American Exceptionalism Presents
an Election Made in Hell
By
William Blum
March 11,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- If the American presidential election winds up
with Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, and my
passport is confiscated, and I’m somehow FORCED to
choose one or the other, or I’m PAID to do so, paid
well … I would vote for Trump.
My main
concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy
is the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity,
and the environment. And when it comes to foreign
policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster. From
Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras the world is a
much worse place because of her; so much so that I’d
call her a war criminal who should be prosecuted.
And not much better can be expected on domestic
issues from this woman who was paid $675,000 by
Goldman Sachs – one of the most reactionary,
anti-social corporations in this sad world – for
four speeches and even more than that in political
donations in recent years. Add to that Hillary’s
willingness to serve for six years on the board of
Walmart while her husband was governor of Arkansas.
Can we expect to change corporate behavior by taking
their money?
The Los
Angeles Times ran an editorial the day after
the multiple primary elections of March 1 which
began: “Donald Trump is not fit to be president of
the United States,” and then declared: “The reality
is that Trump has no experience whatsoever in
government.”
When I need
to have my car fixed I look for a mechanic with
experience with my type of auto. When I have a
medical problem I prefer a doctor who specializes in
the part of my body that’s ill. But when it comes to
politicians, experience means nothing. The only
thing that counts is the person’s ideology. Who
would you sooner vote for, a person with 30 years in
Congress who doesn’t share your political and social
views at all, is even hostile to them, or someone
who has never held public office before but is an
ideological comrade on every important issue?
Clinton’s 12 years in high government positions
carries no weight with me.
The
Times continued about Trump: “He has shamefully
little knowledge of the issues facing the country
and the world.”
Again,
knowledge is trumped (no pun intended) by ideology.
As Secretary of State (January 2009-February 2013),
with great access to knowledge, Clinton played a key
role in the 2011 destruction of Libya’s modern and
secular welfare state, sending it crashing in utter
chaos into a failed state, leading to the widespread
dispersal throughout North African and Middle East
hotspots of the gigantic arsenal of weaponry that
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi had accumulated. Libya
is now a haven for terrorists, from al Qaeda to
ISIS, whereas Gaddafi had been a leading foe of
terrorists.
What good
did Secretary of State Clinton’s knowledge do? It
was enough for her to know that Gaddafi’s Libya, for
several reasons, would never be a properly obedient
client state of Washington. Thus it was that the
United States, along with NATO, bombed the people of
Libya almost daily for more than six months, giving
as an excuse that Gaddafi was about to invade
Benghazi, the Libyan center of his opponents, and so
the United States was thus saving the people of that
city from a massacre. The American people and the
American media of course swallowed this story,
though no convincing evidence of the alleged
impending massacre has ever been presented. (The
nearest thing to an official US government account
of the matter – a Congressional Research Service
report on events in Libya for the period – makes no
mention at all of the threatened massacre.)
The Western
intervention in Libya was one that the New York
Times said Clinton had “championed”, convincing
Obama in “what was arguably her moment of greatest
influence as secretary of state.”ť
All the
knowledge she was privy to did not keep her from
this disastrous mistake in Libya. And the same can
be said about her support of placing regime change
in Syria ahead of supporting the Syrian government
in its struggle against ISIS and other terrorist
groups. Even more disastrous was the 2003 US
invasion of Iraq which she as a senator supported.
Both policies were of course clear violations of
international law and the UN Charter.
Another
foreign-policy “success” of Mrs. Clinton, which her
swooning followers will ignore, the few that even
know about it, is the coup ousting the moderately
progressive Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in June, 2009.
A tale told many times in Latin America. The
downtrodden masses finally put into power a leader
committed to reversing the status quo, determined to
try to put an end to up to two centuries of
oppression … and before long the military overthrows
the democratically-elected government, while the
United States – if not the mastermind behind the
coup – does nothing to prevent it punish the coup
regime, as only the United States can punish;
meanwhile Washington officials pretend to be very
upset over this “affront to democracy”. (See Mark
Weisbrot’s “Top Ten Ways You Can Tell Which Side The
United States Government is On With Regard to the
Military Coup in Honduras”.)
In her 2014
memoir, “Hard Choices”, Clinton reveals just how
unconcerned she was about restoring Zelaya to his
rightful office: “In the subsequent days [after the
coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the
hemisphere … We strategized on a plan to restore
order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair
elections could be held quickly and legitimately,
which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”
The
question of Zelaya was anything but moot. Latin
American leaders, the United Nations General
Assembly, and other international bodies vehemently
demanded his immediate return to office. Washington,
however, quickly resumed normal diplomatic relations
with the new right-wing police state, and Honduras
has since become a major impetus for the child
migrants currently pouring into the United States.
