Hillary's War and the Next 9/11

"We want to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible steps"

 

 - Hillary Clinton on the imperialist U.S. occupation of Iraq in early 2007 (Goldberg 2007).

 

 

United States journalists often reveal and ignore the damndest things at the end of their articles.  Listen, for example, to the following comment by reporters Karen Tumulty and James Carney near the conclusion of a recent TIME magazine article on Hillary Clinton's response to the electoral challenge of Barack Obama:

 

"Both Clintons [Hillary and Bill] have made the case to potential fund raisers that the U.S. will probably suffer a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 after the next President is sworn in - and that Hillary is the only Democratic candidate capable of handling such a crisis because of her Senate Armed Services Committee tenure and her years in the White House" (Tumulty and Carney 2007, p. 43).   

 

And look at the following formulation from writers Evan Thomas and Larry Kaplow at the end of a recent Newsweek story on the U.S . military's effort to find three missing soldiers in Iraq: 

 

"A prolonged, massive search for the missing Americans GIs in Iraq may undermine the overall mission there.   But most U.S. solders interviewed by NEWSWEEK have long since stopped insisting that their greatest mission is to bring peace and democracy to Iraq.  More and more, they talk about their desire to simply protect their buddies and get everyone home alive" (Thomas and Kaplow 2007, p. 37)

 

 

 

HEGEMONY OVER SURVIVAL

 

Let's deal with the first comment first. Would anyone at TIME (in a follow-up piece perhaps) like to make a connection between the apparently likelihood (by Bill and Hillary's reckoning at least) of a 9/11-scale terror attack in late January or early 2009 (!) and the mass-murderous oil invasion of Iraq - an invasion that Senate Armed Services Committee member Hillary Clinton deeply enabled and justified? The United States made a richly bipartisan decision to commit the supreme Nuremburg crime against Iraq and international law: the launching of an unprovoked war of aggression.   The "war" (occupation) was sold on blatantly fraudulent grounds, beginning with false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda/9-11 links and moving on to the childish assertion that Washington invaded to advance freedom and democracy in Iraq and the Middle East. It has resulted in the death of more than 700,000 Iraqis, the exodus of millions more, and in a general crisis and collapse of Iraqi society and infrastructure.   It is widely understood around the world to have been a brazenly imperialist effort to increase U.S. control over strategic Persian Gulf energy resources.

  

Meanwhile, the United States' dominant corporate war & entertainment media - a critical component of the supposed "freedom" culture overseas Islamists are accused of blindly hating - renders Arab and Muslim victims of the American assault invisible to the citizens of the world's most powerful nation. "Our" media was obsessed with the tragic murder of 32 innocent students at Virginia Tech but cannot bring itself to focus in any meaningful, honest or respectful way on routinely larger and daily civilian body counts in U.S.-mangled Iraq(1).

 

"Our" military offers hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about three U.S. soldiers ambushed south of Baghdad last May but gives paltry "blood money" payments of $500-$2500 to the family members of innocent civilians we butcher in the name of "democracy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We" valued the life of each U.S. civilian murdered by al-Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001 at $1.8 million (Mitchell 2007; Engelhardt 2007).

 

Is this all perhaps part of the answer to the great supposed mystery of "Why They Hate Us?" and to the related question of why we will probably soon (according to the Clintons) face another "terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11?"

 

As Noam Chomsky observed in July of 2005, when Hillary Clinton was eagerly embracing the occupation of Iraq in the name of "democracy":

 

"For U.S.-U.K. planners, invading Iraq was a far higher priority that the 'war on terror.' That much is revealed by the reports of their own intelligence agencies.   On the eve of the allied invasion, a classified report by National intelligence Council (NIC), the intelligence community's center for strategic thinking, 'predicted that an America-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict...the NIC warned that 'Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are "professionalized" and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself.'"

 

"The willingness of top planners to risk increase of terrorism does not of course indicate that they welcome such outcomes.   Rather, they are simply not a high priority in comparison with other objectives, such as controlling the world's major energy resources" (Chomsky 2007, p.135).

