RSN: Want Endless War? Love the US Empire? Well, Hillary Clinton's Your Choice

There is no candidate who has provided greater disappointment!

Hillary should scare the bejesus out of you!

The case against Hillary Clinton

Ryan Cooper

NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.

Much of the argument in the Democratic Party primary has hinged on who is more electable. Hillary Clinton, as the more moderate candidate, has a somewhat more plausible case on this score — though at the moment she does a bit worse than her opponent Bernie Sanders in head-to-head polling matchups.

But consider a separate question: Would Clinton actually be a good president? No, argues Doug Henwood in his book My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency. As Daniel Davies observes, it provides a brief, reasonable survey of the case against returning Clinton to the presidency, free of the right-wing dreck clogging up the internet. The whole book is worth reading, but the main argument can be grouped under three headings.

1. Clinton is far too aggressive with the use of military force. Because the American president has a nearly free hand when it comes to foreign policy, this is the most important part of the anti-Clinton brief. Her history suggests she would be more aggressive than President Obama (who hasn't been much of a dove himself).

Most notoriously, she voted for the war in Iraq — even endorsing the Bush administration's false accusation that Saddam Hussein had given "aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members" — but it's been a consistent theme even after that gruesome catastrophe. As secretary of state, she supported escalation in Afghanistan, pushed hard for the Libyan intervention, and lobbied for a continued military presence in Iraq. She was on the hawkish edge of internal Obama administration debates on Syria, plotting with then-CIA Director David Petraeus to arm rebels there (though the plan was rejected by the president).

She also worked to prevent the return of leftist Manuel Zelaya to the presidency of Honduras after a military coup in 2009, proposing to send longtime Clinton hack Lanny Davis as a back channel to the new regime. At the time, Davis was working as a U.S. lobbyist for a pro-regime Honduran business group. She also recently praised Plan Colombia, a drug war military effort whose export around Latin America has been utterly disastrous.

Finally, while Clinton touts her experience on foreign policy, it doesn't seem to have produced many results when it counted. While Clinton's own list of accomplishments at the State Department is rather thin(remember the "pivot to Asia"?), her immediate successor John Kerry has hit a succession of diplomatic home runs: helping get chemical weapons out of Syria, re-opening relations with Cuba after half a century of rupture, pushing through a nuclear deal with Iran, in addition to a host of smaller victories.

2. The whole Clinton operation is extremely shady. Henwood's book documents many instances of suspect conduct by the Clinton Foundation, but perhaps the most spectacular example is the tangled story of how Bill Clinton reportedly helped a Canadian mining magnate named Frank Giustra buy uranium mining operations from the dictator of Kazakhstan, who then donated tens of millions to the Clinton Foundation.

Giustra sold out in 2007, but the same firm was later bought piecemeal by some Russians with government ties. The sale needed approval from a U.S. government body on which Hillary Clinton sat as secretary of state, because it involved uranium assets in the U.S. They got the approval, while the company chairman routed $2.35 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a Russian investment bank with ties to the uranium company paid Bill $500,000 for a speech. Even that summary isn't doing the story justice. There's no evidence of an explicit quid pro quo here, but suffice to say it looks bad.

Clinton has raised millions in campaign contributions from all sorts of rich industries, particularly Wall Street. She's also profited personally,collecting millions in speaking fees from several huge finance players. One wonders what that could possibly be for, if not political access.
The still ongoing email scandal is still another example of a classic Clinton behavior: extreme secrecy and paranoia. She despises the press (with some justification, to be fair), and instinctively treads right up to the line of acceptable behavior for a public official. Though the story has not revealed any serious wrongdoing, it consumes political attention.

One of the underrated benefits of the Obama presidency is his squeaky-clean personal conduct. While I find much of the press' behavior towards the Clintons weirdly obsessive at best, they would not have so much grist for the scandal mill if Clinton were more scrupulous about following the rules. A Clinton presidency is almost guaranteed to be a continual parade of suspicious stories and scandals.

