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writing for godot

A Series of Disasters: Hillary’s Foreign Affairs Credentials

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Written by Tony Russell   
Monday, 18 April 2016 09:37
On October 9, 2002, Bernie Sanders spoke in the House of Representatives in opposition to war in Iraq. These were among the key points he made:

All relevant U.S. intelligence agencies were of the opinion that Saddam Hussein was unlikely to launch a chemical or biological attack on the U.S.
The probable steep cost in human lives of such a war, both U.S. and Iraqi, was being ignored.
A premeditated, unprovoked attack on Iraq would not only be immoral, but could later be used by other belligerent nations as justification for their own unprovoked attacks. (Sanders’ prediction has proven true, with Russia using our example to justify its invasion of Ukraine.)
The war would be an enormous drain from the U.S. economy, diverting money from vital needs here at home. (Sanders was right: the actual cost of the war has turned out to be more than $4.4 trillion.)
We were unprepared for unintended consequences, including the civil war likely to break out once Saddam Hussein’s removal left a void. (Again, Sanders was exactly right.}
An attack on Iraq would divert attention and resources from the U.S.’s global counterterrorist campaign. (This proved to be the case as troops, equipment, and focus shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, leaving the war in Afghanistan in limbo.)

A day later, on October 10, Hillary Clinton rose in the Senate to speak in favor of authorizing the war. In contrast with Sanders, she accepted all of the Bush administration’s spurious claims, including that:
Saddam Hussein was rebuilding a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.
Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and missile delivery capability.
Saddam Hussein was allied with and supporting Al Qaeda.

In presenting the rationale behind her vote, Clinton ignored the broad range of considerations informing Sanders’ decision. She made no acknowledgement of the countervailing intelligence, nor of the moral, legal, human, economic, and strategic arguments against the war. Instead, she talked in general terms about the difficulty of reaching a decision, and then, in effect, passed the buck. She said, “My vote is not ... a vote for any new doctrine of preemption or for unilateralism or for the arrogance of American power or purpose. It is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president. And we say to him: Use these powers wisely and as a last resort.”

George Bush, as we know, didn’t use those war powers wisely, and he used them as a first rather than a last resort. The vote she cast--“with conviction,” she emphasized--was precisely one for a doctrine of preemption, unilateralism, and the arrogance of American power. Clinton has described her support for the war as “a mistake, plain and simple,” which makes it sound as if backing the attack on Iraq was something like forgetting to return a library book on time, or inadvertently leaving your car in a no-parking zone. Why did Bernie Sanders have so little trouble seeing the situation so clearly? How could she not see what was coming?

Nobody seems to have pushed her to answer the obvious follow-up question--”What exactly was the mistake?”--which would at least put the nature of her reassessment and the lessons she presumably learned out where they could be examined. But why wouldn’t you push for a thorough analysis when other people paid such an enormous price for her mistake? (A “mistake” shared, to be sure, by an overwhelming majority of the political establishment and its attendant main stream media.)


At least half a million Iraqi civilians died because of the war we started--the vast majority of them innocent women and children.
A million and a half Iraqis became refugees, their communities destroyed, their families separated, their livelihoods vanished, their possessions abandoned, their hopes ruined .
Iraqis were the victims of horrific war crimes committed by our military and intelligence forces--everything from the bombing of schools and hospitals to the destruction of water supplies and the torture of prisoners. All of this was in violation of international law and military codes of war.
Once-tolerant neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere became the sites of gruesome sectarian violence and bloody ethnic cleansing.
The entire Middle East was plunged into a cascading destabilization, accompanied by a great, ongoing swell of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.
The Iraqi landscape was littered with radioactive debris from depleted uranium munitions used by the U.S., debris that has already caused thousands of childhood cancers and will cause hundreds of thousands of agonizing deaths from cancer over the foreseeable future.

These are the horrors for Iraqis hidden behind the language of a “mistake, plain and simple.” We inflicted wounds of a different sort on ourselves.

The second obvious follow-up question is: “Shouldn’t a mistake of this enormity be followed by sincere contrition and a heartfelt apology, for starters, followed by an attempt--however late--to assume responsibility, to make reparations where possible, and to make sure the mistake is never repeated?” But that question hasn’t been asked either. Nor has she taken any of those steps of contrition and reconciliation. Her admission of a “mistake” seems to come with a limited liability clause.