 

 

A HARD CHOICE

 

There is some relevant history to consider. Who can forget the famous nationally televised comment of the [corporate neo-] "liberal" Bill (and Hillary) Clinton administration's Secretary of State Madeline Albright regarding the murder of half a million Iraqi children by  U.S.-led economic sanctions?   It's a hard choice, she said, but added "we think the price is worth it" (Stahl 1996).

 

The Madame Secretary did not comment on whether the parents of the quietly mass-murdered children of Iraq agreed with her cruel cost accounting.

 

Clinton's deadly economic sanctions were part of a larger imperial U.S. Middle East policy that helped make the jetliner attacks of 9/11/2001 less than completely surprising to people who closely and honestly followed that policy and the Middle East (2).  

 

 

"IF I'D ONLY 'KNOWN' THEN WHAT MOST OF THE WORLD KNEW THEN"

 

Eleven years after Albright emitted her noxious words, "our" foreign policy and media are helping give the Arab and Muslim worlds more reasons to hate us than ever before. Hillary Clinton clings to the revolting claim that he wouldn't have voted to authorize George W. Bush to invade Iraq "if she had had the intelligence information in 2002 that she had now" (Healy 2007)  

 

Never mind that the fact that Cheney et al. were lying about the "threat" posed to the U.S. and the world by Saddam was well understood at home and abroad.   You didn't have to be some kind of clairvoyant, "expert," or insider to know better than to swallow the administration's deceptions. The transparently false and imperially motivated nature of the administration's case for war was evident to most of the morally and politically cognizant planet.   The cooked (not "bad") nature of the administration's "intelligence" ("fixed in advance by the policy," to paraphrase the Downing Street Memo) was apparent to numerous observers.  

 

 

"REQUIRED READING"

 

And never mind that the self-proclaimed foreign policy expert Hillary Clinton didn't even bother to read the complete classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, "the most comprehensive judgment of the intelligence community about Iraq's [supposed] WMD, which was made available to all 100 senators."   As Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. recently reported in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

 

"The 90-page report was delivered to Congress on Oct.1, 2002, just 10 days before the Senate vote [the war authorization vote that gave Bush II the freedom to attack Iraq at will, P.S.].  An abridged summary was made public by the Bush administration, but it painted a less subtle picture of Iraq's weapons program than the full classified reports.   To get a complete picture required reading the entire document, which, according to a version of the report made public in 2004, contained numerous caveats and dissents on Iraq's weapons and capacities...

 

"The question of whether Clinton took time to read the N.I.E. report is critically important.  Indeed, one of Clinton's Democratic colleagues, Bob Graham, the Florida senator who was then chairman of the intelligence committee, said he voted against the resolution on the war, in part because he had read the complete N.I.E. report.  Graham said he found that it did not persuade him that Iraq possessed WMD. 'I was able to apply caveat emptor,' Graham, who has since left the Senate, observed in 2005.   He added regretfully, 'Most of my colleagues could not.'"

 

Hillary never read the full report (3).

 

  

 

A FORGOTTEN VOTE AGAINST DIPLOMACY

 

It gets worse. A second and related justification Clinton gives for her fateful war authorization vote maintains that she wanted Bush II to possess the military option but trusted and expected him to utilize and exhaust diplomatic avenues before attacking. Bush betrayed this trust, Clinton says.

 

But on what grounds does she expect us to believe that she honestly expected the openly war-mongering and neoconservative- and Chickenhawk-laden Bush administration to stand down from their unmistakable lust to assault and occupy defenseless Iraq?  

 

And how are we supposed to explain the fact that she joined 74 other senators in voting against Senator Carl Levin's (D-MI) earlier (several hours before the war authorization vote) proposal of an amendment that would have required the White House to follow a diplomatic process (returning to the UN and perhaps again to Congress) before the legislative branch would fully authorize the use of force (Gerth and Van Nata Jr. 2007, p. 43)? In campaign speeches and meetings where she likes to accuse Bush of having given "short shrift to diplomacy," Clinton naturally never mentions "her own vote against Levin's 2002 amendment, the one that would have required the president to pursue a more diplomatic approach before any invasion of Iraq" (Gerth and Van Natta, pp.60, 66)     

