Is Hillary Clinton "Qualified?"
Monday, 11 April 2016 00:00 By Robert Parry, Consortium News | News Analysis
Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event at Industry City in the
Brooklyn borough of New York, April 9, 2016. (Hilary Swift / The New York
Times)
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders
questioning her qualifications to be President as "silly" -- and looking at
her résumé alone, she'd be right -- but there is also the need to judge her
performance in her various jobs.
What is troubling about Clinton's record is that she has left behind a trail
strewn with failures and even catastrophes. Indeed, her highest profile
undertakings almost universally ended in disaster -- and a person's record
should matter when voters are deciding whether to entrust him or her with
the most powerful office on earth.
In other words, it's not just a question of her holding one prestigious job
or another; it's also how well she did in those jobs. Otherwise, you have a
case of the Peter Principle Squared, not just letting someone rise to the
level of his or her incompetence, but in Clinton's case, continuing to get
promoted beyond her level of incompetence.
So, looking behind Clinton's résumé is important. After all, she presents
herself as the can-do candidate who will undertake small-scale reforms that
may not move the needle much but are better than nothing and may be all
that's possible given the bitterly divided Congress.
But is Hillary Clinton really a can-do leader? Since she burst onto the
national scene with her husband's presidential election in 1992, she has
certainly traveled a lot, given many speeches and met many national and
foreign leaders -- which surely has some value -- but it's hard to identify
much in the way of her meaningful accomplishments.
Clinton's most notable undertaking as First Lady was her disastrous health
insurance plan that was concocted with her characteristic secrecy and then
was unveiled to decidedly mixed reviews. Much of the scheme was mind-numbing
in its complexity and -- because of the secrecy -- it lacked sufficient
input from Congress where it found few enthusiastic supporters.
Not only did the plan collapse under its own weight, but it helped take many
Democratic members of Congress with it, as the Republicans reversed a long
era of Democratic control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Because
of Hillary Clinton's health-care disaster, a chastened Democratic Party
largely took the idea of providing near-universal health-insurance coverage
to Americans off the table for the next 15 years.
In Clinton's next career as a senator from New York, her most notable action
was to enthusiastically support President George W. Bush's Iraq War. Clinton
did not just vote to authorize the war in 2002, she remained a war supporter
until 2006 when it became politically untenable to do so, that is, if she
had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination against
anti-war Sen. Barack Obama.
Both in her support for the war in the early years and her politically
expedient switch -- along with a grudging apology for her "mistake" --
Clinton showed very little courage.
When she was supporting the war, the post-9/11 wind was at Bush's back. So
Clinton joined him in riding the jingoistic wave. By 2006, the American
people had turned against the war and the Republican Party was punished at
the polls for it, losing control of Congress. So it was no
profile-in-courage for Clinton to distance herself from Bush then.
Not Learning Lessons
Still, Clinton seemed to have learned little about the need to ask probing
questions of Bush's team. In November 2006, she completely misread Bush's
firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replacing him with ex-CIA
Director Robert Gates. Serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
Clinton bought the conventional wisdom that Gates's nomination meant that
Bush was winding down the Iraq War despite warnings that it actually meant
the opposite.
If Clinton had done any digging, she could have discovered that Rumsfeld was
dumped not because of his warmongering but because he backed his field
generals -- George Casey and John Abizaid -- who wanted to rapidly shrink
the US military "footprint" in Iraq. But Bush and his neocon advisers saw
that as effectively an admission of defeat, so they got rid of Rumsfeld and
recruited the more malleable Gates to front for their planned escalation or
"surge."
Not only did Consortiumnews.com spell out that reality in real time, but it
also was explained by right-wing pundit Fred Barnes in the neocon Weekly
Standard. As Barnes wrote, Gates "is not the point man for a boarding party
of former national security officials from the elder President Bush's
administration taking over defense and foreign policy in his son's
administration.
Rarely has the press gotten a story so wrong."
Barnes reported instead that the younger George Bush didn't consult his
father and only picked Gates after a two-hour face-to-face meeting at which
the younger Bush got assurances that Gates was onboard with the neocon
notion of "democracy promotion" in the Middle East and shared Bush's goal of
victory in Iraq. [The Weekly Standard, Nov. 27, 2006]
But the mainstream press -- and much of Official Washington -- loved the
other storyline. A Newsweek cover pictured a large George HW Bush towering
over a small George W. Bush. Embracing this conventional wisdom, Clinton and
other Senate Armed Services Committee members brushed aside the warnings
about Gates, both his troubling history at the CIA and his likely support
for a war escalation.
In his 2014 memoir, Duty, Gates reflects on his 2006 nomination and how
completely clueless Official Washington was. Regarding the conventional
wisdom about Bush-41 taking the reins from Bush-43, Gates wrote about his
recruitment by the younger Bush: "It was clear he had not consulted his
father about this possible appointment and that, contrary to later
speculation, Bush 41 had no role in it."
