Hillary-The-Hawk Flies Again

By Ralph Nader

“Hillary works for Goldman Sachs and likes war, otherwise I like Hillary,” a former Bill Clinton aide told me sardonically. First, he was referring to her cushy relationships with top Wall Street barons and her $200,000 speeches with the criminal enterprise known as Goldman Sachs, which played a part in crashing the U.S. economy in 2008 and burdening taxpayers with costly bailouts. Second, he was calling attention to her war hawkish foreign policy.

Last week, Hillary-The-Hawk emerged, once again, with comments to The Atlantic attacking Obama for being weak and not having an organized foreign policy. She was calling Obama weak despite his heavy hand in droning, bombing and intervening during his Presidency. While Obama is often wrong, he is hardly a pacifist commander. It’s a small wonder that since 2008, Hillary-The-Hawk has been generally described as, in the words of the New York Times journalist Mark Landler, “more hawkish than Mr. Obama.”
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Moreover, the former Secretary of State ended her undistinguished tenure in 2013 with an unremitting record of militarizing a Department that was originally chartered over 200 years ago to be the expression of American diplomacy. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton made far more bellicose statements than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates did. Some career Foreign Service Officers found her aggressive language unhelpful, if not downright hazardous to their diplomatic missions.

Such belligerency translated into her pushing both opposed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and reluctant President Obama to topple the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan dictator had given up his dangerous weapons and was re-establishing relations with Western countries and Western oil companies. Mrs. Clinton had no “organizing principle” for the deadly aftermath with warring militias carving up Libya and spilling over into Mali and the resultant, violent disruption in Central Africa. The Libyan assault was Hillary Clinton’s undeclared war – a continuing disaster that shows her touted foreign policy experience as just doing more “stupid stuff.” She displays much ignorance about the quicksand perils for the United States of post-dictatorial vacuums in tribal, sectarian societies.
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Energetically waging peace was not on Secretary of State Clinton’s agenda. She would rather talk about military might and deployment in one geographic area after another. At the U.S. Naval Academy in 2012, Generalissma Clinton gave a speech about pivoting to East Asia with “force posture” otherwise known as “force projection” (one of her favorite phrases) of U.S. naval ships, planes and positioned troops in countries neighboring China.

Of course, China’s response was to increase its military budget and project its own military might. The world’s super-power should not be addicted to continuous provocations that produce unintended consequences.
...

epepke wrote:I'm pretty sure that most Democrat-leaning types will hold their noses and vote for her. Except that the turnout won't be so great. She is nowhere near as good an orator as Obama was, and also, she made the canonical mistake of running on issues. Hardly anybody votes on issues. They vote on trust and values. But then again, she was advised by the same guy who wrote Microtrends, which is probably the stupidest way of looking at demographics to have come out since, well, forever.

I have only met three gung-ho Clinton supporters, all women. When I asked why, they said, "She's a strong woman who didn't care whether Bill got a blow job." An admirable pair of traits, perhaps, but not much of a recommendation for the Presidency. I've also met two people who hated her guts, also both women. Most people seem to be meh about her and will vote for or against the other candidate. That is, if they get out and vote in the first place. I don't really see her motivating the potential voters in the way that Obama did, and that is going to determine the election. The Republicans have their base of gullible, useful idiots who always vote early and often.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:I have never understood "the right NOT to vote". The victorious polly might not have a real mandate, and the voter has less right to bitch about the leadership of the leaders and politicians who they didn't vote against.

epepke wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:I have never understood "the right NOT to vote". The victorious polly might not have a real mandate, and the voter has less right to bitch about the leadership of the leaders and politicians who they didn't vote against.

There has been a cynicism especially on the left for the past 20 years or so. It's pretty destructive.

Nicko wrote:

epepke wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:I have never understood "the right NOT to vote". The victorious polly might not have a real mandate, and the voter has less right to bitch about the leadership of the leaders and politicians who they didn't vote against.

There has been a cynicism especially on the left for the past 20 years or so. It's pretty destructive.

A cynicism that's entirely understandable, but the reality is that the Presidential race is a two-horse one.

Nicko wrote:One thing you can say though is that the next POTUS will be either a Democrat or a Republican. The other thing you can say is that the Democratic candidate will be a better choice than the Republican one.

Mike_L wrote:Hillary is a disgusting, bloodthirsty harpy with a gender-rooted inferiority complex.

Loren Michael wrote:

Mike_L wrote:Hillary is a disgusting, bloodthirsty harpy with a gender-rooted inferiority complex.

Yes she's a warhawk, that much is obvious and on the record.

There's no need to armchair psychoanalyze though, that just makes you look like a Fox News host.

often

Exclusive: Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war
Joint Chiefs, key lawmaker held own talks with Moammar Gadhafi regime

By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro and Kelly Riddell
The Washington Times

Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.

The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns.
...

See also:
Hillary Clinton’s ‘WMD’ moment: U.S. intelligence saw false narrative in Libya

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“It was like the WMDs in Iraq. It was based on a false report,” (Seif) Gadhafi said in a May 2011 phone call to Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat serving at the time. “Libyan airplanes bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in Tripoli, Libyan army killed thousands, etc., etc., and now the whole world found there is no single evidence that such things happened in Libya.”

Seif Gadhafi also warned that many of the U.S.-supported armed rebels were “not freedom fighters” but rather jihadists whom he described as “gangsters and terrorists.”

“And now you have NATO supporting them with ships, with airplanes, helicopters, arms, training, communication,” he said in one recorded conversation with U.S. officials. “We ask the American government send a fact-finding mission to Libya. I want you to see everything with your own eyes.”

The surreptitiously taped conversations reveal an extraordinary departure from traditional policy, in which the U.S. government speaks to foreign governments with one voice coordinated by the State Department.

