She did not say that if Iran
attacked Israel, which is highly unlikely if not impossible, she
will defend Israel.
No, she threatened to obliterate Iran, the land of an old
civilization that’s made many contributions to humanity. Her threat
to “obliterate” Iran means only one thing: She is willing to
attack Iran with nuclear weapons.
Even
though she supported the nuclear accord with Iran, Mrs. Clinton still
demonizes and belittles Iran. In
a speech at the Brookings Institution in
September, Mrs. Clinton declared, “I don’t see Iran as our
partner in implementing this agreement. I believe Iran is
the subject of
the agreement” (emphasis mine), as if Iran is a banana republic
that is subject to U.S. orders. In her aforementioned article in the
Jewish Journal she
threatened Iran again:
“We
have to send Iran an unequivocal message. There can be no doubt
in Tehran that if Iran’s leaders violate their commitments not to
seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons, the United States will
stop them. They will test our resolve with actions like their
provocative ballistic missile test, for which we should impose new
sanctions designations. They need to understand that
America will act decisively if Iran violates the
nuclear agreement, including
taking military action if necessary (emphasis
mine).”
Mrs.
Clinton is always looking for new ways to impose new economic
sanctions on Iran in order to carry favor with the pro-Israel lobby
and its rich donors. After Iranian hardliners in Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards who oppose the nuclear accord tried to provoke
the U.S. by carrying out some missile tests, Mrs. Clinton quickly
called for new sanctions.
Shane
Bauer and two friends were arrested by Iranian border guards in July
2009, after the trio had apparently drifted into Iran from Iraq. They
were held until September 2011. Bauer, now a senior reporter with
Mother Jones, criticized Mrs. Clinton for calling for more sanctions
on Iran after four Iranian-Americans were released from jail in
Tehran on Jan. 16. He
tweeted:
“Seriously, why would Hillary call for more sanctions now? As far
as we know, 4 of the Americans are still in Iran. [It is] totally
irresponsible.” He
also tweeted that when he was in jail in Tehran,
“whenever I heard Hillary’s voice, my heart would sink. All she
ever does with Iran is inflame tensions.”
Mrs.
Clinton has never given up her imperial ambitions to reshape the
Middle East in Israel’s image, making the region as safe for
Israel’s expansionist policy as possible, and she views Iran as the
main impediment to achieving her goal. She has also been itching for
years to start a war with Iran. If that happens, not only her Israeli
patron will be delighted, weapons makers that donate to her
campaign more
than any other candidatewill
be ecstatic. Mrs. Clinton is
a good loyalist of
the military-industrial-intelligence complex.
Mrs.
Clinton’s enmity toward Iran and Iranians, and her unconditional
and blind support for Israel, are not surprising. Her biggest donors,
Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban and his wife Cheryl, have
given $2 million to the super PAC Priorities USA Action that
finances Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.
Saban
is the man who
has bragged,
“I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”
He
has also professed his support for Hillary Clinton. “I have told
her [Clinton] and everybody who’s asked me, ‘Whatever it takes,
we’re going to be there.’ I think she would be a fantastic
president for the United States, an incredible world leader and one
under whom I believe – deeply – the relationship with the U.S.
and Israel will be significantly reinforced,” Saban
told the Washington Post in
November 2014. He has also called for
more scrutiny of
Muslims in the U.S.
Most
recently, the Clinton campaign has been slamming Sen. Sanders’
suggestion that the U.S. and Iran should have closer relations. Jake
Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s senior policy adviser, said
on Jan. 21:
“This proposal [by Sanders] to more aggressively normalize
relations and to move to warm relations with Iran not only breaks
with President Obama’s policy, it breaks with the sober and
responsible diplomatic approach that’s been working for the United
States.”
Thus,
Mrs. Clinton is a strong ally of Iranian hardliners who
also do not want any rapprochement with
the U.S., and have been doing everything they can to prevent it.
Mrs.
Clinton’s warmongering toward Iran has alarmed many. Many
Iranian-Americans are terrified by the possibility of her presidency,
during which she may either re-impose the economic sanctions under
another name, or go to war with Iran.
