Hillary
Clinton’s Support for the Iraq War Was No Fluke
Hillary Clinton has run to the right of the
Obama administration on every major foreign
policy issue — and she’s left a trail of
devastation in her wake.
By Medea Benjamin
March 09, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "FPIF"
- In March 2003, just before the U.S.
invasion of Iraq, about 100 CODEPINK women
dressed in pink slips weaved in and out of
congressional offices demanding to meet with
representatives. Those representatives who
pledged to oppose going to war with Iraq were
given hugs and pink badges of courage; those
hell-bent on taking the United States to war
were given pink slips emblazoned with the words
“YOU’RE FIRED.”
When we
got to Hillary Clinton’s office, we sat down and
refused to leave until we got a meeting with the
New York senator. Within an hour, Clinton
appeared. “I like pink tulips around this time
of the year; they kind of remind ya that there
may be a spring,” she began, looking out at the
rows of women in pink. “Well, you guys look like
a big bunch of big tulips!”
It got
even more awkward after that.
Defending
the Iraq War
Having
just returned from Iraq, I relayed that the
weapons inspectors in Baghdad told us there was
no danger of weapons of mass destruction and
that the Iraqi women we met were terrified about
the pending war and desperate to stop it. “I
admire your willingness to speak out on behalf
of the women and children of Iraq,” Clinton
replied, “but there is a very easy way to
prevent anyone from being put into harm’s way
and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm and I
have absolutely no belief that he will.”
We
thought the easiest way to prevent harming
women, children and other living things in Iraq
was to stop a war of aggression, a war over
weapons of mass destruction that UN inspectors
on the ground couldn’t find — which were, in
fact, never found, because they didn’t exist.
Clinton, however, was steadfast in her
commitment to war: She said it was our
responsibility to disarm Saddam Hussein, and
even defended George W. Bush’s unilateralism,
citing her husband’s go-it-alone intervention in
Kosovo.
Disgusted, CODEPINK cofounder Jodie Evans tore
off her pink slip and handed it to Clinton,
saying that her support for Bush’s invasion
would lead to the death of many innocent people.
Making the bogus connection between the
September 11, 2001, attacks and Saddam Hussein,
Clinton stormed out, saying, “I am the senator
from New York. I will never put my people’s
security at risk.”
But
that’s just what she did, by supporting the Iraq
war and draining our nation of over a trillion
dollars. That money could have been used for
supporting women and children here at home. It
could have been rerouted to the social programs
that have been systematically defunded over the
last few decades of Clinton’s own political
career. Not to mention the war ultimately
snuffed out the lives of thousands of U.S.
soldiers — for absolutely no just cause.
Intervening in Libya, Surging in Afghanistan
If
Clinton supported the Iraq war because she
thought it politically expedient, she came to
regret her stance when the war turned sour and
Senator Barack Obama surged forward as the
candidate opposed to that war during the
presidential race in 2008.
But
Clinton didn’t learn the main lesson from Iraq —
to seek non- violent ways to solve conflicts.
Indeed, when the Arab Spring came to Libya in
2010, Clinton was the Obama administration’s
most forceful advocate for toppling Muammar
Gaddafi. She even out-hawked Robert Gates, the
defense secretary first appointed by George W.
Bush, who was less than enthusiastic about going
to war. Gates was reluctant to get bogged down
in another Arab country, insisting that vital
U.S. interests were not at stake But Clinton
nevertheless favored intervention.
When
Libyan rebels carried out an extrajudicial
execution of their country’s former dictator,
Clinton’s response was sociopathic: “We came, we
saw, he died,” she laughed. That sent a message
that the United States would look the other way
at crimes committed by allies against its
official enemies.
In a
weird bit of rough justice, the political grief
Clinton has suffered over the September 2012
attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi
that killed four Americans might never have
occurred had Clinton not supported the U.S.
intervention in Libya’s civil war. While
Republicans have focused relentlessly on the
terrible deaths of the U.S. diplomats, the
larger disaster is the ensuing chaos that left
Libya without a functioning government, overrun
by feuding warlords and extremist militants. In
2015, the suffering of desperate refugees who
flee civil unrest — many of whom drown in the
Mediterranean Sea — is a direct consequence of
that disastrous operation.
Libya
was part of a pattern for Clinton.
On
Afghanistan, she advocated a repeat of the surge
in Iraq. When the top U.S. commander in Kabul,
General Stanley McChrystal, asked Obama for
40,000 more troops to fight the Taliban in
mid-2009, several top officials — including Vice
President Joe Biden — objected, insisting that
the public had lost patience with a conflict
that had already dragged on too long. But
Clinton backed McChrystal and wound up favoring
even more surge troops than Defense Secretary
Gates did. Obama ultimately sent another 30,000
American soldiers to Afghanistan.
