Leading
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning [Sep.
9] delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in
Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing.
Brookings
served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq
War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously
and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars
— Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon — spent all of 2002 and
2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the
years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and
subsequent occupation were going really well (in April 2003, O’Hanlon
debated with himself over whether the strategy that led to the
“victory” in his beloved war should be deemed “brilliant” or
just extremely “clever,” while in June 2003, Pollack assured New
York Times readers that Saddam’s WMD would be found).
Since then,
O’Hanlon in particular has advocated for increased military force
in more countries than one can count. That’s not surprising:
Brookings is funded in part by one of the Democratic Party’s
favorite billionaires, Haim Saban, who is a dual citizen of the U.S.
and Israel and once said of himself: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my
issue is Israel.” Pollack advocated for the attack on Iraq while he
was “Director of Research of the Saban Center for Middle East
Policy.” Saban became the Democratic Party’s largest fundraiser —
even paying $7 million for the new DNC building — and is now a very
substantial funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In exchange,
she’s written a personal letter to him publicly “expressing her
strong and unequivocal support for Israel in the face of the Boycott,
Divestment and Sanction movement.”
So the
hawkish Brookings is the prism through which Hillary Clinton’s
foreign policy worldview can be best understood. The think tank is
filled with former advisers to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and
would certainly provide numerous top-level foreign policy officials
in any Hillary Clinton administration. As she put it today at the
start: “There are a lot of long-time friends and colleagues who
perch here at Brookings.” And she proceeded to deliver exactly the
speech one would expect, reminding everyone of just how militaristic
and hawkish she is.
The context
for her speech was the Iran Deal, which Clinton supports. It would be
virtually impossible for her not to do so — there is no way anyone
could win the Democratic nomination while opposing a key foreign
policy legacy of the sitting Democratic president — but, regardless
of the motives, she has the right position on that. But that deal is
vehemently opposed by AIPAC and of grave concern to the hawkish
foreign policy circles on which she has long depended, and so the
core purpose of the speech was to assure those nervous precincts
that, despite the Iran Deal support, she’s still the same
aggressive, war-threatening, obsessively Israel-devoted, bellicose
hawk they’ve grown to know and love.
Read
the rest of the story:
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“The
American economic elite, probably prepares the scenery for a more
'willing' puppet in power after the end of the Obama
administration. It appears that, for the moment, the most probable
person for this role is Hillary Clinton, for impression and
distraction purposes too (she will be the first woman president of
the United States, if elected, after Obama, who is the first
African-American president).”
“Hillary
Clinton seems more willing to play the dangerous game of
Washington's 'hawks' - she recently liken Putin's actions with
Hitler's during 30s - while we should not forget that Bill Clinton
brought a bloodbath in Bosnia and Yugoslavia through NATO bombings
during 90s. We should not forget also that Clinton was the one who
opened the way for the total dominance of neoliberalism in the
West, after the advices from the bankers.”
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