Hillary Clinton’s Support for the Iraq War Was No Fluke 
Hillary Clinton has run to the
right of the Obama administration on every major foreign policy issue —
and she’s left a trail of devastation in her wake.
By Medea Benjamin, March 9, 2016. Share
In March 2003, just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, about 100
CODEPINK women dressed in pink slips weaved in and out of congressional
offices demanding to meet with representatives. Those representatives
who pledged to oppose going to war with Iraq were given hugs and pink
badges of courage; those hell-bent on taking the United States to war
were given pink slips emblazoned with the words “YOU’RE FIRED.”
When we got to Hillary Clinton’s office, we sat down and refused to
leave until we got a meeting with the New York senator. Within an hour,
Clinton appeared. “I like pink tulips around this time of the year; they
kind of remind ya that there may be a spring,” she began, looking out
at the rows of women in pink. “Well, you guys look like a big bunch of
big tulips!”
It got even more awkward after that.
Defending the Iraq War
Having just returned from Iraq, I relayed that the weapons inspectors
in Baghdad told us there was no danger of weapons of mass destruction
and that the Iraqi women we met were terrified about the pending war and
desperate to stop it. “I admire your willingness to speak out on behalf
of the women and children of Iraq,” Clinton replied, “but there is a
very easy way to prevent anyone from being put into harm’s way and that
is for Saddam Hussein to disarm and I have absolutely no belief that he
will.”
We thought the easiest way to prevent harming women, children and
other living things in Iraq was to stop a war of aggression, a war over
weapons of mass destruction that UN inspectors on the ground couldn’t
find — which were, in fact, never found, because they didn’t exist.
Clinton, however, was steadfast in her commitment to war:
She
said it was our responsibility to disarm Saddam Hussein, and even
defended George W. Bush’s unilateralism, citing her husband’s
go-it-alone intervention in Kosovo.
Disgusted, CODEPINK cofounder Jodie Evans tore off her pink slip and
handed it to Clinton, saying that her support for Bush’s invasion would
lead to the death of many innocent people. Making the bogus connection
between the September 11, 2001, attacks and Saddam Hussein, Clinton
stormed out, saying, “I am the senator from New York. I will never put
my people’s security at risk.”
But that’s just what she did,
by supporting the Iraq war and draining our nation of over a trillion
dollars. That money could have been used for supporting women and
children here at home. It could have been rerouted to the social
programs that have been systematically defunded over the last few
decades of Clinton’s own political career. Not to mention the war
ultimately snuffed out the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers — for
absolutely no just cause.
Intervening in Libya, Surging in Afghanistan
If Clinton supported the Iraq war because she thought it politically
expedient, she came to regret her stance when the war turned sour and
Senator Barack Obama surged forward as the candidate opposed to that war
during the presidential race in 2008.
But Clinton didn’t learn the main lesson from Iraq — to seek non- violent ways to solve conflicts. Indeed, when the Arab Spring came to Libya in 2010,
Clinton was the Obama administration’s most forceful advocate for toppling Muammar Gaddafi.
She even out-hawked Robert Gates, the defense secretary first appointed
by George W. Bush, who was less than enthusiastic about going to war.
Gates was reluctant to get bogged down in another Arab country,
insisting that vital U.S. interests were not at stake But Clinton
nevertheless favored intervention.
When Libyan rebels carried out an extrajudicial execution of their
country’s former dictator, Clinton’s response was sociopathic: “We came,
we saw, he died,” she laughed. That sent a message that the United
States would look the other way at crimes committed by allies against
its official enemies.
In a weird bit of rough justice, the political grief Clinton has
suffered over the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in
Benghazi that killed four Americans might never have occurred had
Clinton not supported the U.S. intervention in Libya’s civil war. While
Republicans have focused relentlessly on the terrible deaths of the U.S.
diplomats, the larger disaster is the ensuing chaos that left Libya
without a functioning government, overrun by feuding warlords and
extremist militants. In 2015, the suffering of desperate refugees who
flee civil unrest — many of whom drown in the Mediterranean Sea — is a
direct consequence of that disastrous operation.
Libya was part of a pattern for Clinton.
On Afghanistan, she advocated a repeat of the surge in Iraq.