Iraq
and Daesh
That Sen.
Clinton voted in 2002 to go to war with Iraq is
old news. The vote contributed to her defeat in her first
presidential run in 2008. Most likely, she voted for war with
Iraq because
the Israel lobby in the U.S. wanted it,
although many
other factors contributed to
that catastrophic war. We
were lied into war,
and as a senator, she played an important role in it.
But,
even though she
has admitted that the vote was a mistake,
she does not appear to have learned anything from the mistake. In a
House hearing on the Benghazi attack during which U.S. Ambassador to
Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were
killed, Mrs.
Clinton said:
“We have learned the hard way when America is absent, especially
from unstable places, there are consequences. Extremism takes root,
aggressors seek to fill the vacuum and security everywhere is
threatened, including here at home.” In other words, she believes
that U.S. forces should be everywhere. What she does not concede is
that it was the invasion of Iraq which was the catalyst for the
present chaos and bloodshed in the Middle East, and it was the
imperialist intervention in Libya (and elsewhere), which she has
supported, that led to the murders of the four and transformed
Libya from
the wealthiest, most economically advanced nation in Africa under
Moammar Gadhafi to a
hub for terrorists.
In
addition to Mrs. Clinton’s absurd notion of lumping in Daesh with
Hamas and Iran, she is also calling for doubling down on the previous
disaster in Iraq. In
her aforementioned speech at
the Council on Foreign Relations she
called for
“more allied planes, more airstrikes and a broader target set” to
combat Daesh in Iraq and Syria, urging Congress to approve a new
authorization of the use of military force against Daesh. So, what is
the lesson that she has learned from her mistake in voting for war in
Iraq?
Libya
One
of the most despicable moments in Hillary Clinton’s political
career was when she bragged about what happened in Libya and to
Gadhafi. “We came, we saw, he [Gadhafi] died,” Mrs. Clinton
said to an aide after
learning of Gadhafi’s death, echoing
Julius Caesar,
the Roman general and statesman. These six words demonstrate the
imperialist nature of Hillary Clinton’s views better than any book
or article or speech on her foreign policy.
As
secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton forcefully supported the NATO
attacks on Libya and the so-called “humanitarian intervention”
there. It was she who
convinced many skeptical members of
NATO that the alliance must support the intervention, and it was
she who
convinced the president that
the U.S. must intervene in Libya, impose a no-fly zone there, and
bomb the government’s troops and positions, in addition toarming
the Islamic groups that
were fighting with Gadhafi’s army. She “sold” the policy
because it was supposedly “an
opportunity for the United States to respond to an Arab request for
help; it would increase U.S. standing in the Arab world, and it would
send an important signal for the Arab Spring movement.”
Yes, destroying an economically-advanced Arab nation would bolster
U.S. standing with the Arab masses, most of whom despise
other Arab dictators that
we support in Saudi Arabia and the Arab nations of the Persian
Gulfthat
were after Gadhafi’s head.
Mrs.
Clinton was advocating the intervention in Libya while the Pentagon
was opposed to it. It
has been reported that top
Pentagon officials so deeply distrusted Mrs. Clinton about the war in
Libya that they opened their own channels of communications with
Gadhafi. Tapes recovered in Tripoli describe the conversations
between the Pentagon’s emissary (apparently sent by the Joint
Chiefs of Staff) and a son of Gadhafi.
Further, secret
intelligence emails by Sidney Blumenthal,
an adviser to the Clintons, to Mrs. Clinton’s private email account
clearly show that NATO was committing war crimes in Libya; that there
was racial cleansing by the U.S.-supported rebels against black
Libyans; that special forces from Egypt, Britain, and France that
were training the rebels knew of their links with al-Qaida; that
the main
goals of then French President Nicolas Sarkozy,
who was at the forefront of the intervention, were to obtain Libyan
oil, improve his own reputation, and assert French military power,
not any noble humanitarian goal; and that many rumors about Gadhafi’s
alleged crimes against his people were
just that, baseless rumors. Blumenthal
also reported to Mrs. Clintonthat
Gadhafi had 143 tons of gold and a comparable amount of silver valued
at $7 billion, which were supposed to be used for the creation of a
pan-African currency, so that France’s former colonies in Africa
would not use the French franc, and this motivated Sarkozy to attack
Libya.
