The Clintons Celebrated – But Likely Disastrous for the World
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 1 Aug 2016
Jan Oberg - Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research
27 Jul 2016 – Hillary Rodham Clinton was nominated last night by the Democratic Party as its candidate for the U.S. Presidency. She may well win on November 8.
What a tragedy for Western democracy that the leader of what is still called the free, democratic world cannot produce better candidates than Trump and Clinton through a disgustingly commercialized and corrupt political process where candidates like Jill Stein – did you ever hear of that candidate? – doesn’t have a chance because she cannot mobilize the funds.
As a European intellectual with a life-long commitment to peace and democracy, I find little reason to celebrate.
And why the total focus on a few individuals at the top but not the structures that will run them both, such as the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex (MIMAC); the cancer in many societies, including Russia, that President Eisenhower warned the world about in his farewell speech already in 1961?
How short the media memory! Hillary Clinton’s nomination celebrated all over the mainstream press as a victory for the party – preventing it from splitting – and for all women.
But how can people – women in particular – really believe in such genderism: that she will be a better president for the US and the world because she’s a woman? Hasn’t the world learnt anything from the inverse racism:that Obama would be a great president because he is black?
How blind the media to militarism, war and other violence: Not one media focuses on the Clinton’s well-documented fascination with violence and war.
It’s time to refresh the memory of the Clintons:
Bill Clinton’s record
From 1994 BC broke all promises made by his predecessors and other Western politician to Gorbachev about “not expanding NATO an inch”. He started out in Tblisi, Georgia. I happened to be there, spoke with the U.S. representative to the country and got a sense what was coming. Later too in Yugoslavia.
There is a straight line from that fatal arrogance to today’s Second Cold War in Europe, Ukraine having – predictably – to be the this-far-and-no-longer country of that mindless and reckless expansion that should never have happened.
BC’s interventionist record is also forgotten: He bombed in Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia – the latter much much worse from any point of view than the Russian annexation of Crimea. It was based on the fake Rambouillet “talks” between Serbs and Kosovo-Albanians, his public lies about there being an ethnic cleansing of all Albanians in Kosovo coming from Slobodan Milosevic whom he called a new Hitler.
No such plan was ever found – and I know a bit about it because I was a goodwill adviser both to three governments in Belgrade and to the non-violent Kosovo-Albanian leadership under Ibrahim Rugova.
It was Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who masterminded much of it and is on record for saying that it was politically justifiable that the sanctions on Iraq had killed 500.000 innocent people. And they continued.
And she, having survived as a refugee child in Belgrade, Serbia, with her Czechoslovakian family during the Second World War and spoke Serbian is on record for hatred of the Serb people.
Conveniently, the West has forgotten it all. BC is such a charming man (who just told us at the reality show-like democratic convention how much he loves his wife).
His administration was one of the most militarist.
Hillary Clinton’s record
There is no excuse for having forgotten her record. GFrom 2009 to 2013, she served as Secretary of State under Obama, the US president who has been engaged in warfare during more days than any other US President according to the New York Times.
HC has supported all the wars she could and she was a mastermind of the war in Libya. One remembers the film clip showing her happiness at Khadafi’s death.
She is a Cold Warrior, anti-Russia, anti-Putin Russians will be great for fighting Putin.
Her war-promoting record is as long as it is well-documented.
The most solid documentation is that of professor Stephen Zunes. Zunes is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco teaching courses on the politics of Middle East and other regions, U.S. foreign policy, nonviolence, conflict resolution, and globalization. He currently chairs USF’s Middle Eastern Studies Program. He serves as a senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, a contributing editor of Tikkun, and a member of the academic advisory council of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
Professor Zunes is also a TFF Associate and here is his analysis of Hillary Clinton’s systematic fascination with war and everything military, “Hillary The Hawk”.
AS if this was not enough, here is a Mark Landler’s brilliantly researched analysis – again in The New York Times – of HC’s persistent cultivation of American exceptionalism, interventionism, war and “the men with medals.” He writes:
Unlike other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.
I can only hope that I am wrong but I fear that Hillary Clinton – if she becomes the next President of the United States – is likely to be yet another militarist disaster for the world.
And for the US itself whose manifest destiny is now manifest decline, caused mainly by all the failed wars, the cost of militarism and their consequences and blowback effects.
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TFF Director Prof. Jan Oberg is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.
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We read that “the US manifest decline was caused mainly by all the failed wars, the cost of militarism and their consequences” and this to me is the view of a “non-politician”. Politicians love “failed wars”, that is wars the last long, where many people die. We have to remember the “people” don’t want wars. All people want is PEACE, good health, friends, a family, love, books, the cinema, holidaying, football and many other sports, Music and other Arts.
Of course, there are and will always be psychopaths or hot tempered people who use a weapon, and for them we have Police, Courts, lawyers, judges and prisons. Wars are made on behalf of politicians’ sponsors or donors, military manucaturers, the “merchants of death”. Short wars with no or few dead are bad news for them. They want long wars and many dead. Negotiating politicians, diplomats and military leaders also benefit from everlasting wars.
Take the case of Angola. The Civil War was made to last 27 years. This is what American, British, Russian, French, Belgian, Swedish, Israeli and Chinese military manufacturersb and traders, like. And if the country has no money resrves, no pproblem. War-financing Banks and other services are ready to help the country go into Bankrupcy, whilst the country’s politicians make loads of money.
The “cost of militarism” is neither her no there. Politicians don’t have to pay for it. Militarism is paid for with other people’s money. But the profit from militarism goes to the individual, the desired “consequence” of war.
Universal demilitarization is the only solution.
Alberto Portugheis
President HUFUD