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Hillary Clinton is a War Monger
In reply to the Obama is a war monger thread...
While much attention has been given to Senator Hillary Clinton's support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, her foreign policy record regarding other international conflicts and her apparent eagerness to accept the use of force appears to indicate that her fateful vote authorizing the invasion and
her subsequent support for the occupation and counter-insurgency war was no aberration.
Indeed, there's every indication that, as president, her foreign policy agenda would closely parallel that of the Bush administration. Despite efforts by some conservative Republicans to portray her as being on the left wing of the Democratic Party, in reality her foreign policy positions bear a far closer resemblance to those of Ronald Reagan than they do of George McGovern.
For example, rather than challenge President George W. Bush's dramatic increases in military spending, Senator Clinton argues that they are not enough and the United States needs to spend even more in subsequent years. At the end of the Cold War, many Democrats were claiming that the American public would be able to benefit from a "peace dividend" resulting from dramatically-reduced military spending following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Clinton, however, has called for dramatic increases in the military budget, even though the United States, despite being surrounded by two oceans and weak friendly neighbors, already spends as much on its military as all the rest of the world combined.
Her presidential campaign has received far more money from defense contractors than any other candidate - Democrat or Republican - and her close ties to the defense industry has led the Village Voice to refer to her as "Mama Warbucks." She has
even fought the Bush administration in restoring funding for some of the very few weapons systems the Bush administration has sought to cut in recent years. Pentagon officials and defense contractors have given Senator Clinton high marks for listening to their concerns, promoting their products and leveraging her ties to the Pentagon,
comparing her favorably to the hawkish former
Washington Senator "Scoop" Jackson and other pro-military Democrats of earlier eras.
Clinton has also demonstrated a marked preference for military confrontation over negotiation. In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, she called for a "tough-minded, muscular foreign and defense policy." Similarly, when her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness
to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being "irresponsible and frankly naive."
Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband's inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to
resolve the Kosovo crisis.
Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians' nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo
Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy's book Hillary's Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully
pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.
She has also defended the 1998 U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan which had provided that impoverished African country with more than half of its antibiotics and vaccines, falsely claiming it was a chemical weapons factory controlled by Osama bin Laden.
Immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Clinton went well beyond the broad consensus that the United States should go after al-Qaeda cells and their leadership to declare that any country providing any "aid and comfort" to al-Qaeda "will now face the wrath of our country." When Bush echoed these words the following week in his nationally-televised speech, she declared "I'll stand behind Bush for a long time to come."
She certainly did. Clinton voted to authorize the president with wide-ranging authority to attack Afghanistan and was a strong supporter of the bombing campaign against that country, which resulted in more civilian deaths than the 9/11 attacks against the United States that had prompted them.
Despite recent pleas by the democratically elected Afghan president Harmid Karzai that the ongoing U.S. bombing and the overemphasis on aggressive counter-insurgency operations was harming efforts to deal with the resurgence of violence by the Taliban and other radical groups, Clinton argues that our "overriding immediate objective of our foreign policy" toward Afghanistan "must be to significantly step up our military engagement."
Particularly disturbing has been Senator Clinton's attitudes regarding nuclear issues. For example, when Senator Obama noted in August that the use of nuclear weapons -traditionally seen as a deterrent against other nuclear states - was not appropriate for use against terrorists, Clinton rebuked
his logic by claiming that "I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or nonuse of nuclear weapons."
Senator Clinton has also shown little regard for the danger from the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries,
opposing the enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions challenging the nuclear weapons programs of such U.S allies as Israel, Pakistan and India. Not only does
she support unconditional military aid - including nuclear-capable missiles and jet fighters - to these countries, she even voted to end restrictions on U.S. nuclear cooperation with countries that violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
She has a very different attitude, however, regarding even the possibility of a country the United States does not support
obtaining nuclear weapons some time in the future. For example, Senator Clinton insists that the prospect of Iran joining its three Southwest Asian neighbors in developing
nuclear weapons "must be unacceptable to the entire world" since challenging the nuclear monopoly of the United States and its allies would somehow "shake the foundation of global security to its very core."
She refuses to support the proposed nuclear weapons-free zone for the Middle East, as called for in UN Security Council resolution 687, nor does she support a no-first use
nuclear policy, both of which could help resolve the nuclear standoff. Indeed, she has refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against such non-nuclear countries as Iran, even though such unilateral use of nuclear weapons directly contradicts the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the same
treaty she claims the United States must unilaterally and rigorously enforce when it involves Iran and other countries our government doesn't like.
Senator Clinton also criticized the Bush administration's decision to include China, Japan and South Korea in talks regarding North Korea's nuclear program and to allow
France, Britain and Germany to play a major role in negotiations with Iran, claiming that instead of taking "leadership to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists … we have outsourced over
the last five years our policies." In essence, as president, Hillary Clinton would be more unilateralist and less prone to work with other nations than the Bush administration
on such critical issues as non-proliferation.
In Latin America, Senator Clinton argues that the Bush administration should take a more aggressive stance against the rise of left-leaning governments in the hemisphere.
Regarding Israel, Senator Clinton has taken a consistently right-wing position, undermining the efforts of Israeli and Palestinian moderates seeking a just peace. She’s spoken freely about military action against Syria and Iran, often repeating Bush administration talking points that have been proven false. I could go on and on, but I’m nearly out of space.
Hillary Clinton is no progressive. She’s a war mongering cash cow for the military industrial complex. Don’t let her fool you.
