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Hillary Clinton's Gender ArgumentBy Ray McGovern (Page 2 of 3 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page. 2 comments
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Hillary Clinton's record as Secretary of State makes it unmistakably clear that -- like her hawkish predecessor Albright -- she lacks the level-headedness, vision, and, yes, compassion without which the country's top diplomat or (even more importantly) the commander in chief can be outright dangerous.
If there is a Hell, I could visualize a special place for both men and women who operate with the cold-blooded, unfeeling cruelty toward victims of American power. What brought this to mind was the way Clinton exulted shortly after getting word that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed.
The Libyan leader had been flushed out of a culvert hiding place, tortured, sodomized with a bayonet and murdered. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose to rejoice with undisguised glee, using a riff on words attributed to Julius Caesar, "I came; I saw; I conquered." Hillary said: "We came; we saw; he died!"
Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.
(Image by Video screen grab) Details DMCA
Chaos now reigns in Libya and, according to Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" rule, Clinton broke it, so she now owns it. And Obama has just conceded publicly that if he could get a do-over, it would be Libya. He recently expressed open regret over the aftermath of the U.S. military involvement championed by Secretary of State Clinton, calling it the "worst mistake" of his presidency.
In Lock-Step With Neocons
Frankly, it is hard to distinguish Clinton's foreign policy from the neocons' "regime change" obsession. Like the neocons, Clinton expresses full support for whatever Israel does and applies the same step-by-step approach toward dragging the United States into more "regime change" wars against governments and political movements that don't toe Washington's line.
Currently, she's pushing for the U.S. military to impose a "safe zone" or "no-fly zone" in Syria, nice-sounding phrases that mean in reality a direct U.S. invasion of Syria, requiring the violent destruction of Syria's air force and air defenses. It is the same ploy that Clinton used in beginning the disastrous "regime change" in Libya: start with sweet phrases like "responsibility to protect" and "no-fly zones" and then escalate to another "regime change."
President George W. Bush and his neocon advisers pulled a similar stunt in drawing the United States into the Iraq War. Bush insisted that he simply needed the authority to use force to pressure Saddam Hussein to surrender his WMD; then U.S. troops were deployed to the region to show that the U.S. meant business; then, U.S. "credibility" would be impaired if the troops simply had to wait around until the U.N. weapons inspectors searched for the WMD, so the invasion began.
Clinton has consistently been onboard such neocon bandwagons, famously voting for and supporting the Iraq War as a U.S. senator. She also has favored coups and wars to remove troublesome leaders whom she demonizes much as the neocons do, understanding the importance of propaganda and "perception management" to bring a sometimes reluctant U.S. population along for the blood-soaked ride.
As Secretary of State, Clinton supported the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted a relatively progressive president who had offended powerful corporate and oligarchic interests. Also in 2009, she joined hawkish Republican holdovers inside the Obama administration to push for what turned out to be a pointless but bloody "counterinsurgency" escalation in Afghanistan.
In 2011, Clinton tipped the balance in convincing Obama to support the Western invasion of Libya. And in seeking another "regime change" in Syria, she advocated arming Syrian rebels, even though many fought side-by-side with Al Qaeda's Nusra Front.
Clinton also has voiced excessive hostility toward Iran, heightening the confrontation during her years as Secretary of State and threatening to renew it if she becomes President. With Iranian hardliners already questioning the value of Iran's accepting extraordinary constraints on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief (when much of that relief has not materialized), it's not hard to imagine how a President Clinton-45 might push Iran into renouncing the deal, thus reopening the "bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran" option favored by the neocons.
Only the blindest supporters of Secretary Clinton could fail to acknowledge that there is little or no daylight between her and the neocons.
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His (more...)
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