 

 

 

THE BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS: "TACTICAL, NOT PRINCIPLED DIFFERENCES"  

 

It strains credulity for Hillary to say that she was fooled by Cheney-Bush's "bad" (actually cooked) Iraq WMD "intelligence" and then by the hope that Bush would follow through on a diplomatic process she actually voted against requiring. This explanation amounts to admitting that Hillary was one or some mixture of three things, none good, in the fall of 2002:

 

1. a geeked-up post-9/11 war hawk who (consistent with her especially strong support of Israel) was more than ready to join the bloody assault on the oil-rich Arab world.

 

2. a political coward who concluded that Cheney-Bush's illegal war was an unstoppable fait accompli that she could oppose only at serious cost to her presidential-electoral viability.

 

3. unforgivably incompetent in her assessment of relevant information. 

 

Hillary Clinton is not stupid or incompetent, though her failure to read the NIE does not speak well to her effectiveness as an imperial manager. My best guess is that her decision reflected a combination of (1) and (2), with (1) being the heavier part of the equation in the fall of 2002 (I would emphasize # 2 and an over-reliance on centrist political advice in explaining John Edwards' vote for the war authorization).

 

In explaining how and why a probably Democratic White House will (if the Clinton's are correct) be welcomed with "a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11" in early 2009, it is relevant to remember that Bush's reckless foreign policy is remarkably consistent with the imperial practices and doctrines of the neoliberal Clinton administration and with dominant trends in Democratic Party foreign policy thinking. As Tuft's University political scientist Tony Smith notes in a candid Washington Post commentary last March: "Although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush, the fact is that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different from the Bush-Cheney doctrine.  Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions."

 

Smith offers an interesting history of the convergence between Democratic neoliberal interventionism and Republican neoconservative interventionism - both falsely conflating the forceful assertion and expansion of U.S. power and global market forces with "democracy" - during and since the 1990s:

 

"Democratic adherents to what might be called the 'neoliberal' position are well organized and well positioned. Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright, then President Bill Clinton's secretary of state: 'If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future.' She was speaking of Bosnia at the time, but her remark had much wider implications."

 

"Since 1992, the ascendant Democratic faction in foreign policy debates has been the thinkers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides damning Bush's handling of the Iraq war, but it has never condemned the invasion. It has criticized Bush's failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better."

 

 "... These [Democratic] neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable from the better-known neoconservatives...Sources for many of the critical elements of the Bush doctrine can be found in the emergence of neoliberal thought during the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. In think tanks, universities and government offices, left-leaning intellectuals, many close to the Democratic Party, formulated concepts to bring to fruition the age-old dream of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson 'to make the world safe for democracy.' These [Democratic] neolibs advocated the global expansion of 'market democracy.' They presented empirical, theoretical, even philosophical arguments to support the idea of the United States as the indispensable nation [, helping provide] ...the intellectual substance of much of the Bush doctrine..."

 

"Dealing with Serbia in the 1990s cemented the neocon-neolib entente. By Sept. 11, 2001, these two groups had converged as a single ideological family. They agreed that American nationalism was best expressed in world affairs as a progressive imperialism. The rallying call for armed action would be promoting human rights and democratic government among peoples who resisted American hegemony."

 

"And so we may appreciate the Democrats' difficulty in their search for an exit strategy not only from Iraq but also from the temptations of a superpower."

 

As Anthony Arnove noted in early 2006,"the Democrats, who not only voted for the war but have repeatedly voted to fund it, have tactical, not principled differences from the Republicans [over the Iraq occupation], believing that, in the words of the Washington Post, 'success in Iraq at this point is too important'" for the U.S. to withdraw.  "In fact, rather than arguing for troops to come home," Arnove observed, "a number of leading Democrats, such as Senators Joseph Lieberman and Hillary Clinton are seeking to outflank Bush from the right by calling for more troops in Iraq" (Arnove 2006, p. 99).

