by Gary Leupp
If reason and justice
prevailed in this country, you’d think that the recent series of articles in
the Washington Times concerning the U.S.-NATO attack on Libya in 2011 would
torpedo Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects.
Clinton as U.S. Secretary of
State at that time knew that Libya was no threat to the U.S. She knew that
Muammar Gadhafi had been closely cooperating with the U.S. in combating
Islamist extremism. She probably realized that Gadhafi had a certain social
base due in part to what by Middle Eastern standards was the relatively
equitable distribution of oil income in Libya.
But she wanted to topple
Gadhafi. Over the objections of Secretary of “Defense” Robert Gates but
responding to the urgings of British Prime Minister David Cameron and French
President Nicholas Sarkozy, she advocated war. Why? Not for the reason
advertised at the time. (Does this sound familiar?) Not because Gadhafy was
preparing a massacre of the innocents in Benghazi, as had occurred in Rwanda in
1994. (That episode, and the charge that the “international community” had
failed to intervene, was repeatedly referenced by Clinton and other top
officials, as a shameful precedent that must not be repeated. It had also been
deployed by Bill Clinton in 1999, when he waged war on Serbia, grossly
exaggerating the extent of carnage in Kosovo and positing the immanent prospect
of “genocide” to whip up public support. Such uses of the Rwandan case reflect
gross cynicism.)
No, genocide was not the
issue, in Libya any more than in Kosovo. According to the Washington Times, high-ranking
U.S. officials indeed questioned whether there was evidence for such a scenario
in Libya. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that a mere 2,000 Libyan
troops armed with 12 tanks were heading to Benghazi, and had killed about 400
rebels by the time the U.S. and NATO attacked. It found evidence for troops
firing on unarmed protestors but no evidence of mass killing. It did not have a
good estimate on the number of civilians in Benghazi but had strong evidence
that most had fled. It had intelligence that Gadhafy had ordered that troops
not fire on civilians but only on armed rebels.
The Pentagon doubted that
Gadhafi would risk world outrage by ordering a massacre. One intelligence
officer told the Washington Times that the decision to bomb was made on the
basis of “light intelligence.” Which is to say, lies, cherry-picked information
such as a single statement by Gadhafi (relentlessly repeated in the corporate
press echoing State Department proclamations) that he would “sanitize Libya one
inch at a time” to “clear [the country] of these rats.” (Similar language, it
was said, had been used by Hutu leaders in Rwanda.) Now that the rats in their
innumerable rival militias control practically every square inch of Libya,
preventing the emergence of an effective pro-western government, many at the
Pentagon must be thinking how stupid Hillary was.
No, the attack was not about
preventing a Rwanda-like genocide. Rather, it was launched because the Arab
Spring, beginning with the overthrow of the two dictators, President Ben Ali of
Tunisia and President Mubarak of Egypt, had taken the west by surprise and
presented it with a dilemma: to retain longstanding friendships (including that
with Gadhafi, who’d been a partner since 2003) in the face of mass protests, or
throw in its lot with the opposition movements, who seemed to be riding an
inevitable historical trend, hoping to co-opt them?
Recall how Obama had declined
up to the last minute to order Mubarak to step down, and how Vice President Joe
Biden had pointedly declined to describe Mubarak as a dictator. Only when
millions rallied against the regime did Obama shift gears, praise the youth of
Egypt for their inspiring mass movement, and withdraw support for the
dictatorship. After that Obama pontificated that Ali Saleh in Yemen (a key ally
of the U.S. since 2001) had to step down in deference to protesters. Saleh
complied, turning power to another U.S. lackey (who has since resigned). Obama
also declared that Assad in Syria had “lost legitimacy,” commanded him to step
down, and began funding the “moderate” armed opposition in Syria. (The latter
have at this point mostly disappeared or joined al-Qaeda and its spin-offs.
Some have turned coat and created the “Loyalists’ Army” backing Assad versus
the Islamist crazies.)
Hillary, that supposedly
astute stateswoman, believed that the Arab Spring was going to topple all the
current dictators of the Middle East and that, given that, the U.S. needed to
position itself as the friend of the opposition movements. Gadhafy was a goner,
she reasoned, so shouldn’t the U.S. help those working towards his overthrow?
Of course the U.S. (or the
combination of the U.S. and NATO) couldn’t just attack a sovereign state to
impose regime change. It would, at any rate, have been politically damaging
after the regime change in Iraq that had been justified on the basis of now
well discredited lies. So the U.S. arm-twisted UNSC members to approve a
mission to protect civilians in Libya against state violence. China and Russia
declined to use their veto power (although as western duplicity and real
motives became apparent, they came to regret this). The Libya campaign soon
shifted from “peace-keeping” actions such as the imposition of a “no-fly” zone
to overt acts of war against the Gadhafy regime, which for its part
consistently insisted that the opposition was aligned with al-Qaeda.