Clinton’s State Department also provided cover
for the expansion of the not-so-covert drone
wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Clinton’s top legal
adviser, Harold Koh, exploited his
pre-government reputation as an advocate for
human rights to declare in a 2010 speech that
the government had the right not only to detain
people without any charges at Guantanamo Bay,
but also to kill them with unmanned aerial
vehicles anywhere in the world.
Escalation
in Syria
When it
came to Syria, Obama’s top diplomat was a
forceful advocate for military intervention in
that nation’s civil war.
When
Obama threatened air strikes in 2013 to punish
the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, for
example, Clinton publicly supported him,
ignoring polls showing that more than 70 percent
of Americans opposed military action. She
described the planned U.S. attack on Syria as a “limited
strike to uphold a crucial global norm,”
although one of the clearest global norms under
the UN Charter is that a country should not
attack another country except in self-defense.
Clinton
advocated arming Syrian rebels long before the
Obama administration agreed to do so. In 2012,
she allied with CIA Director David Petraeus to
promote a U.S.-supplied-and-trained proxy army
in Syria. As a U.S. Army general, Petraeus spent
enormous amounts of money training Iraqi and
Afghan soldiers with little success, but that
did not deter him and Clinton from seeking a
similar project in Syria. Together, they
campaigned for more direct and aggressive U.S.
support for the rebels, a plan supported by
leading Republicans like
John McCain and
Lindsey Graham. But few in the White House
agreed, arguing that it would be difficult to
appropriately vet fighters and ensure that
weapons didn’t fall into the hands of
extremists.
Clinton
was disappointed when Obama rejected the
proposal, but a similar plan for the U.S. to
“vet and train moderate rebels” at a starting
cost of $500 million was later approved. Some of
the trained rebels were quickly routed and
captured; others, more concerned with toppling
Assad than fighting Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria (ISIS) defected to the al-Qaeda-affiliated
al-Nusra Front. In September 2015, the head of
U.S. Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, told
an incredulous Senate Armed Services Committee
that the $500 million effort to train Syrian
forces had resulted in a mere
four or five fighters actively battling
ISIS. Undeterred, Clinton said that as
commander-in-chief, she would dramatically
escalate the program.
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 has approved air strikes
against ISIS, it has resisted creating a no-fly
zone on the grounds that the effective
enforcement to prevent Assad’s planes from
flying would require large amounts of U.S.
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, her main rival for the
Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders has
warned that a unilateral U.S. no-fly zone in
Syria could “get us more deeply involved in that
horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending
U.S. entanglement in that region,” potentially
making a complex and dangerous situation in
Syria even worse.
Antagonizing Iran
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, Clinton warned that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
Enabling
Netanyahu
Meanwhile, Clinton has positioned herself as
more “pro-Israel” than President Obama.
She
vows to bring the two nations closer together,
promising to invite the right-wing Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the White
House within her first month in office. She has
distanced herself from Obama’s feud with
Netanyahu over the prime minister’s efforts to
derail the Iran nuclear deal and his comments
opposing the creation of a Palestinian state.
Referring to Obama’s policy toward Netanyahu,
Clinton said that such “tough love” is
counterproductive because it invites other
countries to delegitimize Israel. Clinton
promised the people of Israel that if she
were president, “you’ll never have to question
whether we’re with you. The United States will
always be with you.”
Clinton
has also voiced her opposition to the
Palestinian-led nonviolent campaign against the
Israeli government called BDS — standing for
boycott, divestment, and sanctions. In a letter
to her hardline pro-Israel 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.”
Missed
Opportunities
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 60th 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 that ended the fighting on the Korean
peninsula was supposed to be followed up a few
months later by a real peace treaty but never
was. Clinton could have used this occasion to
call for a peace treaty and a process of
reconciliation between the two Koreas. Instead
she characterized the decades-long U.S. military
presence in Korea as a great success — a
statement hard to reconcile with 60 years of
continuous hostilities.
Clinton
also failed miserably in her attempt to “reset”
the U.S. relationship with Russia. Since 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
State Department 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.
sfsdfsdf
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 war hawk 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.
This essay appears in False
Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton, forthcoming June
14. Medea
Benjamin is
the co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and
the human rights organization Global Exchange.
She is the author of eight books, including one
about Saudi Arabia coming out in a few months.