Gadhafi
offered to
negotiate an end to the war,
and even
resign and leave Libya in
order to avoid bloodshed in his country, but the goal of Mrs.
Clinton was
regime change and
removing Gadhafi from power. Toppling Gadhafi and transforming Libya
into a terrorist hub are not the only “achievements” of Mrs.
Clinton’s disastrous policy. Unlike Western propaganda about
Gadhafi’s rule, Libya was, in
fact, a democracy that
was more advanced than those in many other nations. As Harvard
University scholar Garikai
Chengu explained:
“Far
from control being in the hands of one man, Libya was highly
decentralized and divided into several small communities that were
essentially ‘mini-autonomous States’ within a State. These
autonomous States had control over their districts and could make a
range of decisions including how to allocate oil revenue and
budgetary funds. Within these mini autonomous States, the three main
bodies of Libya’s democracy were Local Committees, Basic People’s
Congresses and Executive Revolutionary Councils.
The
Basic People’s Congress … was essentially Libya’s functional
equivalent of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom or the House
of Representatives in the United States. Libya’s
People’s Congress was not comprised merely of elected
representatives who discussed and proposed legislation on behalf of
the people; rather, the Congress allowed all Libyans to directly
participate in this process. Eight hundred People’s Congresses were
set up across the country and all Libyans were free to attend and
shape national policy and make decisions over all major issues
including budgets, education, industry, and the economy.”
Even The
New York Times conceded that Libya’s
direct democracy was functioning. But, to paraphrase Mrs. Clinton,
“the U.S. came, the U.S. saw, Libya died.”
Syria
As
usual, Mrs. Clinton’s positions are subject to change without
notice. The same person who advocated U.S. troops on the ground in
the Middle East during the House hearing on the Benghazi attacks,
changed her position again. Back in October, during the first debate
among the Democratic candidates for president, when the subject of
Syria and U.S. direct intervention there came up, Mrs.
Clinton said:
“We don’t want American troops on the ground in Syria. I never
said that.”
If
that were her position and she could consistently stick to it, we
would at least have some idea where she stands. But she
has repeatedly called for arming
the opposition in
Syria and imposing a
no-fly zone there.
The no-fly zone in Syria is a totally insane idea, because if the
target is Daesh, it has no air force. So, who is the target? The
Russian air force? What if Russian bombers and fighters entered the
U.S.-imposed no-fly-zone?Mrs.
Clinton apparently believes that
the no-fly zone will give the U.S. and its allies leverage over
Russia, an utterly absurd notion. She also seems to believe that such
a zone does not necessarily imply that the U.S. would go to war with
Russia, nor
does it imply that the U.S. might shoot at Russian aircraft.
The universe in which she lives is magical; anything is possible.
Unfortunately, though, it runs parallel to our universe with no
connection between the two.
Even
if Daesh had a sort of rudimentary air force, has Mrs. Clinton not
learned anything from the no-fly zone in Libya and the resulting
catastrophe? Is it possible to arm the opposition in Syria, if most,
if not all, of whom are terrorists, according
to Vice President Joe Biden,
and impose the no-fly zone without the presence of any U.S. military
and intelligence advisers?
In
Mrs. Clinton’s view, America
is “exceptional,” which
means that it should be able to intervene in any country it wishes,
abide by international treaties when they suits American interests,
and abandon them when it wants to. She presented us with a good
example of this “exceptionalism” during the October presidential
debate, when
she said:
“I think it’s important too that the United States make it very
clear to Russia’s Vladimir Putin that it’s not acceptable for him
to be in Syria creating more chaos, bombing people on behalf of
Assad.” This is a politician who has been itching for a war with
Iran for a long time, the same senator who voted for the Iraq War,
and the same secretary of state who orchestrated the war in Libya.
