HILLARY CLINTON’s Foreign Policy Apocalypse: Past and Future…

Hillary Clinton and Nicolas Sarkosy
(AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Now seems a good time to anticipate what US foreign policy might look like under Hillary Clinton; and to recap some of the horror story of her foreign policy record to date.

Is ‘President Hillary’ a foreign-policy apocalypse waiting to happen?

In her spell with the State Department, Hilary oversaw an illegal military destruction of Libya and collapse of the Libyan state, helped agitate the unrest in Syria that created the Syrian Civil War, and played a key role in allowing a right-wing military coup to overthrow a democratically-elected government in Honduras.

Presumably she would’ve played much the same part in all of these catastrophes had she been President at the time. She had of course intended to be President at that time; but thanks to Obama’s stealing of the Democratic nomination from her, she was instead moved to the State Department.

As Secretary of State, she was able to participate in far-reaching conspiracies with horrific international consequences that are still very much going on now.

As she now makes a second bid for the Presidency, she will acquire even more power to continue her destructive work abroad and will likely gather around herself (and put into the State Department) those familiar players who will serve to further those agendas; including probably the likes of Victoria Nuland and Samantha Power.

Hillary barely even conceals this intention. Aside from remaining entirely unapologetic about her deceitful role in the Libyan catastrophe (a country that still doesn’t have a government even five years after Hilary made up her stories about Gaddafi killing civilian protesters, ordering the rape of women and handing out viagra), she has openly stated her willingness to go to war with Iran and to return to the regime-change operation to remove President Assad from Syria.

Hilary’s foreign policy is usually clothed in a disguise of ethical or moral purpose, but in reality is purely corporate or geo-political and is therefore often nonsensical and contradictory.

During the Arab Spring, at the very same time that she was demanding military intervention against Gaddafi and calling for Assad to leave Syria (in both cases because they were attacking their own protesters), she was affirming support for the dictatorship in Bahrain, which was also using force (backed up by Saudi troops) to attack its civilian protesters. The difference was that, where there was very little proof of Gaddafi’s government attacking civilians, there was plenty of proof of the Bahraini forces doing so.

And as Stephen Zunes notes, ‘she has criticized the Russians for supplying Syria with attack helicopters which have been used against civilian targets, but has defended the US supplying Israel, Turkey and Colombia with attack helicopters despite their use against civilian targets’.

Hillary isn’t only the arch war-hawk; she also seems to have psychopathic tendencies.

I wrote at length about Hillary’s role in the destruction of Libya in my book on the Libya conspiracy; I also talked in the book about the accusations that Hillary was personally connected with the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi: how the Libyan figurehead had actually been trying to negotiate a peaceful departure from Libya, how Gaddafi’s convoy had been displaying white flags of truce when it was attacked by NATO bombers, and how Hillary (pictured below with Libyan rebels) herself may have sanctioned the strike that destroyed his convoy and led to his capture.

 
Hillary Clinton with Libyan rebels, 2011 

Some have taken this account further, suggesting that she green-lighted Gaddafi’s murder while in the company of Libya’s Western-backed ‘opposition’; although I’m not sure of the sources; ‘When his wish was presented to Clinton, a source in the room with Clinton has revealed that she silently made the “off with his head” hand motion by moving her hand quickly across her neck. She could do that because she knew the rebels were well equipped with American arms with which to kill him. She didn’t care that many of the rebels were al-Qaida or that arming them was a felony. She lied about this under oath.’

Here, if you’ve never seen it before, is the video of Hillary’s gleeful reaction to the brutal murder of the 69 year-old.

Concerning the Benghazi controversy and the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens – in which Hillary and the State Department – are accused of leaving Stevens to die at the hands of Western-backed Libyan jihadists, it is almost certain that he was sacrificed because he was the CIA asset responsible for the massive weapons transfer from Libyan rebels to Syrian rebels and it was decided that him being killed would help cover up what Seymour Hersh had called the secret ‘Rat Line’.

Concerning that now well-attested transfer of arms (and jihadists) from the fallen Libya and into Syria, this was carried out under Hillary’s leadership of the State Department. Having accomplished the collapse of Libya and murder of Gaddafi, the policy was immediately pursued to try to repeat the same success in Syria: with vast amounts of weaponry stolen from the Libyan Army covertly shipped to Western-backed Syrian rebels, while Hillary moved effortlessly from ‘Gaddafi Must Go’ to ‘Assad Must Go’. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Seymour Hersh, who had been the primary exposer of the aforementioned Libya-to-Syria ‘Rat Line‘, also later exposed that Hillary had personally approved the sending of sarin gas from Libya to the rebels in Syria: probably the same sarin that would later be used by the rebels against Syrian civilians and blamed by international leaders (to this day) on – led of course by Hillary herself – President Assad.

It has become increasingly clear also that Hillary was fully aware of (and party to) the plan to ignite a sectarian war across the Middle East between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Leaked emails confirm that the War in Syria – though it was brought about for a number of geo-political reasons – was largely engineered in order to fully blow up the sectarian conflict that the Neo-Con regime began with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and that a central motive for this was to service Israeli interests by weakening Syria, and weakening Iran in turn. “The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies,Sidney Blumental wrote in one of the emails to Clinton, dated 2012.