The
headline from Time magazine’s report on
Honduras at the close of that year (December 3,
2009) summed it up as follows: “Obama’s Latin
America Policy Looks Like Bush’s”.
And Hillary
Clinton looks like a conservative. And has for many
years; going back to at least the 1980s, while the
wife of the Arkansas governor, when she strongly
supported the death-squad torturers known as the
Contras, who were the empire’s proxy army in
Nicaragua.
Then,
during the 2007 presidential primary, America’s
venerable conservative magazine, William Buckley’s
National Review, ran an editorial by Bruce
Bartlett. Bartlett was a policy adviser to President
Ronald Reagan, a treasury official under President
George H.W. Bush, and a fellow at two of the leading
conservative think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation
and the Cato Institute – You get the picture?
Bartlett tells his readers that it’s almost certain
that the Democrats will win the White House in 2008.
So what to do? Support the most conservative
Democrat. He writes: “To right-wingers willing to
look beneath what probably sounds to them like the
same identical views of the Democratic candidates,
it is pretty clear that Hillary Clinton is the most
conservative.”
During the
same primary we also heard from America’s leading
magazine for the corporate wealthy, Fortune,
with a cover featuring a picture of Mrs. Clinton and
the headline: “Business Loves Hillary”.
And what do
we have in 2016? Fully 116 members of the Republican
Party’s national security community, many of them
veterans of Bush administrations, have signed an
open letter threatening that, if Trump is nominated,
they will all desert, and some will defect – to
Hillary Clinton! “Hillary is the lesser evil, by a
large margin,” says Eliot Cohen of the Bush II State
Department. Cohen helped line up neocons to sign the
“Dump-Trump” manifesto. Another signer,
foreign-policy ultra-conservative author Robert
Kagan, declared: “The only choice will be to vote
for Hillary Clinton.”
The only
choice? What’s wrong with Bernie Sanders or Jill
Stein, the Green Party candidate? … Oh, I see, not
conservative enough.
And Mr.
Trump? Much more a critic of US foreign policy than
Hillary or Bernie. He speaks of Russia and Vladimir
Putin as positive forces and allies, and would be
much less likely to go to war against Moscow than
Clinton would. He declares that he would be
“evenhandedť” when it comes to resolving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as opposed to
Clinton’s boundless support of Israel). He’s opposed
to calling Senator John McCain a “hero”, because he
was captured. (What other politician would dare say
a thing like that?)
He calls
Iraq “a complete disaster”, condemning not only
George W. Bush but the neocons who surrounded him.
“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass
destruction and there were none. And they knew there
were none. There were no weapons of mass
destruction.” He even questions the idea that “Bush
kept us safe”, and adds that “Whether you like
Saddam or not, he used to kill terrorists.”
Yes, he’s
personally obnoxious. I’d have a very hard time
being his friend. Who cares?
CIA motto: “Proudly overthrowing
the Cuban government since 1959.”
Now what?
Did you think that the United States had finally
grown up and come to the realization that they could
in fact share the same hemisphere as the people of
Cuba, accepting Cuban society as unquestioningly as
they do that of Canada? The Washington Post
(February 18) reported: “In recent weeks,
administration officials have made it clear Obama
would travel to Cuba only if its government made
additional concessions in the areas of human rights,
Internet access and market liberalization.”
Imagine if
Cuba insisted that the United States make
“concessions in the area of human rights”; this
could mean the United States pledging to not repeat
anything like the following:
Invading
Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs.
Invading
Grenada in 1983 and killing 84 Cubans, mainly
construction workers.
Blowing up
a passenger plane full of Cubans in 1976. (In 1983,
the city of Miami held a day in honor of Orlando
Bosch, one of the two masterminds behind this awful
act; the other perpetrator, Luis Posada, was given
lifetime protection in the same city.)
Giving
Cuban exiles, for their use, the virus which causes
African swine fever, forcing the Cuban government to
slaughter 500,000 pigs.
Infecting
Cuban turkeys with a virus which produces the fatal
Newcastle disease, resulting in the deaths of 8,000
turkeys.
In 1981 an
epidemic of dengue hemorrhagic fever swept the
island, the first major epidemic of DHF ever in the
Americas. The United States had long been
experimenting with using dengue fever as a weapon.
Cuba asked the United States for a pesticide to
eradicate the mosquito involved but were not given
it. Over 300,000 cases were reported in Cuba with
158 fatalities.