Instead, the tapes show that the Pentagon’s senior uniformed leadership and a congressman from Mrs. Clinton’s own party conveyed sentiments to the Libyan regime that undercut or conflicted with the secretary of state’s own message at the time.
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“I had facts that indicated America was headed once again into an intervention that was going to be disastrous,” Mr. Kucinich told The Times. “What was being said at the State Department — if you look at the charge at the time — it wasn’t so much about what happened as it was about what would happen. So there was a distortion of events that were occurring in Libya to justify an intervention which was essentially wrong and illegal.”
...

Seif Gadhafi also warned that many of the U.S.-supported armed rebels were “not freedom fighters” but rather jihadists whom he described as “gangsters and terrorists.”

Jihadists Now Control Secretive U.S. Base in Libya
A camp on the Libyan coastline meant to train terror-hunters has instead become a haven for terrorists and al Qaeda.

A key jihadist leader and longtime member of al Qaeda has taken control of a secretive training facility set up by U.S. special operations forces on the Libyan coastline to help hunt down Islamic militants, according to local media reports, Jihadist web forums, and U.S. officials.

In the summer of 2012, American Green Berets began refurbishing a Libyan military base 27 kilometers west of Tripoli in order to hone the skills of Libya’s first Western-trained special operations counter-terrorism fighters. Less than two years later, that training camp is now being used by groups with direct links to al Qaeda to foment chaos in post-Qaddafi Libya.

Last week, the Libyan press reported that the camp (named “27” for the kilometer marker on the road between Tripoli and Tunis) was now under the command of Ibrahim Ali Abu Bakr Tantoush, a veteran associate of Osama bin Laden who was first designated as part of al Qaeda’s support network in 2002 by the United States and the United Nations. The report said he was heading a group of Salifist fighters from the former Libyan base.
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Mike_L wrote:

Hillary-The-Hawk Flies Again

By Ralph Nader

“Hillary works for Goldman Sachs and likes war, otherwise I like Hillary,” a former Bill Clinton aide told me sardonically. First, he was referring to her cushy relationships with top Wall Street barons and her $200,000 speeches with the criminal enterprise known as Goldman Sachs, which played a part in crashing the U.S. economy in 2008 and burdening taxpayers with costly bailouts. Second, he was calling attention to her war hawkish foreign policy.

Last week, Hillary-The-Hawk emerged, once again, with comments to The Atlantic attacking Obama for being weak and not having an organized foreign policy. She was calling Obama weak despite his heavy hand in droning, bombing and intervening during his Presidency. While Obama is often wrong, he is hardly a pacifist commander. It’s a small wonder that since 2008, Hillary-The-Hawk has been generally described as, in the words of the New York Times journalist Mark Landler, “more hawkish than Mr. Obama.”
...

...
Moreover, the former Secretary of State ended her undistinguished tenure in 2013 with an unremitting record of militarizing a Department that was originally chartered over 200 years ago to be the expression of American diplomacy. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton made far more bellicose statements than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates did. Some career Foreign Service Officers found her aggressive language unhelpful, if not downright hazardous to their diplomatic missions.

Such belligerency translated into her pushing both opposed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and reluctant President Obama to topple the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan dictator had given up his dangerous weapons and was re-establishing relations with Western countries and Western oil companies. Mrs. Clinton had no “organizing principle” for the deadly aftermath with warring militias carving up Libya and spilling over into Mali and the resultant, violent disruption in Central Africa. The Libyan assault was Hillary Clinton’s undeclared war – a continuing disaster that shows her touted foreign policy experience as just doing more “stupid stuff.” She displays much ignorance about the quicksand perils for the United States of post-dictatorial vacuums in tribal, sectarian societies.
...

...
Energetically waging peace was not on Secretary of State Clinton’s agenda. She would rather talk about military might and deployment in one geographic area after another. At the U.S. Naval Academy in 2012, Generalissma Clinton gave a speech about pivoting to East Asia with “force posture” otherwise known as “force projection” (one of her favorite phrases) of U.S. naval ships, planes and positioned troops in countries neighboring China.

Of course, China’s response was to increase its military budget and project its own military might. The world’s super-power should not be addicted to continuous provocations that produce unintended consequences.
...

Full essay at:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39433.htm

epepke wrote:I'm pretty sure that most Democrat-leaning types will hold their noses and vote for her. Except that the turnout won't be so great. She is nowhere near as good an orator as Obama was, and also, she made the canonical mistake of running on issues. Hardly anybody votes on issues. They vote on trust and values. But then again, she was advised by the same guy who wrote Microtrends, which is probably the stupidest way of looking at demographics to have come out since, well, forever.

I have only met three gung-ho Clinton supporters, all women. When I asked why, they said, "She's a strong woman who didn't care whether Bill got a blow job." An admirable pair of traits, perhaps, but not much of a recommendation for the Presidency. I've also met two people who hated her guts, also both women. Most people seem to be meh about her and will vote for or against the other candidate. That is, if they get out and vote in the first place. I don't really see her motivating the potential voters in the way that Obama did, and that is going to determine the election. The Republicans have their base of gullible, useful idiots who always vote early and often.

Mike_L wrote:

Loren Michael wrote:

Mike_L wrote:Hillary is a disgusting, bloodthirsty harpy with a gender-rooted inferiority complex.

Yes she's a warhawk, that much is obvious and on the record.

There's no need to armchair psychoanalyze though, that just makes you look like a Fox News host.

She's also fat.

The big questions are...
* is there a realistic alternative to Hillary... to run as the Dem contender for the White House?

* overall, what is the probability that Hillary will ascend to the highest office?

* if she gets into the Oval Office, what will it mean for America and the world? Escalation of hostilities in Syria? War with Iran? Heightened tensions with Russia and/or China?