The latter two events have brought incredible destruction, bloodshed
and chaos to the Middle East, but because she believes in “American
exceptionalism,” she wants to lecture Mr. Putin on the virtues of
non-intervention.
Never
mind that regardless of whether one supports or rejects intervention
in other nations, Russia is in Syria because its government, still
recognized by the United Nations as the representative of the Syrian
people,invited
it.
As far as we can tell, the White House has not received such an
invitation. And do not forget that Mrs. Clinton called Syrian
President Bashar Assad a
reformer,
and Secretary of State John Kerry referred to him as “a
very generous man”
and “my
dear friend,”
whom he visited
several times.
On the other hand, the U.S. is supporting the opposition in Syria,
which is an act of war.
No
true progressive advocates the type of imperialist wars that Hillary
Clinton has championed. She is truly a
mistress of deception,
changing her positions all the time, hoping that she can deceive the
people and present herself as progressive. She is a phony
progressive, but a proven warmonger. If she is elected, we should
expect war with Iran, as well as deeper intervention in Iraq and
Syria. A vote for her would be a vote for more war.
The
Warmongering Record of Hillary Clinton
If
reason and justice prevailed in this country, you’d think that the
recent series of articles in the Washington Times concerning the
U.S.-NATO attack on Libya in 2011 would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s
presidential prospects.
as U.S. Secretary of State at that time knew that Libya was no threat
to the U.S. She knew that Muammar Gadhafi had been closely
cooperating with the U.S. in combating Islamist extremism. She
probably realized that Gadhafi had a certain social base due in part
to what by Middle Eastern standards was the relatively equitable
distribution of oil income in Libya.
But
she wanted to topple Gadhafi. Over the objections of Secretary of
“Defense” Robert Gates but responding to the urgings of British
Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy,
she advocated war. Why? Not for the reason advertised at the time.
(Does this sound familiar?) Not because Gadhafy was preparing a
massacre of the innocents in Benghazi, as had occurred in Rwanda in
1994. (That episode, and the charge that the “international
community” had failed to intervene, was repeatedly referenced by
Clinton and other top officials, as a shameful precedent that must
not be repeated. It had also been deployed by Bill Clinton in 1999,
when he waged war on Serbia, grossly exaggerating the extent of
carnage in Kosovo and positing the immanent prospect of “genocide”
to whip up public support. Such uses of the Rwandan case reflect
gross cynicism.)
No,
genocide was not the issue, in Libya any more than in Kosovo.
According to the Washington Times, high-ranking U.S. officials indeed
questioned whether there was evidence for such a scenario in Libya.
The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that a mere 2,000 Libyan
troops armed with 12 tanks were heading to Benghazi, and had killed
about 400 rebels by the time the U.S. and NATO attacked. It found
evidence for troops firing on unarmed protestors but no evidence of
mass killing. It did not have a good estimate on the number of
civilians in Benghazi but had strong evidence that most had fled. It
had intelligence that Gadhafy had ordered that troops not fire on
civilians but only on armed rebels.
The
Pentagon doubted that Gadhafi would risk world outrage by ordering a
massacre. One intelligence officer told the Washington Times that the
decision to bomb was made on the basis of “light intelligence.”
Which is to say, lies, cherry-picked information such as a single
statement by Gadhafi (relentlessly repeated in the corporate press
echoing State Department proclamations) that he would “sanitize
Libya one inch at a time” to “clear [the country] of these rats.”
(Similar language, it was said, had been used by Hutu leaders in
Rwanda.) Now that the rats in their innumerable rival militias
control practically every square inch of Libya, preventing the
emergence of an effective pro-western government, many at the
Pentagon must be thinking how stupid Hillary was.