The results of “Operation
Unified Protector” have of course been absolutely disastrous. Just as the U,S.
and some of its allies wrecked Iraq, producing a situation far worse than that
under Saddam Hussein, so they have inflicted horrors on Libya unknown during
the Gadhafi years. These include the persecution of black Africans and Tuaregs,
the collapse of any semblance of central government, the division of the country
between hundreds of warring militias, the destabilization of neighboring Mali
producing French imperialist intervention, the emergence of Benghazi as an
al-Qaeda stronghold, and the proliferation of looted arms among rebel groups.
The “humanitarian intervention” was in fact a grotesque farce and huge war
crime.
But the political class and
punditry in this country do not attack Hillary for war crimes, or for promoting
lies to validate a war of aggression. Rather, they charge her and the State
Department with failure to protect U.S. ambassador to Libya John Christopher
Stevens and other U.S. nationals from the attack that occurred in Benghazi on
September 11, 2012. And they fault her for promoting the State Department’s
initial “talking point” that the attack had been a spontaneous reaction to an
anti-Muslim YouTube film rather than a calculated terrorist attack. They pan
her for sniping at a senator during a hearing, “What difference does it make
(whether the attack had been launched by protestors spontaneously, or was a
terrorist action planned by forces unleashed by the fall of the Gadhafi
regime)”?
In other words: Hillary’s
mainstream critics are less concerned with the bombing of Libya in 2011 that
killed over 1100 civilians, and produced the power vacuum exploited by
murderous jihadis, than by Hillary’s alleged concealment of evidence that might
show the State Department inadequately protected U.S. diplomats from the
consequences of the U.S.-orchestrated regime change itself. In their view, the
former First Lady might have blood on her hands—but not that, mind you, of
Libyan civilians, or Libyan military forces going about their normal business,
or of Gadhafi who was sodomized with a knife while being murdered as Washington
applauded.
No, she’s held accountable for
the blood of these glorified, decent upstanding Americans who’d been complicit
in the ruin of Libya.
This version of events is easy
to challenge. It’s easy to show that Clinton skillfully—in full neocon mode,
spewing disinformation to a clueless public—steered an attack on Libya that has
produced enormous blowback and ongoing suffering for the Libyan people. If
a right-wing paper like Washington Times can expose this, how much more the
more “mainstream” press? Could they at least not raise for discussion whether
what Rand Paul calls “Hillary’s war” was, like the Iraq War (and many others)
based on lies? Shouldn’t Hillary be hammered with the facts of her history, and
her vaunted “toughness” be exposed as callous indifference to human life?
* * *
While championing the rights
of women and children, arguing that “it takes a village” to raise a child,
Clinton has endorsed the bombing of villages throughout her public life. Here
are some talking points for those appalled by the prospects of a Hillary
Clinton presidency.
*She has always been a
warmonger. As First Lady from January 1993, she encouraged her husband Bill and
his secretary of state Madeleine Albright to attack Serbian forces in the
disintegrating Yugoslavia—in Bosnia in 1994 and Serbia in 1999. She’s stated
that in 1999 she phoned her husband from Africa. “I urged him to bomb,” she
boasts. These Serbs were (as usual) forces that did not threaten the U.S. in
any way. The complex conflicts and tussles over territory between ethnic groups
in the Balkans, and the collapse of the Russian economy following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, gave Bill Clinton an excuse to posture as the
world’s savior and to use NATO to impose order. Only the United States, he
asserted, could restore order in Yugoslavia, which had been a proudly neutral
country outside NATO and the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War. President
Clinton and Albright also claimed that only NATO—designed in 1949 to counter a
supposed Soviet threat to Western Europe, but never yet deployed in
battle—should deal with the Balkan crises.
The Bosnian intervention
resulted in the imposition of the “Dayton Accord” on the parties involved and
the creation of the dysfunctional state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Kosovo
intervention five years later (justified by the scaremongering, subsequently
disproven reports of a Serbian genocidal campaign against Kosovars) involved
the NATO bombing of Belgrade and resulted in the dismemberment of Serbia.
Kosovo, now recognized by the U.S. and many of its allies as an independent
state, is the center of Europe’s heroin trafficking and the host of the U.S.’s
largest army base abroad. The Kosovo war, lacking UN support and following
Albright’s outrageous demand for Serbian acquiescence—designed, as she gleefully
conceded, “to set the bar too high” for Belgrade and Moscow’s acceptance—of
NATO occupation of all of Serbia, was an extraordinary provocation to Serbia’s
traditional ally Russia. “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are
going to get,” Albright said at the time, as NATO prepared to bomb a European
capital for the first time since 1945.