While much attention has been given to Senator Hillary Clinton's support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, her foreign policy record regarding other international conflicts and her apparent eagerness to accept the use of force appears to indicate that her fateful vote authorizing the invasion and
her subsequent support for the occupation and counter-insurgency war was no aberration.
Indeed, there's every indication that, as president, her foreign policy agenda would closely parallel that of the Bush administration. Despite efforts by some conservative Republicans to portray her as being on the left wing of the Democratic Party, in reality her foreign policy positions bear a far closer resemblance to those of Ronald Reagan than they do of George McGovern.
For example, rather than challenge President George W. Bush's dramatic increases in military spending, Senator Clinton argues that they are not enough and the United States needs to spend even more in subsequent years. At the end of the Cold War, many Democrats were claiming that the American public would be able to benefit from a "peace dividend" resulting from dramatically-reduced military spending following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Clinton, however, has called for dramatic increases in the military budget, even though the United States, despite being surrounded by two oceans and weak friendly neighbors, already spends as much on its military as all the rest of the world combined.
Her presidential campaign has received far more money from defense contractors than any other candidate - Democrat or Republican - and her close ties to the defense industry has led the Village Voice to refer to her as "Mama Warbucks." She has
even fought the Bush administration in restoring funding for some of the very few weapons systems the Bush administration has sought to cut in recent years. Pentagon officials and defense contractors have given Senator Clinton high marks for listening to their concerns, promoting their products and leveraging her ties to the Pentagon,
comparing her favorably to the hawkish former
Washington Senator "Scoop" Jackson and other pro-military Democrats of earlier eras.
Clinton has also demonstrated a marked preference for military confrontation over negotiation. In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, she called for a "tough-minded, muscular foreign and defense policy." Similarly, when her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness
to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being "irresponsible and frankly naive."
Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband's inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to
resolve the Kosovo crisis.
Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians' nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo
Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy's book Hillary's Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully
pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.
She has also defended the 1998 U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan which had provided that impoverished African country with more than half of its antibiotics and vaccines, falsely claiming it was a chemical weapons factory controlled by Osama bin Laden.
Immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Clinton went well beyond the broad consensus that the United States should go after al-Qaeda cells and their leadership to declare that any country providing any "aid and comfort" to al-Qaeda "will now face the wrath of our country." When Bush echoed these words the following week in his nationally-televised speech, she declared "I'll stand behind Bush for a long time to come."
She certainly did. Clinton voted to authorize the president with wide-ranging authority to attack Afghanistan and was a strong supporter of the bombing campaign against that country, which resulted in more civilian deaths than the 9/11 attacks against the United States that had prompted them.
Despite recent pleas by the democratically elected Afghan president Harmid Karzai that the ongoing U.S. bombing and the overemphasis on aggressive counter-insurgency operations was harming efforts to deal with the resurgence of violence by the Taliban and other radical groups, Clinton argues that our "overriding immediate objective of our foreign policy" toward Afghanistan "must be to significantly step up our military engagement."
Particularly disturbing has been Senator Clinton's attitudes regarding nuclear issues. For example, when Senator Obama noted in August that the use of nuclear weapons -traditionally seen as a deterrent against other nuclear states - was not appropriate for use against terrorists, Clinton rebuked
his logic by claiming that "I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or nonuse of nuclear weapons."
Senator Clinton has also shown little regard for the danger from the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries,
opposing the enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions challenging the nuclear weapons programs of such U.S allies as Israel, Pakistan and India. Not only does
she support unconditional military aid - including nuclear-capable missiles and jet fighters - to these countries, she even voted to end restrictions on U.S. nuclear cooperation with countries that violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
She has a very different attitude, however, regarding even the possibility of a country the United States does not support
obtaining nuclear weapons some time in the future. For example, Senator Clinton insists that the prospect of Iran joining its three Southwest Asian neighbors in developing
nuclear weapons "must be unacceptable to the entire world" since challenging the nuclear monopoly of the United States and its allies would somehow "shake the foundation of global security to its very core."
She refuses to support the proposed nuclear weapons-free zone for the Middle East, as called for in UN Security Council resolution 687, nor does she support a no-first use
nuclear policy, both of which could help resolve the nuclear standoff. Indeed, she has refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against such non-nuclear countries as Iran, even though such unilateral use of nuclear weapons directly contradicts the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the same
treaty she claims the United States must unilaterally and rigorously enforce when it involves Iran and other countries our government doesn't like.
Senator Clinton also criticized the Bush administration's decision to include China, Japan and South Korea in talks regarding North Korea's nuclear program and to allow
France, Britain and Germany to play a major role in negotiations with Iran, claiming that instead of taking "leadership to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists … we have outsourced over
the last five years our policies." In essence, as president, Hillary Clinton would be more unilateralist and less prone to work with other nations than the Bush administration
on such critical issues as non-proliferation.
In Latin America, Senator Clinton argues that the Bush administration should take a more aggressive stance against the rise of left-leaning governments in the hemisphere.
Regarding Israel, Senator Clinton has taken a consistently right-wing position, undermining the efforts of Israeli and Palestinian moderates seeking a just peace. She’s spoken freely about military action against Syria and Iran, often repeating Bush administration talking points that have been proven false. I could go on and on, but I’m nearly out of space.
Hillary Clinton is no progressive. She’s a war mongering cash cow for the military industrial complex. Don’t let her fool you.
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