No,
the attack was not about preventing a Rwanda-like genocide. Rather,
it was launched because the Arab Spring, beginning with the overthrow
of the two dictators, President Ben Ali of Tunisia and President
Mubarak of Egypt, had taken the west by surprise and presented it
with a dilemma: to retain longstanding friendships (including that
with Gadhafi, who’d been a partner since 2003) in the face of mass
protests, or throw in its lot with the opposition movements, who
seemed to be riding an inevitable historical trend, hoping to co-opt
them?
Recall
how Obama had declined up to the last minute to order Mubarak to step
down, and how Vice President Joe Biden had pointedly declined to
describe Mubarak as a dictator. Only when millions rallied against
the regime did Obama shift gears, praise the youth of Egypt for their
inspiring mass movement, and withdraw support for the dictatorship.
After that Obama pontificated that Ali Saleh in Yemen (a key ally of
the U.S. since 2001) had to step down in deference to protesters.
Saleh complied, turning power to another U.S. lackey (who has since
resigned). Obama also declared that Assad in Syria had “lost
legitimacy,” commanded him to step down, and began funding the
“moderate” armed opposition in Syria. (The latter have at this
point mostly disappeared or joined al-Qaeda and its spin-offs. Some
have turned coat and created the “Loyalists’ Army” backing
Assad versus the Islamist crazies.)
Hillary,
that supposedly astute stateswoman, believed that the Arab Spring was
going to topple all the current dictators of the Middle East and
that, given that, the U.S. needed to position itself as the friend of
the opposition movements. Gadhafy was a goner, she reasoned, so
shouldn’t the U.S. help those working towards his overthrow?
Of
course the U.S. (or the combination of the U.S. and NATO) couldn’t
just attack a sovereign state to impose regime change. It would, at
any rate, have been politically damaging after the regime change in
Iraq that had been justified on the basis of now well discredited
lies. So the U.S. arm-twisted UNSC members to approve a mission to
protect civilians in Libya against state violence. China and Russia
declined to use their veto power (although as western duplicity and
real motives became apparent, they came to regret this). The Libya
campaign soon shifted from “peace-keeping” actions such as the
imposition of a “no-fly” zone to overt acts of war against the
Gadhafy regime, which for its part consistently insisted that the
opposition was aligned with al-Qaeda.
The
results of “Operation Unified Protector” have of course been
absolutely disastrous. Just as the U,S. and some of its allies
wrecked Iraq, producing a situation far worse than that under Saddam
Hussein, so they have inflicted horrors on Libya unknown during the
Gadhafi years. These include the persecution of black Africans and
Tuaregs, the collapse of any semblance of central government, the
division of the country between hundreds of warring militias, the
destabilization of neighboring Mali producing French imperialist
intervention, the emergence of Benghazi as an al-Qaeda stronghold,
and the proliferation of looted arms among rebel groups. The
“humanitarian intervention” was in fact a grotesque farce and
huge war crime.
But
the political class and punditry in this country do not attack
Hillary for war crimes, or for promoting lies to validate a war of
aggression. Rather, they charge her and the State Department with
failure to protect U.S. ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens
and other U.S. nationals from the attack that occurred in Benghazi on
September 11, 2012. And they fault her for promoting the State
Department’s initial “talking point” that the attack had been a
spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube film rather than a
calculated terrorist attack. They pan her for sniping at a senator
during a hearing, “What difference does it make (whether the attack
had been launched by protestors spontaneously, or was a terrorist
action planned by forces unleashed by the fall of the Gadhafi
regime)”?
In
other words: Hillary’s mainstream critics are less concerned with
the bombing of Libya in 2011 that killed over 1100 civilians, and
produced the power vacuum exploited by murderous jihadis, than by
Hillary’s alleged concealment of evidence that might show the State
Department inadequately protected U.S. diplomats from the
consequences of the U.S.-orchestrated regime change itself. In their
view, the former First Lady might have blood on her hands—but not
that, mind you, of Libyan civilians, or Libyan military forces going
about their normal business, or of Gadhafi who was sodomized with a
knife while being murdered as Washington applauded.
No,
she’s held accountable for the blood of these glorified, decent
upstanding Americans who’d been complicit in the ruin of Libya.
