In effect, this election is asking American voters if they want incremental changes to the current system -- represented by establishment candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush -- or if they want to shake the system up with insurgent candidates like Sanders and Trump.
Though most neocons are supporting Republican establishment candidates who have sworn allegiance to the Israeli/neocon cause, the likes of Sen. Marco Rubio, some prominent neocons have made clear that they would be happy with Hillary Clinton as president.
For instance, neocon superstar Robert Kagan told The New York Times in 2014 that he hoped that his neocon views -- which he now prefers to call "liberal interventionist" -- would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. After all, Secretary of State Clinton named Kagan to one of her State Department advisory boards and promoted his wife, neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who oversaw the provocative "regime change" in Ukraine in 2014.
According to the Times' article, Clinton "remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes."
Kagan is quoted as saying: "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. ... If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue ... it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else."
Though Clinton recently has sought to portray herself as an Obama loyalist -- especially in South Carolina where she is counting on strong African-American support -- she actually has adopted far more hawkish positions than the President, both when she was a senator and as Obama's first secretary of state.
"Team of Rivals" Debacle
Arguably, Obama's most fateful decision of his presidency occurred shortly after the 2008 election when he opted for the trendy idea of a "team of rivals" to run his foreign policy. He left Bush family loyalist Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, retained a neocon-dominated senior officer corps led by the likes of Gen. David Petraeus, and picked hawkish Sen. Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State. Thus, Obama never took control of his own foreign policy.
The troika of Clinton-Gates-Petraeus challenged Obama over his desire to wind down the Afghan War, bureaucratically mouse-trapping him into an ill-advised "surge" that accomplished little other than getting another 1,750 U.S. soldiers killed along with many more Afghans. Nearly three-quarters of the 2,380 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan were killed on Obama's watch.
Ironically, it was Gates who shed the most light on Clinton's neocon-oriented positions in his memoir, Duty, written after he left the Pentagon in 2011. While generally flattering Clinton for her like-minded positions, Gates also portrays Clinton as a pedestrian foreign policy thinker who is easily duped and leans toward military solutions.
Indeed, for thoughtful and/or progressive Democrats, the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton could represent a step back from some of President Barack Obama's more innovative foreign policy strategies, particularly his readiness to cooperate with the Russians and Iranians to defuse Middle East tensions and his willingness to face down the Israel Lobby when it is pushing for heightened confrontations and war.
Based on her public record and Gates's insider account, Clinton could be expected to favor a neoconservative approach to the Mideast, one more in line with the dominant thinking of Official Washington and the belligerent dictates of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Standing with Israeli Bigots
As a U.S. senator and as Secretary of State, Clinton rarely challenged the conventional wisdom on the Mideast or resisted the use of military force to solve problems. She famously voted for the Iraq War in 2002 -- falling for President George W. Bush's bogus WMD case -- and remained a war supporter until her position became politically untenable during Campaign 2008.
Representing New York, Clinton avoided criticizing Israeli actions. In summer 2006, as Israeli warplanes pounded southern Lebanon, killing more than 1,000 Lebanese, Sen. Clinton shared a stage with Israel's bigoted Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman who had said, "While it may be true -- and probably is -- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim."
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