 

 

DEMOCRACY PROMOTION

 

Hillary Clinton is an especially strong example of the sort of interventionist Democrat Smith discusses - a so-called "progressive imperialist" who "embraces the idea of a muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or defend key U.S. interests." Described by the New York Times in 2005 as "a strong proponent of a forceful American military presence abroad" (Arnove 2006, p. 99), she sounded more hawkish than de facto neoconservative Lieberman on the supposed democratic ambitions and successful record of the Iraq invasion until it finally (some time in 2006) sunk in with her that the criminal occupation was not working and was therefore a terrible "mistake" (Gerth and Van Natta Jr. 2007).       

 

Like the other top-tier Democratic candidates, Clinton clings to the laughable notion that the imperialist occupation of Iraq reflects a noble desire to bring peoples power to Iraq and the Middle East (Goldberg 2007; Street 2007a, 2007b, and 2007c) [4]. "We want to continue to export democracy," Hillary Clinton told the New Yorker at the end of 2006, "but we want to deliver it in digestible steps" (Goldberg 2007). Never mind that the occupation is a monumentally illegal war crime exercised in defiance of Iraqi and world opinion and international law and directed at deepening U.S. control over Middle Eastern energy resources - a goal that stands in direct conflict with the alleged motive of enhancing popular rule and national independence in Iraq.   

 

Which brings us back to the second mainstream media passage quoted at the beginning of this essay (see the fourth paragraph on the first page of this article). If NEWSWEEK writers Thomas and Kaplow are correct, the nation's mostly working-class occupation troops are downplaying Washington's supposed "democracy-promotion" goal in Iraq. Nobody faces more pressure to internalize the U.S. government's fraudulent pretexts for the bloody colonial occupation of Iraq (Street 2007d). At the same time, no Americans have a better frontline seat than the GIs on the absurdity of the United States' claim to be bringing cherished western principles of popular governance to the Iraqis, less than 2 percent of whom have ever accepted the notion that the U.S. invaded to spread "democracy." "In Iraq, like Vietnam," Anthony Arnove noted in early 2006, "soldiers themselves have begun to question the rationale for the war given by politicians and daily echoed by the dominant media, as they see on the ground the enormous contradictions in the claim that the United states is 'bringing democracy' to a people it is brutalizing and repressing" (Arnove 2006, p. xvi).   

 

Democracy, it might be worth noting, is in disturbingly short supply and no small peril in the United States (Alperovitz 2005, pp.1-4 , 42-54; Chomsky 2006, pp. 205-251). The Iraq occupation is one of many examples of the shocking disconnect between majority public opinion and policy (the "democracy deficit") in the U.S. Most U.S. citizens have long rejected the invasion and supported a rapid withdrawal while Bush has "stayed the course" and escalated the "war."   Leading Democrats and the Democratic-majority Congress have pathetically dithered, failing even to make the continued funding of the invasion contingent upon elementary timelines for eventual withdrawal.  

 

In the meantime, here's something for the onetime Iraqi "economic sanctions" enthusiast and ardent 2003-2006 Iraq invasion supporter Hillary Clinton and her supporters to reflect upon: maybe we should try to avert future "terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11" (or larger) by finding a non-imperialist way to think about and relate to the people and nations of the Middle East and the world.

 

 

Veteran radical historian, journalist, and activist Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com ) is a Left commentator in Iowa City, IA. Street's latest book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).  Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and the semi-weekly Empire and Inequality Report.

 

 

NOTES

 

1. Truth be told, that media has spent more energy mourning the death of a fallen U.S. horse (Barbaro) than acknowledging the U.S.-imposed death of untold thousands of children in illegally occupied Iraq.

 

2. Sometimes the U.S killed Iraqis more directly during the years when Bill and Hillary occupied the White House.   In 1998, the U.S., assisted by the United Kingdom, "launched more than 400 cruise missiles and flew 650 air attacks against suspected weapons-of-mass-destruction sites in Iraq" (Gerth and Van Natta Jr. 2006. p. 41). On Clinton's imperial violence against the Arab and Muslim world, see Hitchens 2000, pp.85-102).

