A Clinton
Family Value: ‘Humanitarian’ War
The transformation of the Democratic Party from
the relative “peace party” to a belligerent “war
party” occurred during Bill Clinton’s presidency and
is likely to resume if Hillary Clinton is elected,
writes James W Carden.
By James W Carden
August 23,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"
- The current debate over the future of U.S. foreign
policy is largely over whether the U.S. should
continue its self-anointed role as the policeman of
the world, or whether it might be wise for the next
administration to put, in the words of Donald J.
Trump, “America First.”
On the
other hand, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly called
for a more active U.S. foreign policy. The 2016
election is shaping up to be, among other things, a
battle between the inarticulate isolationism of
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s liberal
interventionism. Hers is an approach which came into
vogue during the administration of her husband.
During the
1992 campaign, Bill Clinton sought to differentiate
himself from President George H.W. Bush by sounding
“tough” on foreign policy. At the time, Clinton
declared that, unlike Bush, he would “not coddle
dictators from Baghdad to Beijing.”
Once in
office Clinton departed from policies of his
predecessor, whose foreign policy was steered by
“realists” such as national security adviser Brent
Scowcroft and Secretary of State James A. Baker.
Baker’s judgment that the war in the Balkans did not
merit American intervention – “we don’t,” said
Baker, “have a dog in this fight,” was emblematic of
the administration’s approach, which, despite
launching interventions in Iraq and Panama, was for
the most part, a cautious one.
Bush
outraged New York Times columnist William
Safire when he warned of the danger that nationalism
poses to regional stability. Speaking in Kiev in
1991, Bush promised that “we will not meddle in your
internal affairs.”
“Some
people,” he continued, “have urged the United States
to choose between supporting President Gorbachev and
supporting independence-minded leaders throughout
the U.S.S.R. I consider this a false choice.”
Such was
Bush’s wariness over riling Russia that, according
to the historian Mary Elise Sarotte, Secretary of
State Baker (along with German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher) “repeatedly affirmed” to the Soviets “that
NATO would not move eastward at all.”
Bush
decided that it was best not to rub Russia’s
diminished fortunes in its face. Not so President
Clinton, who vowed “not let the Iron Curtain be
replaced with a veil of indifference.” The Clinton
team ignored the advice of Senators Bill Bradley,
Sam Nunn and Gary Hart and the former Ambassador to
the USSR, Jack Matlock, who all urged
the administration to reconsider its policy
of NATO expansion. Needless to say, predictions that
NATO expansion would have dire consequences for
U.S.-Russia relations have come to fruition.
Grandiose Ambitions
Speaking
before the U.N. General Assembly in September 1993,
President Clinton declared that
the U.S. had “the chance to expand the reach of
democracy and economic progress across the whole of
Europe and to the far reaches of the world.”
At the
time, the stars seemed aligned for such a pursuit.
In Foreign Affairs, neoconservative writer
Charles Krauthammer declared that the end of the
Cold War was America’s “unipolar” moment. The
pursuit of American global hegemony was not,
according to Krauthammer, some “Wilsonian fantasy.”
It was, rather, “a matter of sheerest prudence.”
During
Clinton’s tenure, the U.S. military was dispatched
on ostensibly humanitarian grounds in Somalia
(1993), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), and Kosovo
(1999). Clinton also directed airstrikes on Sudan in
what was said to be an attempt on Osama bin Laden’s
life.
Clinton
bombed Iraq (1998) over its violations of the NATO
enforced no-fly zones. That same year, Clinton
signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law which
stipulated that “It should be the policy of the
United States to support efforts to remove the
regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”
In some
ways the now deeply embedded belief in the efficacy
and rightness of humanitarian intervention dates
back to NATO’s intervention in Bosnia in 1995. The
success of the Dayton Accords seemed to cement the
idea that America was, after all, the indispensable
nation in the minds of the Clinton foreign policy
team.
The
historian David P. Calleo has observed that while
the Clinton administration “had always sported a
low-grade Wilsonian rhetoric that implied hegemonic
ambitions,” it was only after Dayton that “the
policy began to imitate the rhetoric.”
The Clinton
administration’s second intervention in the Balkans
in 1999, set the template for what George W. Bush
attempted in Iraq, and, later, what Barack Obama
attempted in Libya. Once again, in the absence of
U.N. sanction, Clinton launched a war under
humanitarian pretexts. The 77-day aerial bombardment
of Serbia carried out by NATO was ostensibly
undertaken to prevent what was said to be the
looming wholesale slaughter of Albanian Kosovars by
Serbian forces.
The
intervention in Kosovo not only riled the Russians,
it also upset American allies. Shortly before the
commencement of hostilities in Kosovo, France’s
Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine declared that the
United States was not only a superpower, but a
“hyper-power.” According to Vedrine, the question of
the American hyper-power was “at the center of the
world’s current problems.”
Kosovo set
a pattern that has held in subsequent interventions
in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Advertised (all, or, in
part) as interventions on behalf of suffering
Muslims, they invariably end up strengthening the
hand of those who are declared enemies of the U.S.:
Sunni Islamic extremists.
By the end
of Bill Clinton’s tenure, the prudence exhibited by
George H.W. Bush had long since vanished. Given her
record, should Hillary Clinton win in November, the
elder Bush’s foreign policy “realism” will have
little chance of reappearing.
[For more
on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Yes,
Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon.”]
James W Carden
is a contributing writer for The Nation and editor
of The American Committee for East-West Accord’s
eastwestaccord.com. He previously served as an
advisor on Russia to the Special Representative for
Global Inter-governmental Affairs at the US State
Department. |