3. General Clinton ideology. The Clintons were at the forefront of the turn towards neoliberalism in the Democratic Party, the most disastrous of which was the evisceration of traditional welfare in 1996, which increased extreme poverty in this country by 150 percent. Not so long ago she sounded like Rand Paul when speaking about poor people. She neither admits this was a mistake nor outlines a plan to reverse the damage.

Aside from the welfare debacle, Clinton has a long history of being pro-deregulation, anti-labor (she spent six years on the board of viciously anti-union Walmart, and did not defend worker organizing once), and advocating for draconian anti-crime policy. Though she (like most other Democratic centrists) has come around on financial regulation and in other areas, the journey has been incomplete and halting at best. Instead of straightforward social insurance, the signature Clinton policy remainsfiddly little tax credits that accomplish little and add to the tax system's already mind-crushing complexity.

While her platform does have some good stuff in it, particularly on police reform and drug abuse, as Henwood writes, "Little that Hillary says about policy can be believed with any confidence." Given her campaign's dishonest triangulation against single payer and taxation in general, it's hard to believe that Clinton would go to the mat for the working class, particularly when it means jacking up taxes on the rich.


So while Clinton would surely be better than whatever crawls out of the Republican primary swamp, her presidency would be a step back for the nation as a whole.

http://theweek.com/articles/601909/case-against-hillary-clinton

Want Endless War? Love the US Empire? Well, Hillary Clinton's Your Choice

By Marjorie Cohn, Consortium News

03 February 16

Surviving Iowa in a dead heat with Sen. Bernie Sanders, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now hopes her establishment-backed campaign will grind down her opposition and pave the way for her presidential nomination. But many Democrats remain leery of her hawkish foreign policy, writes Marjorie Cohn.

illary Clinton likes to extol her foreign policy credentials, particularly her experience as Secretary of State. She attaches herself to Barack Obama’s coattails, pledging to continue his policies. But she is even more hawkish than the President.

Like Obama, Clinton touts American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is better than any other country. In his State of the Union addresses, Obama has proclaimed America “exceptional” and said the U.S. must “lead the world.” Clinton wrote in her book Hard Choices that “America remains the ‘indispensable nation.’”

It is this view that animates U.S. invasions, interventions, bombings and occupations of other countries. Under the pretense of protecting our national interest, the United States maintains some 800 military bases in other countries, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually. Often referred to as “enduring bases,” they enable us to mount attacks whenever and wherever our leaders see fit, whether with drones or manned aircraft.

Obama, who continues to prosecute the war in Afghanistan 15 years after it began, is poised to send ground troops back to Iraq and begin bombing Libya. His aggressive pursuit of regime change in Syria was met with pushback by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Seymour Hersh.

The President has bombed some seven countries with drones. But besides moving toward normalization of relations with Cuba, his signature foreign policy achievement is brokering the agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Although Clinton supports the nuclear deal, she talks tough about Iran. In September 2015, she provocatively declared, “I don’t believe Iran is our partner in this agreement. Iran is the subject of the agreement,” adding, “I will confront them across the board.” She said, “I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton promised to “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Clinton was, in effect, pledging to commit genocide against the Iranian people.

In an August 2014 Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton maintained, “There is no such thing as a right to enrich.” Apparently, she has not read the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives countries like Iran the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Article IV of the treaty says, “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.”

One country that does possess nuclear weapons is Israel, which refuses to ratify the NPT. Clinton has consistently and uncritically supported the policies of the Israeli government. In the Atlantic interview, she placed the blame for Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza squarely with the Palestinians.

From July 8 to Aug. 27, 2014, Israel killed over 2,100 Palestinians, 80 percent of them civilians including more than 400 children. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and seven Israeli civilians were killed.

When Goldberg asked Clinton whom she held responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children, she demurred, saying, “[I]t’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.” She blamed only the Palestinians, saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict.” Claiming “Israel has a right to defend itself,” she said, “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets.”