This
version of events is easy to challenge. It’s easy to show that
Clinton skillfully—in full neocon mode, spewing disinformation to a
clueless public—steered an attack on Libya that has produced
enormous blowback and ongoing suffering for the Libyan people. If
a right-wing paper like Washington Times can expose this, how much
more the more “mainstream” press? Could they at least not raise
for discussion whether what Rand Paul calls “Hillary’s war”
was, like the Iraq War (and many others) based on lies? Shouldn’t
Hillary be hammered with the facts of her history, and her vaunted
“toughness” be exposed as callous indifference to human life?
While
championing the rights of women and children, arguing that “it
takes a village” to raise a child, Clinton has endorsed the bombing
of villages throughout her public life. Here are some talking points
for those appalled by the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
She
has always been a warmonger. As
First Lady from January 1993, she encouraged her husband Bill and his
secretary of state Madeleine Albright to attack Serbian forces in the
disintegrating Yugoslavia—in Bosnia in 1994 and Serbia in 1999.
She’s stated that in 1999 she phoned her husband from Africa. “I
urged him to bomb,” she boasts. These Serbs were (as usual) forces
that did not threaten the U.S. in any way. The complex conflicts and
tussles over territory between ethnic groups in the Balkans, and the
collapse of the Russian economy following the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, gave Bill Clinton an excuse to posture as the world’s
savior and to use NATO to impose order. Only the United States, he
asserted, could restore order in Yugoslavia, which had been a proudly
neutral country outside NATO and the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold
War. President Clinton and Albright also claimed that only
NATO—designed in 1949 to counter a supposed Soviet threat to
Western Europe, but never yet deployed in battle—should deal with
the Balkan crises.
The
Bosnian intervention resulted in the imposition of the “Dayton
Accord” on the parties involved and the creation of the
dysfunctional state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Kosovo intervention
five years later (justified by the scaremongering, subsequently
disproven reports of a Serbian genocidal campaign against Kosovars)
involved the NATO bombing of Belgrade and resulted in the
dismemberment of Serbia. Kosovo, now recognized by the U.S. and many
of its allies as an independent state, is the center of Europe’s
heroin trafficking and the host of the U.S.’s largest army base
abroad. The Kosovo war, lacking UN support and following Albright’s
outrageous demand for Serbian acquiescence—designed, as she
gleefully conceded, “to set the bar too high” for Belgrade and
Moscow’s acceptance—of NATO occupation of all of Serbia, was an
extraordinary provocation to Serbia’s traditional ally Russia.
“They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get,”
Albright said at the time, as NATO prepared to bomb a European
capital for the first time since 1945.
Clinton
has been a keen advocate for the expansion of an antiquated Cold War
military alliance that persists in provoking Russia. In
the same year that NATO bombed Belgrade (1999), the alliance expanded
to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But Clinton’s
predecessor George H. W. Bush had promised Russia in 1989 that NATO
would not expand eastward. And since the Warsaw Pact had been
dissolved in 1991, and since Russia under Boris Yeltsin hardly
threatened any western countries, this expansion has understandably
been viewed in Russia as a hostile move. George Kennan, a former U.S.
ambassador to the USSR and a father of the “containment”
doctrine, in 1998 pronounced the expansion a “tragic mistake”
with “no reason whatsoever.” But the expansion continued under
George W. Bush and has continued under Obama. Russia is now
surrounded by an anti-Russian military alliance from its borders with
the Baltic states to the north to Romania and Bulgaria. U.S.-backed
“color revolutions” have been designed to draw more countries
into the NATO camp. Hillary as secretary of state was a big proponent
of such expansion, and under her watch, two more countries (Albania
and Croatia) joined the U.S.-dominated alliance.
(To
understand what this means to Russia, imagine how Washington would
respond to a Russia-centered “defensive” military alliance
requiring its members to spend 2% of their GDPs on military spending
and coordinate military plans with Moscow incorporating Canada and
all the Caribbean countries, surrounding the continental U.S., and
now moving to include Mexico. Would this not be a big deal for U.S.
leaders?)
