by
Ted Rall
What if
Hillary Clinton had won 114,000 more votes in four key states? Or,
what if she’d picked up the two to three percent of the vote she
lost because Bernie Sanders’ supporters sat on their hands on
election day? She’d be “Clinton 2” or “Clinton 45” or “the
second President Clinton” — and the world would look very
different.
In terms
of personnel and therefore policy, a Clinton Administration II would
look and feel like a mash-up of Obama’s third term and a throwback
to figures who populated her husband’s White House during the
1990s. Having moved to the right since Bill’s first term,
progressive figures like then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich would be
out in the cold. Rahm Emanuel and Timothy Geithner could expect
cabinet offers. So could some Bush-era neo-cons like Robert Kagan.
Hillary
didn’t promise much change to domestic policy during her campaign.
Her biggest proposal was to spend $275 billion on infrastructure,
which would have left us $1.3 trillion short of what’s needed. Not
that she could have gotten it through the Republican Congress.
The
alternate presidential history of 2017 differs most significantly in
two respects: foreign policy, and tone.
Clinton’s
liberal supporters always glossed over her long history of hawkish,
arguably far-right, approaches to military matters. Those who mourn
her loss to Trump today have completely forgotten that she convinced
Obama to back military coups against the democratically-elected
leaders of Honduras and Egypt. She also successfully advised advised
Obama to arm and fund radical Islamist militias in Syria and Libya,
plunging two modern Muslim countries into civil wars that have
reduced them to failed states. Clinton’s famous cackle after a U.S.
drone blew up Libyan ruler Moammar Khaddafi’s convoy, leading to
his being sodomized by bayonet on video, is terrifying.
“It’s
impossible to know which national security crises she would be forced
to confront, of course,” Micah Zenko speculated in Foreign Policy
in July 2016. “But those who vote for her should know that she will
approach such crises with a long track record of being generally
supportive of initiating U.S. military interventions and expanding
them.”
Two
months later, another FP writer penned an astonishing look behind the
Kremlin walls at the thinking of top Russian officials worried about
the U.S. election: “Moscow perceives the former secretary of state
as an existential threat… That fear was heightened when Clinton
surrogate Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, recently accused
Putin of attempting to rig the U.S. election through cyberattacks.
That is a grave allegation — the very kind of thing a President
Clinton might repeat to justify war with Russia,” wrote Clinton
Ehrlich.
Would
Hillary’s tough talk have triggered World War III with Russia by
now? Probably not. But it’s not impossible — which shows us how
far right she stands politically on the use of the force.
More
likely and thus more worrisome, Hillary might have leveraged the
current U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan into attacks against
neighboring Iran. “I want the Iranians to know, if I am the
president, we will attack Iran” if Iran were to attack Israel —
even if there were no Congressional authorization or a clear and
present danger to the U.S., Clinton said in 2008. “And I want them
to understand that… we would be able to totally obliterate them [to
retaliate for an attack on Israel].” Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan,
Iran has a real military and thus a real ability to defend itself —
which would mean a long, costly and possibly unwinnable war.
Like
Trump, Hillary would almost certainly be authorizing the
construction, deployment and use of more assassination drone planes.
The one
arena where most people agree that President Clinton would have been
better than President Trump is presidential tone. Yes, “she does
yell into microphones and speak in an overly enunciated voice—two
factors that may make her seem abrasive.” But this is a woman whose
campaign assigned 12 staffers to compose a tweet; they went through
10 drafts over 10 hours. There wouldn’t be any Trump-style 3 a.m.
Twitter diarrhea coming out of a Clinton White House.
When
George W. Bush was president, there wasn’t one morning I didn’t
regret that Al Gore wasn’t there instead. Gore wouldn’t have
invaded Iraq. He might not have gone into Afghanistan either. Unlike
pretty much every other president, he cared about the environment.
There
isn’t a single moment I miss President Hillary Clinton, though.
Trump is a disaster, a real piece of crap. But everyone knows it.
Because Trump is so loud and stupid and cruel and greedy and corrupt,
all liberals and not a few conservatives clearly discern the true
nature of his administration, and of the system itself.
If
Hillary Clinton were president, the left would still be just as
asleep as it was between 2008 and 2016. First woman president! Aren’t
we just the best.
Meanwhile,
the drones fire their missiles and U.S. troops and spooks prop up
tyrants, and the filthy rich rake in their loot.
Trump
gives us clarity. That is no small thing.
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