 

3.  According to Gerth and Van Natta Jr, "Senators were able to access the [full] N.I.E. at two secure locations in the Capitol complex.   Nonetheless, only six senators personally read the report...Earlier this year, on the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, Clinton was confronted by a woman who had traveled from New York to ask her if she had read the intelligence report.   According to Eloise Harper of ABC News, Clinton responded that she had been briefed on it...On Tuesday, Oct. 8, Senate Democrats, including Clinton, held a caucus over lunch on the second floor of the Capitol.   There, Graham said he 'forcefully' urged his colleagues to read the complete 90-page N.I.E. before casting such a monumental vote" (Gerth and Van Natta Jr., 2007, pp. 41-42).

 

4. Barack Obama's position is just as mendacious. He describes the invasion of Iraq as a "strategic blunder" executed "with all the best of intentions" and expressing a misguided but sincere U.S. desire to "export democracy by the barrel of a gun" (Obama 2006, pp, pp. 297-98, 317). John Edwards unfortunately told the New Yorker in late 2006 that "America has fulfilled its commitment to the Iraqi people...We've been there for a few years," Edwards elaborated.  "We've devoted enormous resources, human and otherwise. And now we've reached the place, I think, where the Iraqis are going to have to take responsibility. 'My view of Darfur," Edwards added, "is that we've done nothing but yap.  We - as a lot of American families can tell you - we've done a lot more than talk in Iraq.  And I think you just reach a place where you have to say, 'We've done our part, and now it's time for you to step up to the plate.' You can't police places forever" (Goldberg 2007). We've certainly "done a lot more than talk" TO Iraq!

 

 

SOURCES

 

Gar Alperovitz 2005. America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy (New York: Wiley, 2005).

 

Anthony Arnove 2006.  Iraq: the Logic of Withdrawal (New York: New Press, 2006).

 

Noam Chomsky 2006.  Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan 2006).

 

Noam Chomsky 2007.  Interventions (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007).

 

Tom Engelhardt 2007. "What Price Slaughter?" Tom Dispatch, reproduced on ZNet (May 14, 2007) and available on at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle. cfm?ItemID=12829.

 

Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. 2007.  Hillary's War," New York Times Sunday Magazine (June 3 2007), p. 41.

 

Jeffrey Goldberg 2007.  "The Starting Gate: Foreign Policy Divides the Democrats," The New Yorker, January 15, 2007.

 

Patrick Healy 2007. "In New Hampshire, Clinton Owns Up Her Vote on Iraq War,"  New York Times, 11 February 2007, sec. 1, p.22).

 

Christopher Hitchens 2000.  No One Left to Lie to: the Values of the Worst Family (New York: Verso, 2000)

 

Greg Mitchell 2007. "Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here's $500," Editor and Publisher, April 14, 2007, available online at http://www.editorandpublisher. com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003571125).

 

Barack Obama 2006. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, NY: Crown, 2006).  

 

Tony Smith 2007.  "It's Uphill for the Democrats: They Need a Global Strategy, Not Just Tactics for Iraq," Washington Post, 11 March, 2007, p. B01, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2007/03/09/ AR2007030901884_pf.html).

 

Leslie Stahl 1996. "Punishing Saddam," produced by Catherine Olian, CBS 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996.

 

Paul Street 2007a.  "We've Done a Lore More Than Talk," Empire and Inequality Report No. 7 (January 19 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11895.

 

Paul Street 2007b.  "' We've Done Our Part:' The Democratic Party Line on the United States' Commitment to Peace and Democracy Within and Beyond Iraq," Empire and Inequality Report No. 14 (March 27, 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12432.

 

Paul Street 2007c.  "Imperial Temptations: John Edwards, Barack Obama and the Myth of Post-WWII U.S. Benevolence," Empire and Inequality Report No. 19 (May 28 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12928.

 

Paul Street 2007 d.  "Loss, Class, Empire and the Vicious Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance," Empire and Inequality Report No. 22 (forthcoming).

 

Evan Thomas and Larry Kaplow 2007.  "Manhunt in Mesopotamia." NEWSWEEK (May 28, 2007): 36-37.

 

Karen Tumulty and James Carney 2007.  "Hillary Pushes Back."  TIME (May 7 2007): 42-43.