As
New York senator Clinton endorsed the murderous ongoing sanctions
against Iraq, imposed by the UN in 1990 and continued until
2003. Initially
applied to force Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the sanctions were
sustained at U.S. insistence (and over the protests of other Security
Council members) up to and even beyond the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Bill Clinton demanded their continuance, insisting that Saddam
Hussein’s (non-existent) secret WMD programs justified them. In
1996, three years into the Clinton presidency, Albright was asked
whether the death of half a million Iraq children as a result of the
sanctions was justified, and famously replied in a television
interview, “We think it was worth it.” Surely Hillary agreed with
her friend and predecessor as the first woman secretary of state. She
also endorsed the 1998 “Operation Desert Fox” (based on lies,
most notably the charge that Iraq had expelled UN inspectors)
designed to further destroy Iraq’s military infrastructure and make
future attacks even easier.
She was a strident supporter of the
Iraq War. As
a New York senator from 2001 to 2009, Hillary aligned herself with
the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, earning a reputation
as a hawk. She was a fervent supportive of the attack on Iraq, based
on lies, in 2003. On the floor of the Senate she echoed all the
fictions about Saddam Hussein’s “chemical and biological weapons
stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program.”
She declared, “He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to
terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.” She suggested that her
decision to support war was “influenced by my eight years of
experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Ave. in the White House
watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation.”
(Presumably by the latter she meant the threats posed by Serbs in
Bosnia and Kosovo.) Her loss to Obama in the Democratic primary in
2008 was due largely to Obama’s (supposed) antiwar position
contrasting with her consistently pro-war position. She has only
vaguely conceded that her support for the invasion was something of a
mistake. But she blames her vote on others, echoing Dick Cheney’s
bland suggestion that the problem was “intelligence failures.”
“If we knew know then what we know now,” she stated as she began
her presidential campaign in late 2006, “I certainly wouldn’t
have voted” for the war.
She actively pursued anti-democratic
regime change in Ukraine. As
secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Clinton as noted above endorsed
NATO’s relentless expansion. She selected to serve as Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs the neocon
Victoria Nuland, who had been the principal deputy foreign advisor to
Cheney when he was vice president. The wife of neocon pundit Robert
Kagan, Nuland is a war hawk whose current mission in life is the full
encirclement of Russia with the integration of Ukraine into the EU
and then into NATO. The ultimate goal was the expulsion of the
Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimean Peninsula (where it has been
stationed since 1783). She has boasted of the fact that the U.S. has
invested five billion dollars in supporting what she depicts as the
Ukrainian people’s “European aspirations.” What this really
means is that the U.S. exploited political divisions in Ukraine to
topple an elected leader and replace him with Nuland’s handpicked
prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyev, deploying neo-Nazi shock troops in
the process and generating a civil war that has killed over 5000
people.
Clinton
has increasingly vilified Vladimir Putin, the popular Russian
president, absurdly comparing the Russian re-annexation of the
Crimean Peninsula following a popular referendum with Hitler’s
annexation of the Sudetenland. She is totally on board the program of
producing a new Cold War, and forcing European allies to
cooperate in isolating the former superpower.
She
wanted to provide military assistance to the “moderate” armed
opposition in Syria, to effect regime change, and after leaving
office criticized Obama for not supplying more than he did. In
2011 Clinton wanted the U.S. to arm rebels who quickly became aligned
with the al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate) and other extreme
Islamists, in order to bring down a secular regime that respects
religious rights, rejects the implementation of Sharia law, and
promotes the education of women. The U.S. indeed has supplied arms to
anti-Assad forces from at least January 2014, But as it happens the
bulk of U.S. aid to the “moderate rebels” has been appropriated
by Islamists, and some of it is deployed against U.S. allies in Iraq.
