Posted on February 3,
2016 by WashingtonsBlog
By Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School
of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild.
Hillary Clinton likes to extol her foreign policy
credentials, particularly her experience as secretary of state. She attaches
herself to Barack Obama’s coattails, pledging to continue his policies. But she
is even more hawkish than the president.
Like Obama, Clinton touts American exceptionalism, the
notion that the United States is better than any other country. In his State of
the Union addresses, Obama has proclaimed America “exceptional” and said the
U.S. must “lead the world.” Clinton wrote in her book Hard Choices that
“America remains the indispensable nation.”
It is this view that animates U.S. invasions,
interventions, bombings and occupations of other countries. Under the pretense
of protecting our national interest, the United States maintains some 800
military bases in other countries, costing taxpayers tens of billions of
dollars annually. Often referred to as “enduring bases,” they enable us to
mount attacks whenever and wherever our leaders see fit, whether with drones or
manned aircraft.
Obama, who continues to prosecute the war in
Afghanistan 15 years after it began, is poised to send ground troops back to
Iraq and begin bombing Libya. His aggressive pursuit of regime change in Syria
was met with pushback by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Seymour Hersh.
The president has bombed some seven countries with
drones. But besides moving toward normalization of relations with Cuba, his
signature foreign policy achievement is brokering the agreement to prevent Iran
from developing nuclear weapons.
Although Clinton supports the nuclear deal, she talks
tough about Iran. In September 2015, she provocatively declared, “I don’t
believe Iran is our partner in this agreement. Iran is the subject of the
agreement,” adding, “I will confront them across the board.” She said, “I will
not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear
weapon.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton
promised to “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Clinton was, in
effect, pledging to commit genocide against the Iranian people.
In an August 2014 Atlantic interview
with Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton maintained, “There is no such thing as a right
to enrich.” Apparently, she has not read the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT), which gives countries like Iran the right to enrich uranium for peaceful
purposes. Article IV of the treaty says, “Nothing in this Treaty shall be
interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty
to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes
without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this
Treaty.”
One country that does possess nuclear weapons is
Israel, which refuses to ratify the NPT. Clinton has consistently and
uncritically supported the policies of the Israeli government. In the Atlantic
interview, she placed the blame for Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza squarely
with the Palestinians.
From July 8 to Aug. 27, 2014, Israel killed over 2,100
Palestinians — including more than 400 children — 80 percent of them civilians.
Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and seven Israeli civilians were killed.
When Goldberg asked Clinton whom she held responsible
for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children, she demurred, saying,
“[I]t’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.” She blamed only the
Palestinians, saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this
conflict.” Claiming “Israel has a right to defend itself,” she said, “I think
Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets.”
But Israel did not act in self-defense. In the first
10 days of June 2014, Israeli forces abducted 17
Palestinian teenage boys in
the occupied West Bank. On June 12, three Israeli teenagers were abducted in
the southern West Bank; Israel accused Hamas. After those three were found
dead, a group of Israelis tortured and killed a Palestinian teenager in
Jerusalem. On July 7, Israel launched a large military operation in the Gaza
Strip, dubbed Operation Protective Edge. The Israeli Defense Forces devastated
Gaza. For 51 days, Israel bombarded Gaza with more than 6,000 airstrikes.
The United Nations Human Rights Council subsequently
convened an independent, international commission of inquiry, which concluded
that Israel, and to a lesser extent Palestinian armed groups, had likely
committed violations of international humanitarian law and international human
rights law, some constituting war crimes. “The scale of the devastation was
unprecedented” in Gaza, according to the commission.
Yet Clinton was puzzled by what she calls “this
enormous international reaction against Israel,” adding, “This reaction is
uncalled for and unfair.”
She attributed the “enormous international reaction”
to “a number of factors” but only mentioned anti-Semitism, never citing
Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands or its periodic massacres in
Gaza.
Indeed, in January 2016, U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon told the Security Council it was an “indisputable truth” that
“Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of
occupation and the paralysis of the peace process.” He noted that it was “human
nature to react to occupation, which serves as a potent incubator of hate and
extremism.”
Clinton didn’t ponder why so many people around the
world are participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement
against the Israeli occupation. Representatives of Palestinian civil society
launched BDS in 2005, calling upon “international civil society organizations
and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and
implement divestment initiatives against Israel.”
In her November 2015 article titled “How I Would
Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu,” published in the Jewish newspaper Forward,
Clinton vowed to continue to oppose BDS. “As secretary of state, I requested
more assistance for Israel every year,” she boasted, adding that she opposed
“the biased Goldstone report,” explained below.
After Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, in which
nearly 1,400 Palestinians (82 percent of whom were civilians) and 13 Israelis
were killed, a U.N. Human Rights Council report by a commission headed by
Justice Richard Goldstone concluded that “Disproportionate destruction and
violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy [by Israel].”
Israel responded to the report with threats and
harassment against Goldstone, leading him to backtrack on one of the findings
in the report that bears his name, namely, that Israel deliberately targeted
civilians. But the other members of the commission stood fast on all of the
report’s conclusions.
Clinton’s vote in favor of President George W. Bush’s
illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq cost her the 2008 election. It also cost more
than 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives.
Yet Clinton cynically told corporate executives at a
2011 State Department roundtable on investment opportunities in Iraq, “It’s
time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.”
The same year, Clinton led the campaign for forcible
regime change in Libya, despite opposition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Responding to the gruesome sodomizing of President Moammar Gadhafi with a
bayonet, Clinton laughed and said, “We came, we saw, he died.”
Both the Iraq War and regime change in Libya paved the
way for the rise of Islamic State and dangerous conflict in the Middle East.
Obama is about to escalate his military involvement in Libya. Joseph Dunford,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “The president has made clear that
we have the authority to use military force.” The New York Times reports
that the expanded campaign is “expected to include airstrikes and raids by
elite American troops.”
The Obama administration is reportedly changing the
rules of engagement to allow more civilian casualties in the “war” against
Islamic State. A senior military official told The Daily
Beast, “Now I think
you’ll see a little more willingness to tolerate civilian casualties in the
interest of making progress.” But the Geneva Conventions prohibit the
disproportionate killing of civilians.
Clinton has promised to escalate the wars in Syria and
Iraq, including a no-fly zone in Syria. Since Islamic State doesn’t have an air
force, her no-fly zone is likely to capture Russian planes flying over Syria.
Talking tough on ABC’s This Week, Clinton
declared, “We have to fight in the air, fight on the ground and fight them on
the Internet.” She said nothing about diplomacy or an arms embargo to stop
sending weapons that end up in the hands of Islamic State.
Although the corporate media fans the flames of fear
about Islamic State, only 38 people in the United States have died in
terror-related incidents since 9/11, according to Politifact.com. The “war on
terror” has cost us more than $1.5 trillion, in addition to U.S. lives and
those of untold numbers in other countries.
Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a President
Hillary Clinton would continue our “perpetual war.” She would do everything in
her power to ensure the robust survival of the American empire.
This article first appeared on Truthdig.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson
School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy
secretary-general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her
most recent book is Drones and
Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. SeeMarjorie’s website. Follow
her on Twitter at @marjoriecohn.
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