In October 2015, Clinton broke with the Obama White House on Syria by calling for the creation of a no-fly zone "to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock of what's happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees," she said in a TV interview on the campaign trail.
While the Obama White House approved limited air strikes against ISIL, it has resisted creating a no-fly zone on the grounds that effective enforcement to prevent Assad's planes from flying would require large amounts of US resources and could pull the military further into an unpredictable conflict.
Clinton's position is at odds not only with President Obama but also with the position of Bernie Sanders, who, at this writing, is her main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders has warned that a unilateral US no-fly zone in Syria could "get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending US entanglement in that region," potentially making a complex and dangerous situation in Syria even worse.
Clinton did come out in support of President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, but even that position comes with a heavy load of bellicose baggage. Back in April 2008 she warned that the US could "totally obliterate" Iran in retaliation for a nuclear attack on Israel -- prompting Obama to warn against "language that's reflective of George Bush." In 2009, as Secretary of State, she was adamant that the US keep open the option of attacking Iran over never-proven allegations it was seeking the nuclear weapons that Israel already has. She opposed talk of a "containment" policy that would be an alternative to military action should negotiations with Tehran fail.
Even after the agreement was sealed, she struck a bullying tone: "I don't believe Iran is our partner in this agreement," Clinton insisted. "Iran is the subject of the agreement," adding that she would not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon. "We should expect that Iran will want to test the next president. They will want to see how far they can bend the rules," she said in a September 2015 speech at the Brookings Institution. "That won't work if I'm in the White House."
To bolster her tough stance, Clinton suggested deploying additional US forces to the Persian Gulf region and recommended that Congress close any gaps in the existing sanctions to punish Iran for any current or future instances of human rights abuses and support for terror.
It's true that the Iran nuclear agreement allowed for additional possible sanctions unrelated to Iran's nuclear program, but it also required parties to avoid action "inconsistent with the letter, spirit and intent" of the deal. Clinton's call for new sanctions violates the deal's intent.
Clinton has also voiced her opposition to the Palestinian-led nonviolent campaign against the Israeli government called BDS -- boycott, divestment and sanctions. In a letter to Jewish mega donor Haim Saban, she said BDS seeks to punish Israel and asked Saban's advice on "how leaders and communities across America can work together to counter BDS."
As secretary of state, Clinton missed opportunity after opportunity to shine as the nation's top diplomat. In July 2010 she visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone with Defense Secretary Robert Gates to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Standing at the site of the most militarized border in the world at a time of great tension between North and South Korea, she could have publicly recognized that the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended the fighting on the Korean peninsula was supposed to be followed up a few months later by a peace treaty that would move toward reconciliation but that never happened. Clinton could have used this occasion to call for a peace treaty and a process of reconciliation between the two Koreas. Instead she claimed that the US military presence in Korea for decades had led to the current successful result, a statement hard to reconcile with 60 years of continuous hostilities.
As Secretary of State, Clinton failed miserably in her attempt to "reset" the US relationship with Russia, and after leaving office, she has criticized the Obama administration for not doing more to contain Russia's presence in Ukraine since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. She put herself "in the category of people who wanted to do more in reaction to the annexation of Crimea," insisting that the Russian government's objective is "to stymie, to confront, to undermine American power whenever and wherever they can."
It was only after Clinton resigned as secretary of state and was replaced by John Kerry that the agency moved away from being merely an appendage of the Pentagon to one that truly sought creative, diplomatic solutions to seemingly intractable conflicts. President Obama's two signature foreign policy achievements -- the Iran deal and the groundbreaking opening with Cuba -- came after Clinton left. These historic wins serve to highlight Clinton's miserable track record in the position.
When Clinton announced her second campaign for the presidency, she declared she was entering the race to be the champion for "everyday Americans." As a lawmaker and diplomat, however, Clinton has long championed military campaigns that have killed scores of "everyday" people abroad. As commander-in-chief, there's no reason to believe she'd be any less a warhawk than she was as the senator who backed George W. Bush's war in Iraq, or the Secretary of State who encouraged Barack Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
Clinton may well have been the administration's most vociferous advocate for military action. On at least three crucial issues -- Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden raid -- she took a more aggressive line than Defense Secretary Gates, a Bush-appointed Republican.
Little wonder that Clinton has won the support of many pundits who continually agitate for war. "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy," Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, told the New York Times. "If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue," he said, "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."
Let's call it what it is: more of the interventionist policies that destroyed Iraq, destabilized Libya, showered Yemen with cluster bombs and drones, and legitimized repressive regimes from Israel to Honduras.
A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our nation in a perpetual state of war -- killing people around the world, plenty of them women and children.
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