When the top U.S. commander in Kabul, General Stanley McChrystal, asked
Obama for 40,000 more troops to fight the Taliban in mid-2009, several
top officials — including Vice President Joe Biden — objected, insisting
that the public had lost patience with a conflict that had already
dragged on too long. But Clinton backed McChrystal and wound up favoring
even more surge troops than Defense Secretary Gates did. Obama
ultimately sent another 30,000 American soldiers to Afghanistan.
Clinton’s State Department also provided cover for the expansion of
the not-so-covert drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Clinton’s top legal
adviser, Harold Koh, exploited his pre-government reputation as an
advocate for human rights to declare in a 2010 speech that the
government had the right not only to detain people without any charges
at Guantanamo Bay, but also to kill them with unmanned aerial vehicles
anywhere in the world.
Escalation in Syria
When it came to Syria, Obama’s top diplomat was a forceful advocate for military intervention in that nation’s civil war.
When Obama threatened air strikes in 2013 to punish the Assad
regime’s use of chemical weapons, for example, Clinton publicly
supported him, ignoring polls showing that more than 70 percent of
Americans opposed military action. She described the planned U.S. attack
on Syria as a “limited strike to uphold a crucial global norm,”
although one of the clearest global norms under the UN Charter is that a
country should not attack another country except in self-defense.
Clinton advocated arming Syrian rebels long before the Obama administration agreed to do so.
In 2012, she allied with CIA Director David Petraeus to promote a
U.S.-supplied-and-trained proxy army in Syria. As a U.S. Army general,
Petraeus spent enormous amounts of money training Iraqi and Afghan
soldiers with little success, but that did not deter him and Clinton
from seeking a similar project in Syria. Together, they campaigned for
more direct and aggressive U.S. support for the rebels, a plan supported
by leading Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham. But few in
the White House agreed, arguing that it would be difficult to
appropriately vet fighters and ensure that weapons didn’t fall into the
hands of extremists.
Clinton was disappointed when Obama rejected the proposal, but a
similar plan for the U.S. to “vet and train moderate rebels” at a starting cost of $500 million was later approved.
Some of the trained rebels were quickly routed and captured; others,
more concerned with toppling Assad than fighting Islamic State in Iraq
and Syria (ISIS) defected to the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front. In
September 2015, the head of U.S. Central Command, General Lloyd Austin,
told an incredulous Senate Armed Services Committee that the $500
million effort to train Syrian forces had resulted in a mere four or
five fighters actively battling ISIS. Undeterred, Clinton said that as
commander-in-chief, she would dramatically escalate the program.
In October 2015, Clinton broke with the Obama White House on Syria by
calling for the creation of a no-fly zone “to try to stop the carnage
on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock
of what’s happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees,” she said in a
TV interview on the campaign trail.
While the Obama White House has approved air strikes against ISIS, it
has resisted creating a no-fly zone on the grounds that the effective
enforcement to prevent Assad’s planes from flying would require large
amounts of U.S. resources and could pull the military further into an
unpredictable conflict.
Clinton’s position is at odds not only with President Obama, but also
with the position of Bernie Sanders, her main rival for the Democratic
presidential nomination. Sanders has warned that a unilateral U.S.
no-fly zone in Syria could “get us more deeply involved in that horrible
civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region,”
potentially making a complex and dangerous situation in Syria even
worse.
Antagonizing Iran
Clinton did come out in support of President Obama’s nuclear deal
with Iran, but even that position comes with a heavy load of bellicose
baggage.
Back in April 2008,
Clinton warned that the U.S. could “totally obliterate” Iran in retaliation for a nuclear attack on Israel
— prompting Obama to warn against “language that’s reflective of George
Bush.” In 2009, as secretary of state, she was adamant that the U.S.
keep open the option of attacking Iran over never-proven allegations it
was seeking the nuclear weapons that Israel already has. She opposed
talk of a “containment” policy that would be an alternative to military
action should negotiations with Tehran fail.
Even after the agreement was sealed, she struck a bullying tone: “I
don’t believe Iran is our partner in this agreement,” Clinton insisted.
“Iran is the subject of the agreement,” adding that she would not
hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear
weapon. “We should expect that Iran will want to test the next
president. They will want to see how far they can bend the rules,” she
said in a September 2015 speech at the Brookings Institution. “That
won’t work if I’m in the White House.”