It is now widely understood that the bulk of “moderate” rebels
are either in Turkish exile or directed by CIA agents, while the U.S.
plans to train some 5000 new recruits in Jordan. Meanwhile Assad has
won election (as fair as any held in a U.S. client state like
Afghanistan or Iraq) and gained the upper hand in the civil war. U.S.
meddling in Syria has empowered the Islamic State that now controls
much of Syria and Iraq.
She has been an unremitting supporter of
Israeli aggression, whenever it occurs. The
Israeli newspaper Haaretz described her last year as “Israel’s
new lawyer” given her sympathetic view of Binyamin Netanyahu’s
2014 bombardment of Gaza and even his desire to maintain “security”
throughout the occupied West Bank. She postured as an opponent of
Israel’s unrelenting, illegal settlements of Palestinian territory
in 2009, but backed down when Netanyahu simply refused to heed U.S.
calls for a freeze. In her memoir she notes “our early, hard line
on settlements didn’t work”—as though she’s apologizing for
it.
In
1999 as First Lady, Hillary Clinton hugged and kissed Yassir Arafat’s
wife Suha during a trip to the West Bank. She advocated the
establishment of a Palestinian state. She changed her tune when she
ran for the New York Senate seat. When it comes to the Middle East,
she is a total, unprincipled opportunist.
Hillary
tacitly endorsed the military coup against elected Honduran president
Manuel Zelaya in 2009, refusing to call it such (even though Obama
did). She
made common cause with those who feared his effort to poll the people
about constitutional reform would weaken their positions, made nice
with the ensuing regime and made sure Zelaya would not return to
office.
She provoked China by siding with Japan in the Senkaku/
Daioyutai dispute. Departing
from the State Department’s traditional stance that “we take no
position” on the Sino-Japanese dispute about sovereignty over the
Senkaku/ Daioyutai islands in the East China Sea, seized by Japan in
1895, Clinton as secretary of state emphasized that the islands fall
within the defense perimeters of the U.S.-Japanese alliance. The
warmongering neocon National Review in a piece entitled “In Praise
of Hillary Clinton” praised her for “driving the Chinese slightly
up a wall.”
She helped bring down a Japanese prime minister who
heeded the feelings of the people of Okinawa, who opposed the Futenma
Marine Corps Air Force Station on the island. The
new prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of
Japan defeated the slavishly pro-U.S. Liberal Democratic Party in the
general election of 2009, had promised to move the hated U.S. base in
the heart of Ginowan city for the noise, air pollution and public
safety hazards it causes. Clinton met with him, listened
sympathetically, and said “no.” Hatoyama was obliged to apologize
to the people of Okinawa, essentially conceding that Japan remains an
occupied nation that doesn’t enjoy sovereignty. Nationwide his
public support ratings fell from 70 to 17% and he was obliged to
resign in shame after eight months in office.
She made countless
trips to India, signing bilateral economic and nuclear cooperation
agreements with a country her husband had placed under sanctions for
its nuclear tests in 1998. While
castigating North Korea for its nuclear weapons program, and taking
what a CIA analyst called a “more hard line, more conditional, more
neoconservative [approach] than Bush during the last four years of
his term,” she signaled that India’s nukes were no longer an
issue for the U.S. India is, after all, a counterweight to
China.
What
can those who revere her point to in this record that in any way
betters the planet or this country? Clinton’s record of her tenure
in the State Department is entitled Hard Choices, but it has never
been hard for Hillary to choose brute force in the service of U.S.
imperialism and its controlling 1%.
This is a country of 323
million people. 88% of those over 25 have graduated high school. The
world respects U.S. culture, science, and technology. Why is it that
out of our well-educated, creative masses the best that the those who
decide these things—the secretive cliques within the two official,
indistinguishable political parties who answer to the 1% and who
decide how to market electoral products—can come up with is the
likely plate of candidates for the presidential election next year?
Why is it that, while we all find it ridiculous that North Korea’s
ruled by its third Kim, Syria by its second Assad, and Cuba by its
second Castro, the U.S. electorate may well be offered a choice
between another Clinton and another Bush? As though their
predecessors of those surnames were anything other than
long-discredited warmongering thugs?
* Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University.
