US
Presidential Election 2016: The Battle of the Hawks
By Steven MacMillan
August 30, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "NEO"
-As the US presidential election fast approaches in
November, the greatest political spectacle of the
year is in full swing. Say what you want about the
US, but there is no other country that knows how to
put a show on in the same way as our American
friends. Trump vs. Clinton is the pay-per-view event
of 2016, and it will continue to dominate the media
headlines.
Yet many media outlets fail to ask
the most important and fundamental question
pertaining to the presidential contest: is the fight
rigged so that the establishment is the only winner?
Clinton is evidently controlled by the establishment
and will serve her masters loyally if installed into
the White House, although her deterioratinghealth
will be a worry for the puppet masters, as even
puppets need to be able to dance on strings when
needed. The real issue is whether or not Trump is
the establishment outsider he claims to be, and will
actually challenge the parallel government. Judging
by the
Wall Street connections of Trump’s
advisers
however, the elite seem to be in control of
both major candidates, with the election merely
serving as a political circus to distract the masses
from the bankrupt economy and the perennial foreign
wars.
Both Trump and
Clinton Supported the Libyan War
The more digging you do into Trump,
the more he seems to be just another flavour of the
establishment. By looking at Trump’s stances on two
previous wars, we can get an indication of what US
foreign policy will look like under Trump. Although
the real estate magnate has criticized both the wars
in Iraq and Libya after the fact, he did support
both imperial endeavours before they were launched.
In a September, 2002 interview with Howard Stern,
Trump was asked whether he would support a war in
Iraq, in which he
replied:
“Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first
time it was done correctly.” To be fair, this is
hardly the most belligerent comments you’ve ever
heard, but it is still disingenuous for Trump to
claim he was against the 2003 war.
What should really worry those who
are opposed to Western imperialism however, is the
position Trump took on the 2011
‘humanitarian’ intervention in Libya,
which led to the complete destruction of the
country. Despite criticizing Clinton for her pivotal
role in the war, Trump himself was a major
cheerleader of the intervention. In a video posted
on one of
Trump’s official YouTube channels from the 28th
of February, 2011, the reality TV star couldn’t be
more in favour of the war that caused such
widespread devastation:
“I can’t believe
what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is
killing thousands of people, nobody knows how
bad it is, and we’re sitting around – we have
soldiers all have the Middle East – and we’re
not bringing them in to stop this horrible
carnage… You talk about things that have
happened in history; this could be one of the
worst. Now we should go in, we should stop this
guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We
could do it surgically, stop him from doing it,
and save these lives… Ultimately, the people
will appreciate it; they’re going to end up
taking over the country eventually, and they
should pay us back.”
Trump
continues:
“But we
have to go in to save these lives; these people
are being slaughtered like animals. It’s
horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped.
We’re making decisions like trade embargoes –
what does this have to do with a trade embargo?
He’s [Qaddafi’s] killing people with machine
guns in the streets. We should do it on a
humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya
[and] knock this guy out very quickly, very
surgically, very effectively, and save the
lives. After it’s all done, we go to the
protestors who end up running the country… and
we should then say: by the way, from all of your
oil, we want reimbursement.”
Hillary the
Hawk
Out of the two candidates, Clinton is
clearly the number one pick of the establishment.
Clinton is
one of the most hawkish individuals in Washington,
and she has supported every US military venture in
recent decades. Clinton
has received over
$300,000 from war contractors in her
presidential bid so far, the second highest amount
(after Bernie Sanders) out of all the candidates who
initially ran for the White House.
There is not one thinking person on
earth that disputes Clinton’s hawkishness, as the
evidence is too insurmountable to challenge.
Apparently establishment academics
live in a world of their own however.
In an article published by Vox – and
republished by the
Brookings Institution and
European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) –
on the 8th of August, two establishment
academics engaged in the most absurd argument one
has read in a while. Written by
Jeremy Shapiro, a nonresident senior fellow in the
Project on International Order and Strategy and the
Center on the United States and Europe at the
Brookings Institution, and Richard Sokolsky, a
Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, the article was titled:
Why Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be a foreign policy
hawk as President.
Shapiro and
Sokolsky start by acknowledging that every human
being who has an IQ above single digits believes
Clinton is a hawk, and that US foreign policy will
be more aggressive under a Clinton administration.
They then progress to document that she has
supported countless wars and interventions in the
last two decades: including in the former
Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya and in
Syria. So far, so good. But then, with a
not-so-subtle flip of reality, they try to argue
that her hawkish history is not a good indication of
how she will behave if she becomes President,
claiming that Clinton will be more focused on
domestic policy rather than foreign affairs.
From this
article we can draw the following conclusion:
Clinton’s reputation is so tarnished, and her
warmongering so transparent, that the establishment
has to engage in total damage control to try and
keep her in the race. If Hillary wasn’t a woman, and
didn’t have the weight of the establishment behind
her, there would be absolutely no chance that she
could win in a fair vote, considering the array of
scandals she has been at
the centre
of. As Clinton has supported at least five
major wars and interventions over the past two
decades, there is no question that she would be
hawkish as Commander-in-Chief.
Although Hillary is (rightly)
lambasted for being a hawk, Trump should also be
criticized for supporting illegal and immoral wars
in the past. Trump’s brazen endorsement of military
intervention in Libya in 2011 should be a warning as
to the type of administration a Trump one would be.
The evidence indicates that
regardless of who is crowned the
champion in November, we can expect US foreign
policy to continue to be destructive and
belligerent.
Steven
MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher,
geopolitical analyst and editor of The
Analyst Report, especially |