*Clinton has been a keen
advocate for the expansion of an antiquated Cold War military alliance that
persists in provoking Russia. In the same year that NATO bombed Belgrade
(1999), the alliance expanded to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
But Clinton’s predecessor George H. W. Bush had promised Russia in 1989 that
NATO would not expand eastward. And since the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved in
1991, and since Russia under Boris Yeltsin hardly threatened any western
countries, this expansion has understandably been viewed in Russia as a hostile
move. George Kennan, a former U.S. ambassador to the USSR and a father of the
“containment” doctrine, in 1998 pronounced the expansion a “tragic mistake”
with “no reason whatsoever.” But the expansion continued under George W. Bush
and has continued under Obama. Russia is now surrounded by an anti-Russian
military alliance from its borders with the Baltic states to the north to
Romania and Bulgaria. U.S.-backed “color revolutions” have been designed to
draw more countries into the NATO camp. Hillary as secretary of state was a big
proponent of such expansion, and under her watch, two more countries (Albania
and Croatia) joined the U.S.-dominated alliance.
(To understand what this means
to Russia, imagine how Washington would respond to a Russia-centered
“defensive” military alliance requiring its members to spend 2% of their GDPs
on military spending and coordinate military plans with Moscow incorporating
Canada and all the Caribbean countries, surrounding the continental U.S., and
now moving to include Mexico. Would this not be a big deal for U.S. leaders?)
*As New York senator Clinton
endorsed the murderous ongoing sanctions against Iraq, imposed by the UN in
1990 and continued until 2003. Initially applied to force Iraqi forces out of
Kuwait, the sanctions were sustained at U.S. insistence (and over the protests
of other Security Council members) up to and even beyond the U.S. invasion in
2003. Bill Clinton demanded their continuance, insisting that Saddam Hussein’s
(non-existent) secret WMD programs justified them. In 1996, three years into
the Clinton presidency, Albright was asked whether the death of half a million
Iraq children as a result of the sanctions was justified, and famously replied
in a television interview, “We think it was worth it.” Surely Hillary agreed
with her friend and predecessor as the first woman secretary of state. She also
endorsed the 1998 “Operation Desert Fox” (based on lies, most notably the
charge that Iraq had expelled UN inspectors) designed to further destroy Iraq’s
military infrastructure and make future attacks even easier.
*She was a strident supporter
of the Iraq War. As a New York senator from 2001 to 2009, Hillary aligned
herself with the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, earning a
reputation as a hawk. She was a fervent supportive of the attack on Iraq, based
on lies, in 2003. On the floor of the Senate she echoed all the fictions about
Saddam Hussein’s “chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery
capability, and his nuclear program.” She declared, “He has also given aid,
comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.” She
suggested that her decision to support war was “influenced by my eight years of
experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Ave. in the White House watching my
husband deal with serious challenges to our nation.” (Presumably by the latter
she meant the threats posed by Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo.) Her loss to Obama
in the Democratic primary in 2008 was due largely to Obama’s (supposed) antiwar
position contrasting with her consistently pro-war position. She has only
vaguely conceded that her support for the invasion was something of a mistake.
But she blames her vote on others, echoing Dick Cheney’s bland suggestion that
the problem was “intelligence failures.” “If we knew know then what we know
now,” she stated as she began her presidential campaign in late 2006, “I certainly
wouldn’t have voted” for the war.
*She actively pursued
anti-democratic regime change in Ukraine. As secretary of state from 2009 to
2013, Clinton as noted above endorsed NATO’s relentless expansion. She selected
to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs the
neocon Victoria Nuland, who had been the principal deputy foreign advisor to
Cheney when he was vice president. The wife of neocon pundit Robert Kagan,
Nuland is a war hawk whose current mission in life is the full encirclement of
Russia with the integration of Ukraine into the EU and then into NATO. The
ultimate goal was the expulsion of the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimean
Peninsula (where it has been stationed since 1783). She has boasted of the fact
that the U.S. has invested five billion dollars in supporting what she depicts
as the Ukrainian people’s “European aspirations.” What this really means is
that the U.S. exploited political divisions in Ukraine to topple an elected
leader and replace him with Nuland’s handpicked prime minister, Arseniy
Yatsenyev, deploying neo-Nazi shock troops in the process and generating a
civil war that has killed over 5000 people.
Clinton has increasingly
vilified Vladimir Putin, the popular Russian president, absurdly comparing the
Russian re-annexation of the Crimean Peninsula following a popular referendum
with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. She is totally on board the
program of producing a new Cold War, and forcing European allies to
cooperate in isolating the former superpower.
