If the Republican candidates are collectively criminally insane this woman is a criminal of the first order.
Hillary
Is the Candidate of the War Machine
Jeffrey
Sachs
the
4th Estate,
16
February, 2016
There’s
no doubt that Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street. Even more
dangerous, though, is that she is the candidate of the
military-industrial complex.
The idea that she is bad on the
corporate issues but good on national security has it wrong. Her
so-called foreign policy “experience” has been to support every
war demanded by the US deep security state run by the military and
the CIA.
Hillary
and Bill Clinton’s close relations with Wall Street helped to stoke
two financial bubbles (1999-2000 and 2005-8) and the Great Recession
that followed Lehman’s collapse. In the 1990s they pushed financial
deregulation for their campaign backers that in turn let loose the
worst demons of financial manipulation, toxic assets, financial
fraud, and eventually collapse. In the process they won elections and
got mighty rich.
Yet
Hillary’s connections with the military-industrial complex are also
alarming. It is often believed that the Republicans are the neocons
and the Democrats act as restraints on the warmongering. This is not
correct. Both parties are divided between neocon hawks and cautious
realists who don’t want the US in unending war. Hillary is a
staunch neocon whose record of favoring American war adventures
explains much of our current security danger.
Just
as the last Clinton presidency set the stage for financial collapse,
it also set the stage for unending war. On October 31, 1998 President
Clinton signed the Iraq
Liberation Act that
made it official US policy to support “regime change” in Iraq.
It
should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to
remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to
promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that
regime.
Thus
were laid the foundations for the Iraq War in 2003.
Of
course, by 2003, Hillary was a Senator and a staunch supporter of the
Iraq War, which has cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of
lives, and done more to create ISIS and Middle East instability than
any other single decision of modern foreign policy. In defending her
vote, Hillary parroted the phony propaganda of the CIA:
“In
the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show
that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological
weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear
program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists,
including Al Qaeda members… ”
After
the Iraq Liberation Act came the 1999 Kosovo War, in which Bill
Clinton called in NATO to bomb Belgrade, in the heart of Europe, and
unleashing another decade of unrest in the Balkans. Hillary,
traveling in Africa, called Bill: “I urged him to bomb,” she told
reporter Lucinda Frank.
Hillary’s
record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and
disastrous, of modern US history. Some experience. Hilary was a
staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at
every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of
violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters
loom largest: Libya and Syria.
Hillary
has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi,
but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO
bombing is the far graver disaster. Hillary strongly promoted
NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of
international law but counter to the most basic good judgment. After
the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil war while the
paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread
west across the African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster
has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and
fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, Hillary
found it hilarious to
declare of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”
Perhaps
the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been
Hillary’s relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria.
Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change
to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely
successful. In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her
declaration Assad must “get
out of the way,” backed
bysecret
CIA operations.
Five
years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war,
and no place poses a great threat to US security. More than 10
million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the
Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece,
Turkey, and the European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret
CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum,
and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks.
The
list of her incompetence and warmongering goes on. Hillary’s
support at every turn for NATO expansion, including even into Ukraine
and Georgia against all common sense, was a trip wire that violated
the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in 1991 and that led to
Russia’s violent counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine. As
Senator in 2008, Hilary co-sponsored 2008-SR439,
to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. As Secretary of State, she
then presided over the restart of the Cold War with Russia.
It
is hard to know the roots of this record of disaster. Is it
chronically bad judgment? Is it her preternatural faith in the lying
machine of the CIA? Is it a repeated attempt to show that as a
Democrat she would be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to
satisfy her hardline campaign financiers? Who knows? Maybe it’s all
of the above. But whatever the reasons, hers is a record of disaster.
Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having
stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia
and that threatens US security.
Follow
Jeffrey Sachs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JeffDSachs
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