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Scheer’s article reminds us not just of Hillary Clinton’s call to obliterate Iran during the election but also Barack Obama’s call to attack Pakistan. Indeed, it seems like this administration that many voted into power because of their so-called opposition to the Iraq War has a tendency to threaten aggressive military action.
In August of 2007, Obama began to discuss how he would handle America’s situation with Pakistan:
"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said.
Indeed, Obama was suggesting that with or without permission from Pakistani government America would act. So much for respecting a country’s sovereignty.
Interestingly, in addition to the fact that Hillary Clinton suggested during a debate held in Chicago just after Obama’s remarks that “you shouldn’t always say what you think if you are running for president,” Joe Biden explained and justified what Obama said.
“Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts," Biden said. "It's already the policy of the United States -- has been for four years -- that there's actionable intelligence, we would go into Pakistan.”
Threatening to attack a country, which is a violation of international law, is not just the policy of Hillary Clinton but many other members of the Obama Administration.
Jeremy Scahill pointed out in November of 2008 that Obama was going to load his Cabinet with “hawks” and not one anti-war voice was going to be a member of the Obama Administration.
Scahill wrote this about Hillary Clinton:
Hillary Rodham Clinton
For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-a-vis Obama's stated foreign-policy goals.
Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush's invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the war, but aided the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising to support the measure in October 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."
"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"
Beyond Iraq, Clinton shocked many and sparked official protests by Tehran at the United Nations when asked during the presidential campaign what she would do as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," she declared. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."
Clinton has not shied away from supporting offensive foreign policy tactics in the past. Recalling her husband's weighing the decision of whether to attack Yugoslavia, she said in 1999, "I urged him to bomb. … You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"
If one recalls, in true American exceptionalism fashion, news commentators, policymakers, and politicians in America refuse to let go of the fact that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggested that Israel should be wiped off the map.