These are
but three examples of decades-long CIA chemical and
biological warfare (CBW) against Cuba.
We must keep
in mind that food is a human right (although the
United States has repeatedly denied this.
Washington
maintained a blockade of goods and money entering
Cuba that is still going strong, a blockade that
President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy
Berger, in 1997 called “the most pervasive sanctions
ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind”.
Attempted
to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro on
numerous occasions, not only in Cuba, but in Panama,
Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
In one
scheme after another in recent years, Washington’s
Agency for International Development (AID)
endeavored to cause dissension in Cuba and/or stir
up rebellion, the ultimate goal being regime change.
In 1999 a
Cuban lawsuit demanded $181.1 billion in US
compensation for death and injury suffered by Cuban
citizens in four decades “war” by Washington against
Cuba. Cuba asked for $30 million in direct
compensation for each of the 3,478 people it said
were killed by US actions and $15 million each for
the 2,099 injured. It also asked for $10 million
each for the people killed, and $5 million each for
the injured, to repay Cuban society for the costs it
has had to assume on their behalf.
Needless to
say, the United States has not paid a penny of this.
One of the
most common Yankee criticisms of the state of human
rights in Cuba has been the arrest of dissidents
(although the great majority are quickly released).
But many thousands of anti-war and other protesters
have been arrested in the United States in recent
years, as in every period in American history.
During the Occupy Movement, which began in 2011,
more than 7,000 people were arrested in about the
first year, many were beaten by police and
mistreated while in custody, their street displays
and libraries smashed to pieces.
; the Occupy
movement continued until 2014; thus, the figure of
7,000 is an understatement.)
Moreover,
it must be kept in mind that whatever restrictions
on civil liberties there may be in Cuba exist within
a particular context: The most powerful nation in
the history of the world is just 90 miles away and
is sworn – vehemently and repeatedly sworn – to
overthrowing the Cuban government. If the United
States was simply and sincerely concerned with
making Cuba a less restrictive society, Washington’s
policy would be clear cut:
- Call
off the wolves – the CIA wolves, the AID wolves,
the doctor-stealer wolves, the
baseball-player-stealer wolves.
-
Publicly and sincerely (if American leaders
still remember what this word means) renounce
their use of CBW and assassinations. And
apologize.
- Cease
the unceasing hypocritical propaganda – about
elections, for example. (Yes, it’s true that
Cuban elections never feature a Donald Trump or
a Hillary Clinton, nor ten billion dollars, nor
24 hours of campaign ads, but is that any reason
to write them off?)
- Pay
compensation – a lot of it.
-
Sine qua non
– end the God-awful blockade.
Throughout
the period of the Cuban revolution, 1959 to the
present, Latin America has witnessed a terrible
parade of human rights violations – systematic,
routine torture; legions of “disappeared” people;
government-supported death squads picking off
selected individuals; massacres en masse of
peasants, students and other groups. The worst
perpetrators of these acts during this period have
been the military and associated paramilitary squads
of El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile,
Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Haiti and Honduras.
However, not even Cuba’s worst enemies have made
serious charges against the Havana government for
any of such violations; and if one further considers
education and health care, “both of which,”ť said
President Bill Clinton, “work better [in Cuba] than
most other countries”
, and both of
which are guaranteed by the United Nations
“Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and the
“European Convention for the Protection of Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms”, then it would
appear that during the more-than-half century of its
revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best
human-rights records in all of Latin America.
But never
good enough for American leaders to ever touch upon
in any way; the Bill Clinton quote being a rare
exception indeed. It’s a tough decision to normalize
relations with a country whose police force murders
its own innocent civilians on almost a daily basis.
But Cuba needs to do it. Maybe they can civilize the
Americans a bit, or at least remind them that for
more than a century they have been the leading
torturers of the world.
William
Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning
his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service
Officer, because of his opposition to what the
United States was doing in Vietnam.
Mr. Blum
has been a freelance journalist in the United
States, Europe and South America. His stay in Chile
in 1972-3, writing about the Allende government’s
“socialist experiment” and its tragic overthrow in a
CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal
involvement and an even more heightened interest in
what his government was doing in various parts of
the world.
In the
mid-1970’s, he worked in London with former CIA
officer Philip Agee and his associates on their
project of exposing CIA personnel and their
misdeeds.
His book
on U.S. foreign policy,
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II, first published in
1995 and updated since, has received international
acclaim. Noam Chomsky called it “far and away the
best book on the topic.”
Notes
williamblum.org
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