Clinton and Bush: Hawk Versus Hawk
By Matt Carr
April 17, 2015 "ICH"
- If you take seriously the premise that US military power is a force for
international stability and global good, then a number of events over the last
two weeks ought to give pause for thought. In Kosovo, nearly 16 years after
NATO bombed Yugoslavia,
UNCHR reported that 10,000 people had filed for asylum in Hungary in a
single month, and as many as 20,000 Kosovars are leaving the country each month
to escape poverty, corruption and unemployment.In
Libya, the executions of Coptic Christians carried out by ISIL raise the
prospect of the disintegration of Libya into a ‘Somalia on the Mediterranean’.
In Afghanistan the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMA)
announced that civilian casualties last year reached a new record. That’s
on top of the still ongoing implosion of Iraq, and Syria, and Ukraine, where the
US has pursued less visible ‘regime change’ policies with no less catastrophic
results.
In a sane and healthy democracy this legacy of civil war,
state collapse, chaos and violence ought at the very least to raise an urgent
debate about the strategic viability of militarism as a foreign policy
instrument.
But there is little evidence of any such criticism and
self-analysis in the two frontrunners for next year’s presidential elections.
Astonishingly – and depressingly – America is facing the prospect of a contest
between members of the two families that governed America from 1989 to 2009, and
which also presided over some of the disasters we are now witnessing.
Let’s start with Hilary Clinton, who was
last year voted the ‘most admired woman in America’ for the thirteenth year
in a row, for reasons which are certainly not clear to me at least. After all,
we are talking about a woman who lied – sorry ‘misspoke’ – about coming under
sniper fire in Tuzla in order to boost her presidential prospects. Clinton
voted to authorize the Iraq War, and she was a strong supporter of the bombing
of Libya – even to the point of chortling happily when she heard that Gaddafi
had been sodomized with a knife and shot dead.
You don’t have to like Gaddafi to observe that such behavior
is a little…undignified, and more appropriate for a sociopath than a
stateswoman. But Clinton is tough and wants American to know how tough she can
be. She is a big fan of drones, which
she says have taken ‘dozens of senior terrorists off the battlefield.’ She
promised back in 2008 that America would
‘totally obliterate’ Iran if it carried out a nuclear strike on Israel –
something that there is no evidence Iran has any capability to do or intention
of doing.
And even as Libya was visibly falling apart she still wanted
to bomb Syria. In an
interview with one of the most well-known Zionist hawk journalists Jeffrey
Goldberg she repeated the canard that the rise of ISIS was due to Obama’s
failure to support ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels. She also defended Netanyahu over
last year’s massacre in Gaza, claiming that ‘Israel did what it had to do to
respond to the rockets’ and blaming the ‘intense international focus’ on the war
on anti-Semitism and Hamas’s ‘stage-managing’ of the conflict.
Asked if Israel had done enough to prevent the deaths of
children and other innocent people she waffled ‘ that democratic nations have
demonstrably better values in a conflict position’ and suggested that ‘ the
anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and the children
and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the
truth.’
It is, if you have no interest in getting to it in the first
place. Clinton distanced herself from Obama’s more cautious foreign policy,
declaring that ‘Great nations need organizing principles, and “not doing stupid
stuff” is not an organizing principle.’ She appeared to delineate a vague new
version of Cold War ‘containment’ policy towards a jihadist threat that she
compared to communism and fascism, and declared her ‘organizing principle’ as
‘peace, progress and prosperity.’
So what’s the difference between her and her possible
opponent? Not too much really. Yesterday the ghastly Jeb Bush
declared his foreign policy aspirations to the Chicago Council of Global
Affairs and they are pretty much what you might expect from a man whose policy
team is filled with the dregs of his brother’s advisors including men like Paul
Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, who in a sane world would never be allowed any way
near public office again.
Bush declared himself to be ‘his own man’ and attempted to
distance himself from the ‘mistakes’ that took place on his sibling’s watch.
But he then repeated the same lie that his brother – and Tony Blair – has told
so many times – that ‘ Using the intelligence capability that everybody embraced
about weapons of mass destruction was not — turns out not to be accurate.’
The ‘mistakes’ were only due to the failure to provide
security after ‘taking out’ Saddam Hussein. Apart from that, all good,
especially the ‘surge’ which Bush calls “one of the most heroic acts of courage
politically’ were it not for the fact that Obama ruined it – by observing the
terms of the status of forces agreement that Bush had established – thereby
creating ‘ a void’ that gave rise to ISIS.
Well actually there was no void. There was a massive,
well-trained and well-equipped Iraqi army whose officers were so corrupt that
they didn’t want to fight. But never mind, let’s continue the dream. Where
his brother wanted to ‘smoke out’ Osama bin Laden, Bush wants to ‘take out’
ISIS. Like Clinton, he was at pains to declare his undying love of Israel. He
wants a
new sanctions bill to prevent Iran implementing a nuclear enrichment program
that would ‘endanger Israel.’
Like Clinton, he wants foreign policy with a principle, which
he calls ‘liberty democracy’, which should be ‘ backed up by the greatest
military force in the world’ and supported by big increases in defense spending.
Nowhere in either of these two is there the slightest evidence
of critical thinking, or any awareness that the policies they advocate might
actually have produced even worse outcomes than the problems they were
supposedly intended to solve. One of the reasons why Obama won the presidency
and wrecked Clinton’s aspirations was because he was able to give the illusion
of a radical departure from the rabid militarism of his predecessors.
Neither Clinton nor Bush are offering any such illusions. And
their endorsement of militarism isn’t just a personal quirk, the results of too
much political inbreeding through all these years of dynastic continuity. Its
worse than that. The hawk v. hawk competition that now beckons is a testament
to an imperial consensus in Washington that is impervious to any evidence that
contradicts its own assumptions, and which continues to believe like Madeleine
Albright, that America is the ‘indispensable nation’, when it really isn’t.
Matt Carr is a writer and
journalist, living in Derbyshire England. He is the author of four published
books,
My Father’s House
(Penguin 1997),
The Infernal Machine: a History of
Terrorism (New Press 2007),
recently republished in the UK as The Infernal Machine: an
Alternative History of Terrorism
(Hurst & Co 2011), Blood and Faith: the Purging of Muslim
Spain (New Press 2009, Hurst
2010), and Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent
(New Press/Hurst 2012). My latest book
Sherman’s Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way
of War (New Press 2015) has just
been published in the US. Matt blogs at
http://infernalmachine.co.uk