To bolster her tough stance, Clinton suggested deploying additional
U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf region and recommended that Congress
close any gaps in the existing sanctions to punish Iran for any current
or future instances of human rights abuses and support for terror.
It’s true that the Iran nuclear agreement allowed for additional
possible sanctions unrelated to Iran’s nuclear program, but it also
required parties to avoid action “inconsistent with the letter, spirit
and intent” of the deal. Clinton’s call for new sanctions violates the
deal’s intent.
Enabling Netanyahu
Meanwhile,
Clinton has positioned herself as more “pro-Israel” than President Obama.
She vows to bring the two nations closer together, promising to
invite the right-wing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit
the White House within her first month in office. She has distanced
herself from Obama’s feud with Netanyahu over the prime minister’s
efforts to derail the Iran nuclear deal and his comments opposing the
creation of a Palestinian state. Referring to Obama’s policy toward
Netanyahu, Clinton said that such “tough love” is counterproductive
because it invites other countries to delegitimize Israel. Clinton
promised the people of Israel that if she were president, “
you’ll never have to question whether we’re with you. The United States will always be with you.”
Clinton has also voiced her opposition to the Palestinian-led
nonviolent campaign against the Israeli government called BDS — standing
for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. In a letter to her hardline
pro-Israel mega donor Haim Saban, she said BDS seeks to punish Israel
and asked Saban’s advice on “how leaders and communities across America
can work together to counter BDS.”
Missed Opportunities
As secretary of state, Clinton missed opportunity after opportunity to shine as the nation’s top diplomat.
In July 2010, she visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone with Defense
Secretary Robert Gates to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the start
of the Korean War. Standing at the site of the most militarized border
in the world at a time of great tension between North and South Korea,
she could have publicly recognized that the 1953 armistice that ended
the fighting on the Korean peninsula was supposed to be followed up a
few months later by a real peace treaty but never was. Clinton could
have used this occasion to call for a peace treaty and a process of
reconciliation between the two Koreas. Instead she characterized the
decades-long U.S. military presence in Korea as a great success — a
statement hard to reconcile with 60 years of continuous hostilities.
Clinton also failed miserably in her attempt to “reset” the U.S. relationship with Russia.
Since leaving office, she has criticized the Obama administration for
not doing more to contain Russia’s presence in Ukraine since the 2014
annexation of Crimea. She put herself “in the category of people who
wanted to do more in reaction to the annexation of Crimea,” insisting
that the Russian government’s objective is “to stymie, to confront, to
undermine American power whenever and wherever they can.”
It was only after Clinton resigned as secretary of state and was
replaced by John Kerry that the State Department moved away from being
merely an appendage of the Pentagon to one that truly sought creative,
diplomatic solutions to seemingly intractable conflicts. President
Obama’s two signature foreign policy achievements — the Iran deal and
the groundbreaking opening with Cuba — came after Clinton left. These
historic wins serve to highlight Clinton’s miserable track record in the
position.
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When Clinton announced her second campaign for the presidency, she
declared she was entering the race to be the champion for “everyday
Americans.”
As a lawmaker and diplomat, however, Clinton has long championed
military campaigns that have killed scores of “everyday” people abroad.
As commander-in-chief, there’s no reason to believe she’d be any less a
war hawk than she was as the senator who backed George W. Bush’s war in
Iraq, or the secretary of state who encouraged Barack Obama to escalate
the war in Afghanistan.
Clinton may well have been the administration’s most vociferous advocate for military action.
On
at least three crucial issues — Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden
raid — she took a more aggressive line than Defense Secretary Gates, a
Bush-appointed Republican.
Little wonder that Clinton has won the support of many pundits who
continually agitate for war. “I feel comfortable with her on foreign
policy,” Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for
the New American Century, told the New York Times. “If she pursues a
policy which we think she will pursue,” he said, “it’s something that
might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going
to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
Let’s call it what it is: more of the interventionist policies that
destroyed Iraq, destabilized Libya, showered Yemen with cluster bombs
and drones, and legitimized repressive regimes from Israel to Honduras.
A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass
ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to
break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our
nation in a perpetual state of war —
killing people around the world, plenty of them women and children.