But Israel did not act in self-defense. In the first 10 days of June 2014, Israeli forces abducted 17 Palestinian teenage boys in the occupied West Bank. On June 12, three Israeli teenagers were abducted in the southern West Bank; Israel accused Hamas. After those three were found dead, a group of Israelis tortured and killed a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem.

On July 7, Israel launched a large military operation in the Gaza Strip, dubbed Operation Protective Edge. The Israel Defense Forces devastated Gaza. For 51 days, Israel bombarded Gaza with more than 6,000 airstrikes.

The United Nations Human Rights Council subsequently convened an independent, international commission of inquiry, which concluded that Israel, and to a lesser extent Palestinian armed groups, had likely committed violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, some constituting war crimes. “The scale of the devastation was unprecedented” in Gaza, according to the commission.

Yet Clinton was puzzled by what she calls “this enormous international reaction against Israel,” adding, “This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.” She attributed the “enormous international reaction” to “a number of factors” but only mentioned anti-Semitism, never citing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands or its periodic massacres in Gaza.

Indeed, in January 2016, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council it was an “indisputable truth” that “Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process.” He noted that it was “human nature to react to occupation, which serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”

Clinton didn’t ponder why so many people around the world are participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Israeli occupation. Representatives of Palestinian civil society launched BDS in 2005, calling upon “international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel.”

In her November 2015 article titled “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu,” published in the Jewish newspaper Forward, Clinton vowed to continue to oppose BDS. “As secretary of state, I requested more assistance for Israel every year,” she boasted, adding that she opposed “the biased Goldstone report,” explained below.

After Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians (82 percent of whom were civilians) and 13 Israelis were killed, a U.N. Human Rights Council report by a commission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone concluded that “Disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy [by Israel].”

Israel responded to the report with threats and harassment against Goldstone, leading him to backtrack on one of the findings in the report that bears his name, namely, that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. But the other members of the commission stood fast on all of the report’s conclusions.

Clinton’s vote in favor of President George W. Bush’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq cost her the 2008 election. It also cost more than 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives. Yet Clinton cynically told corporate executives at a 2011 State Department roundtable on investment opportunities in Iraq, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.”

The same year, Clinton led the campaign for forcible regime change in Libya, despite opposition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Responding to the gruesome sodomizing of President Muammar Gaddafi with a bayonet, Clinton laughed and said, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Both the Iraq War and regime change in Libya paved the way for the rise of Islamic State and dangerous conflict in the Middle East. Obama is about to escalate his military involvement in Libya. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “The president has made clear that we have the authority to use military force.” The New York Times reports that the expanded campaign is “expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.”

The Obama administration is reportedly changing the rules of engagement to allow more civilian casualties in the “war” against Islamic State. A senior military official told The Daily Beast, “Now I think you’ll see a little more willingness to tolerate civilian casualties in the interest of making progress.” But the Geneva Conventions prohibit the disproportionate killing of civilians.

Clinton has promised to escalate the wars in Syria and Iraq, including a no-fly zone in Syria. Since Islamic State doesn’t have an air force, her no-fly zone is likely to capture Russian planes flying over Syria.

Talking tough on ABC’s “This Week,” Clinton declared, “We have to fight in the air, fight on the ground and fight them on the Internet.” She said nothing about diplomacy or an arms embargo to stop sending weapons that end up in the hands of Islamic State.

Although the corporate media fans the flames of fear about Islamic State, only 38 people in the United States have died in terror-related incidents since 9/11, according to Politifact.com. The “war on terror” has cost us more than $1.5 trillion, in addition to U.S. lives and those of untold numbers in other countries.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a President Hillary Clinton would continue our “perpetual war.” She would do everything in her power to ensure the robust survival of the American empire.

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Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary-general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” See www.marjoriecohn. Follow her on Twitter at @marjoriecohn. [This article first appeared on Truthdig[http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/want_endless_war_love_the_us_empire_hillary_clintons_your_choice_20160201]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34972-want-endless-war-love-the-us-empire-well-hillary-clintons-your-choice