My guess is that Clinton and Sanders arrived at opposite votes because they started from different values and principles--from a different vision of America, and beyond that, a different vision of human history and possibility. If I’m right, her support for the invasion of Iraq wasn’t a “mistake,” but the logical consequence of a set of amoral realpolitik premises that she shares with a host of Washington insiders across party lines.

It’s hard to even have a serious foreign policy debate in the U.S., because we live in a permanent fog of propaganda, propaganda generated by our own government and directed at its own citizens. Politicians, the mainstream media, and a great many citizens, operate as if the propaganda is an accurate picture of reality, whether they actually believe it or not.

In our public image, we present ourselves as a caring and righteous nation, strong in its own defense but willing--out of sheer goodheartedness--to take on the burden defending and spreading freedom and democracy around the planet. In reality, we more closely resemble the hidden-portrait version of Dorian Gray, stashed away in a locked room. .

We are an aggressive, militaristic nation, more likely to destroy democracy than support it. We routinely aid and install dictatorships, and in the process crush democratic movements. We have been complicit in slaughtering priests and nuns, as well as in in kidnapping and murdering journalists and teachers and labor leaders and students and entire villages of peasants. We have held people without trial and operated secret sites in which prisoners simply vanished. We have taught torture techniques to others and tortured prisoners ourselves. We have tried to conceal all of this, and when found out, have denied and lied, denied and lied.

A quick tour of history.

Iran was the original success story for U.S. regime change abroad.  The CIA-orchestrated coup in Iran in 1953 ousted a democratically-elected government and installed a dictatorship in its place. This achievement became the prototype for U.S. foreign interventions around the globe, and has been followed since then by at least eighty U.S.-initiated coups to topple foreign governments. Eighty coups!

After Iran, came the overthrow of President Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, during which about 200,000 people--mostly peasants--were killed by U.S.-backed security forces.  Then came the coup in Thailand in 1957, and the one in Laos between 1958 and 1960.  That coincided with the coup in the Congo in 1960, after the Belgian Congo finally gained its independence.  We arranged that Patrice Lumumba, the newly-chosen Prime Minister, was imprisoned and executed for being insufficiently compliant with western interests.

In subsequent years, all of the following countries became additional victims of U.S.-backed coups:

Turkey in 1960, 1971, and 1980; Ecuador in 1961 and 1963; South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Argentina, all in 1963; Honduras, also 1963 and then again in 2009; Iraq in 1963 and 2003; the overthrow of President Goulart in Brazil in 1964; Bolivia three times, including 1964, 1971 and 1980.  In 1965, the U.S. gave the Indonesian army the names of 5,000 Communists, who were hunted down and killed as part of the quarter of a million Indonesians slaughtered by the military.  The U.S. orchestrated the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966; a coup in Greece in 1967; the overthrow of President Arias in Panama in 1968 after he demanded the return of the Canal Zone to Panamanian jurisdiction, and then again in 1989 with the replacement of Manuel Noriega. We arranged he removal of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia in 1970; the overthrow of President Allende of Chile in 1973; Bangladesh in 1975; ‘Operation Fair Play,’ the military coup that removed Prime Minister Bhutto of Pakistan in 1977; the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983; Mauritania and Guinea in 1984;  Burkina Faso in 1987; Paraguay in 1989; Haiti in 1991 and again in 2004; Russia in 1993; Uganda in 1996; and Libya in 2011.

In short, to extend American power, support U.S. corporations abroad, and control the world’s oil supply, we have been willing to spend trillions of dollars to crush democracy, slaughter civilians, and run roughshod over human rights on a global scale. Keeping that effort going requires an enormous investment in weapons and intelligence. It also require staggering hypocrisy, especially at home, where the U.S. public continues to be fed the fairy tale that we’re a beacon of hope in an otherwise wicked world, a “shining city on a hill.”

But it’s about time we were clear-eyed about how U.S. foreign policy actually works. Like our economy, it is broken, and immoral to its core. One of the most liberating things about our current political season is that people finally feel free to point out so many of the ways the Emperor has no clothes.

The deceit, manipulation, and aggression just summarized were clearly on display in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Supporting them wasn’t an aberration in Hillary Clinton’s career, nor a one-time mistake. Despite her elaborate disclaimers to the contrary, they have proven to be the main items in her foreign policy toolkit. Her foreign policy “experience,” which is alleged to make her a superior choice to Bernie Sanders, is all cut from the same cloth--interventionist, militaristic, and undemocratic. Clinton can talk the diplomacy/democracy talk with the best of them, but as W. H. Auden once wrote, “when [s]he cried the little children died in the streets.”