Five years, over a quarter of a million deaths and a devastated nation later, Hillary is still very much committing to the same hymn sheet, as witnessed by her dogged position regarding Aleppo and her commitment to the ‘Assad Must Go’ mantra.

Even with Washington’s Syria policy utterly collapsed and the regime-change program essentially failed, she is still fully committed to removing Assad from Damascus.

_____________________

Hillary, Democrat or not, should be viewed as pretty much a Neo-Con – in foreign policy terms, at least, and a clear successor to the Bush-led Cheney/Rumsfeld regime.

This is further illustrated by, for example, Jacob Heilbrunn’s article from some time ago in the New York Times entitled ‘The Next Act of the Neocons‘, in which he highlights how many Neo-Cons were considering defecting from the spectacle of the GOP to join the Hillary camp.

Hilary is frequently lauded and endorsed by Neo-Con figures, largely the same people who’ve spent years desperately waiting for Obama to get out of the picture.

As successor to Bush, she – like Bush – may be ‘predestined’ to assume the presidency no matter what (hence all the electoral fraud in the Democratic primaries and the fact that Bernie Sanders was reportedly threatened to get out of the way), and she may come into office with a pre-fabricated war/invasion in her secret contract.

This is why Vladimir Putin appears to have openly suggested that a Hillary Clinton victory would mean World War III; and why Moscow appears to be taking every measure to prepare itself for war. Hillary has spent most of her presidential campaign demonising Russia, accusing Russia of being in league with WikiLeaks and accusing Russian hackers of cyber attacks. The anti-Russia demonisation is being built up and played out in Western media so that a prospective Hillary regime has a running start and no time is wasted.


Clinton has also acquired a reputation as one of the most right-wing Democrats when it comes to Israel and Palestine.


She repeatedly sides with the Likud-centered governments and against the progressives and moderates in Israel. And she has shown no interest in bringing international law to bear on the Israeli state. Hilary’s pro-Zionist leanings were clearly demonstrated, for example, in 2011; in the same year that she was using her influence to bring about the collapse in Libya and the Civil War in Syria, Hillary successfully pushed for the American veto of a UN Security Council resolution that would’ve called for a clampdown on illegal Israeli settlement building and would’ve reaffirmed the illegality of the settler activity.

A Hilary Clinton Presidency is very much in the State of Israel’s interests – although, in truth, Netanyahu probably has both outcomes covered and is likely to also be on friendly terms with Donald Trump.

In contrast to the uneasy relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, Hillary has promised to invite the right-wing Israeli prime minister to the White House as one of her first acts if she inherits the Oval Office. This is more than just a symbolic statement. She has also said she is ready to take the relationship between the United States and Israel “to the next level”; whatever that’s supposed to mean. How many more “levels” can there be to the US/Israel relationship?

But Mrs Clinton specified at a Washington forum hosted by the Brookings Institution (who drew up the plans for the regime-change operation in Syria and for the invasion of Iraq), saying she would immediately “work towards very much strengthening and intensifying our relationship on military matters”. That reference to “military matters” is again quite possibly a reference to Iran, particularly as Netanyahu and his government has been continually pushing for an attack on Iran for many years now (and has been deeply frustrated by President Obama’s unwillingness to play to that agenda; the main cause of the friction between Netanyahu and Obama).

It’s interesting to note that since Hillary stood down from the State Department (in February 2013), President Obama has followed a more flexible, tempered foreign policy route. He had, for example, been willing to cooperate with Russia for a time in achieving some degree of diplomatic progress in Syria, and had been crucially willing to follow a diplomatic path with Iran (despite all the immense opposition from within Washington, as well as from America’s Israeli and Saudi allies).

Also, Obama has been entirely willing to fall out with the Israeli government and the Israel Lobby.

Hillary is unlikely to do anything of the sort.


All of which adds to my longstanding suspicions that Obama’s decisions regarding Libya were guided heavily by Hillary and the State Department (along with pressure from Paris and London): and were not based on his own better judgements.


Honduras was another example of Hillary Clinton’s highly dubious foreign policy decision-making. I already covered the Honduras coup here, so I won’t go over those details again now.

This is the woman poised to be the next president of the most powerful nation on earth. When Vladimir Putin says that her assumption of the presidency could mean World War III, he is not – as many American commentators claim – simply trying to “interfere” in the US election or trying to threaten Americans into voting a certain way: rather, he is tracking Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy trajectory to its logical consequences and warning people that there is a line now drawn in the sand.

If people think Trump is a risk – and he is, especially domestically – it should not be overlooked how much of a risk Hillary Clinton is in foreign policy terms.

S. Awan

Independent journalist. Pariah. Believer in human rights, human dignity and liberty. Musician. Substandard Jedi. All-round failure. And future ghost.

3 Comments

    • Thanks Ray032, will be interested in what Pilger is saying.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.