*She wanted to provide
military assistance to the “moderate” armed opposition in Syria, to effect
regime change, and after leaving office criticized Obama for not supplying more
than he did. In 2011 Clinton wanted the U.S. to arm rebels who quickly became
aligned with the al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate) and other extreme
Islamists, in order to bring down a secular regime that respects religious
rights, rejects the implementation of Sharia law, and promotes the education of
women. The U.S. indeed has supplied arms to anti-Assad forces from at least
January 2014, But as it happens the bulk of U.S. aid to the “moderate rebels”
has been appropriated by Islamists, and some of it is deployed against U.S.
allies in Iraq. It is now widely understood that the bulk of “moderate” rebels
are either in Turkish exile or directed by CIA agents, while the U.S. plans to
train some 5000 new recruits in Jordan. Meanwhile Assad has won election (as
fair as any held in a U.S. client state like Afghanistan or Iraq) and gained
the upper hand in the civil war. U.S. meddling in Syria has empowered the
Islamic State that now controls much of Syria and Iraq.
*She has been an unremitting
supporter of Israeli aggression, whenever it occurs. The Israeli newspaper
Haaretz described her last year as “Israel’s new lawyer” given her sympathetic
view of Binyamin Netanyahu’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza and even his desire to
maintain “security” throughout the occupied West Bank. She postured as an opponent
of Israel’s unrelenting, illegal settlements of Palestinian territory in 2009,
but backed down when Netanyahu simply refused to heed U.S. calls for a freeze.
In her memoir she notes “our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work”—as
though she’s apologizing for it.
In 1999 as First Lady, Hillary
Clinton hugged and kissed Yassir Arafat’s wife Suha during a trip to the West
Bank. She advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state. She changed her
tune when she ran for the New York Senate seat. When it comes to the Middle
East, she is a total, unprincipled opportunist.
*Hillary tacitly endorsed the
military coup against elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009,
refusing to call it such (even though Obama did). She made common cause with
those who feared his effort to poll the people about constitutional reform
would weaken their positions, made nice with the ensuing regime and made sure
Zelaya would not return to office.
*She provoked China by siding
with Japan in the Senkaku/ Daioyutai dispute. Departing from the State
Department’s traditional stance that “we take no position” on the Sino-Japanese
dispute about sovereignty over the Senkaku/ Daioyutai islands in the East China
Sea, seized by Japan in 1895, Clinton as secretary of state emphasized that the
islands fall within the defense perimeters of the U.S.-Japanese alliance. The
warmongering neocon National Review in a piece entitled “In Praise of Hillary
Clinton” praised her for “driving the Chinese slightly up a wall.”
*She helped bring down a
Japanese prime minister who heeded the feelings of the people of Okinawa, who
opposed the Futenma Marine Corps Air Force Station on the island. The new prime
minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan defeated the
slavishly pro-U.S. Liberal Democratic Party in the general election of 2009,
had promised to move the hated U.S. base in the heart of Ginowan city for the
noise, air pollution and public safety hazards it causes. Clinton met with him,
listened sympathetically, and said “no.” Hatoyama was obliged to apologize to
the people of Okinawa, essentially conceding that Japan remains an occupied
nation that doesn’t enjoy sovereignty. Nationwide his public support ratings
fell from 70 to 17% and he was obliged to resign in shame after eight months in
office.
*She made countless trips to
India, signing bilateral economic and nuclear cooperation agreements with a
country her husband had placed under sanctions for its nuclear tests in 1998.
While castigating North Korea for its nuclear weapons program, and taking what
a CIA analyst called a “more hard line, more conditional, more neoconservative
[approach] than Bush during the last four years of his term,” she signaled that
India’s nukes were no longer an issue for the U.S. India is, after all, a
counterweight to China.
What can those who revere her
point to in this record that in any way betters the planet or this country?
Clinton’s record of her tenure in the State Department is entitled Hard
Choices, but it has never been hard for Hillary to choose brute force in the
service of U.S. imperialism and its controlling 1%.
This is a country of 323
million people. 88% of those over 25 have graduated high school. The world
respects U.S. culture, science, and technology. Why is it that out of our
well-educated, creative masses the best that the those who decide these
things—the secretive cliques within the two official, indistinguishable
political parties who answer to the 1% and who decide how to market electoral
products—can come up with is the likely plate of candidates for the
presidential election next year? Why is it that, while we all find it
ridiculous that North Korea’s ruled by its third Kim, Syria by its second
Assad, and Cuba by its second Castro, the U.S. electorate may well be offered a
choice between another Clinton and another Bush? As though their predecessors
of those surnames were anything other than long-discredited warmongering thugs?
GARY LEUPP is Professor
of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department
of Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a
contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be
reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
No comments:
Post a Comment