That’s not hyperbole. Vast numbers of children died in the streets and countryside of Iraq. They have also died--and are continuing to die--in Honduras, Libya, and Syria. I am sick of hearing candidate Clinton take so much credit for her work with the Children’s Defense Fund and other child advocacy efforts more than thirty years ago, while she takes no responsibility for the mass deaths of children in wars she has championed in these later stages of her career.

Clinton wielded an undemocratic iron fist in Honduras during her tenure as Secretary of State. Children died and are still dying there in significant part because Clinton, as Secretary of State, threw U.S. support behind the 2009 military coup that overthrew Honduras’s democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya.

Clinton kept U.S. aid flowing to the leaders of the coup, in violation of U.S. law. She rebuffed international calls to condemn the coup, and worked to block Zelaya’s restoration to office. The dictatorship she threw U.S. support behind has destroyed the rule of law in Honduras. It has used repression, kidnapping, violence, and assassination to suppress dissent, in the process cursing Honduras with the highest murder rate in the world. That’s the background for the flood of children fleeing Central America as illegal immigrants, trying to escape the hell Clinton helped foster.

As Secretary of State Clinton was also one of the strongest voices in the Obama administration calling for yet another “regime change,” this time in Libya, where children are also still dying in the streets. Not only did her push for war show she learned nothing from her earlier “mistake” in Iraq, but it saddled Obama with his own “mistake,” a virtual replay of the Iraq calamity. Like Bush’s 2003 invasion, it was a grab for control of vast oil reserves, under the pretext of toppling a cruel dictator for “humanitarian” reasons. And like our “victory” in Iraq, it left a once-stable society in bloody chaos and ruins. Having taken credit in earlier debates for the

Clinton and other war proponents claimed that Muammar Gaddafi was planning to massacre peaceful protesters in Benghazi. With that fiction, the U.S. and its European allies extracted a U.N. resolution establishing a no-fly zone in Libya, and used it to oust Gaddafi, plunging Libya into a disastrous downspiral that has led to the deaths of at least 30,000 Libyans and caused an estimated two million others to flee into exile. Five years later, rival militias are still tearing the country apart. Now Obama says that “failing to plan for the day after” the invasion of Libya was the “worst mistake” of his presidency. Clinton, on the other hand, infamously gloated over our toppling of Gaddafi, saying, “We came, we saw, he died”--easily one of the most repulsive boasts I’ve ever heard from a politician. What Obama in 2016 is calling “a mess,” Clinton still defends as “smart power at its best.”

Iraq, a political and humanitarian disaster. Honduras, a political and humanitarian disaster. Libya, a political and humanitarian disaster. Syria, a political and humanitarian disaster. These are the achievements which Clinton rattles off with so much confidence in touting her foreign affairs credentials. If you’re looking for a candidate who’ll lead us toward a safer, saner world, she has proven beyond a doubt you should look somewhere else.

But there’s precious little stomach for scrutinizing such failures. Because obviously they’re not just Clinton’s.

It’s easy enough to say, as Conor Friedersdorf did in his analysis of Clinton’s failed strategy in Libya, that “a Clinton administration would likely pursue more wars of choice with poor judgment and insufficient planning.” Probably so. But she didn’t pioneer these dirty wars, nor has she been an outlier. Just the opposite. She is part of a long and dishonorable tradition. In following business as usual, and in being--as required--a perfect hypocrite, she has been thoroughly representative. She is the quintessential establishment figure, almost a poster girl for a decades-long pattern of U.S. foreign aggression. Better judgment and planning would simply make her a more adept warmonger.

That’s why everyone in the political mainstream has been so unwilling to take a close look at Clinton’s foreign policy adventures. It’s not just Hillary Clinton being exposed, but the entire governing class of which she’s a part. One can almost sympathize with her resentment that she is being called to account for “what everybody does.”

The ubiquity of these failures is the reason why, for all the seemingly endless harping on Clinton’s e-mails as Secretary of State, mainstream media have entirely ignored the content of the more than 30,000 released. Tom Hall, on the World Socialist Web Site, characterizes them as showing Clinton helping drive wars in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, plus pushing for drone assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Her e-mails mirror our true nature in bureaucratic detail. If we’re going to keep talking about what Sanders called her “damn e-mails,” let’s examine the sordid particulars of what she was straining to accomplish, and the immorality behind them.

Maybe then, finally, we can have an honest conversation about restoring some openness, fairness, and justice to the U.S.’s role in world affairs. And in the process we could give some credit to the candidate who has been pushing for that conversation his entire political career.
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