Regarding the mainstream news media's wrongheaded take on his nomination,
Gates wrote: "There was a lot of hilarious commentary about a return to
'41's' team, the president's father coming to the rescue, former secretary
of state Jim Baker pulling all the strings behind the scenes, and how I was
going to purge the Pentagon of Rumsfeld's appointees, 'clean out the E-Ring'
(the outer corridor of the Pentagon where most senior Defense civilians have
their offices). It was all complete nonsense."
Though Gates doesn't single out Hillary Clinton for misreading the
significance of his nomination, Gates wrote: "The Democrats were even more
enthusiastic, believing my appointment would somehow hasten the end of the
war.
They professed to be enormously pleased with my nomination and
offered their support, I think mainly because they thought that I, as a
member of the Iraq Study Group [which had called for winding down the war],
would embrace their desire to begin withdrawing from Iraq."
In other words, Hillary Clinton got fooled again.
Surging for Surges
Once installed at the Pentagon, Gates became a central figure in the Iraq
War "surge," which dispatched 30,000 more US troops to Iraq in 2007. The
"surge" saw casualty figures spike. Nearly 1,000 additional American died
along with an untold number of Iraqis. And despite another conventional
wisdom about the "successful surge" it failed to achieve its central goal of
getting the Iraqis to achieve compromises on their sectarian divisions.
Yet, the mainstream press didn't get any closer to the mark in 2008 when it
began cheering the Iraq "surge" as a great success, getting spun by the
neocons who noted a gradual drop in the casualty levels. The media honchos,
many of whom supported the invasion in 2003, ignored that Bush had laid out
specific policy goals for the "surge," none of which were achieved.
In Duty, Gates reminds us of those original targets, writing: "Prior to the
deployment, clear benchmarks should be established for the Iraqi government
to meet during the time of the augmentation, from national reconciliation to
revenue sharing, etc."
Those benchmarks were set for the Iraqi government to meet, but the goals
were never achieved, either during the "surge" or since then. To this day,
Iraq remains a society bitterly divided along sectarian lines with the
out-of-power Sunnis again sidling up to Al Qaeda-connected extremists and
even the Islamic State.
But Clinton didn't have the courage or common sense to recognize that the
Iraq War "surge" had failed. After Obama appointed her as Secretary of State
-- as part of a naïve gesture of outreach to a "team of rivals" -- Clinton
fell back in line behind Official Washington's new favorite conventional
wisdom, the "successful surge."
In the end, all the Iraq War "surge" did was buy President Bush and his
neocon advisers time to get out of office before the failure of the Iraq War
became obvious to the American public. Its other primary consequence was to
encourage Defense Secretary Gates, who was kept on by President Obama as a
gesture of bipartisanship, to conjure up another "surge" for Afghanistan.
In that context, in Duty, Gates recounts a 2009 White House meeting
regarding the Afghan War "surge." He wrote: "The exchange that followed was
remarkable. In strongly supporting the surge in Afghanistan, Hillary told
the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political
because she was facing him in the Iowa primary [in 2008]. She went on to
say, 'The Iraq surge worked.'
"The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been
political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of
me, was as surprising as it was dismaying." Obama's aides disputed Gates's
suggestion that the President indicated that his opposition to the Iraq
"surge" was political, noting that he had always opposed the Iraq War. The
Clinton team never challenged Gates's account.
In other words, having been an Iraq War hawk when it mattered -- from
2002-06 -- Hillary Clinton changed direction when that was politically
expedient, apologizing for her "mistake," but then returned to her
enthusiasm for the war by accepting the benighted view that the "surge
worked."
Clinton's enthusiasm for "surges" also influenced her to side with Gates and
General David Petraeus, a neocon favorite, to pressure Obama into a "surge"
for Afghanistan, sending in an additional 30,000 troops on a bloody,
ill-fated "counterinsurgency" mission. Again, the cost in American lives was
about 1,000 soldiers but their sacrifice did little to shift the war's
outcome.
Winning Praise
Again and again, Hillary Clinton seemed incapable of learning from her
costly errors -- or perhaps she just understands that the politically safest
course is to do what Washington's neocon-dominated foreign policy
establishment wants done. That way you get hailed as a serious thinker in
the editorial pages of The Washington Post and at the think-tank
conferences.
Virtually all the major columnists and big-name pundits praised Clinton's
hawkish tendencies as Secretary of State, from her escalating tensions with
Iran to tipping the balance of the Obama administration's debate in favor of
a "regime change" mission in Libya to urging direct US military intervention
in Syria in pursuit of another "regime change" there.
On the campaign trail, Clinton seeks to spin all these militaristic
recommendations as somehow beneficial to the United States. But the reality
is quite different.
Regarding Iran, in 2010, Secretary Clinton personally killed a promising
initiative sponsored by Brazil and Turkey (at President Obama's request) to
get Iran to swap much of its low-enriched uranium for radiological medical
tests. Instead, Clinton followed the path laid out by Israel and the
neocons, ratchet up pressure on Iran and keep open the "bomb-bomb-bomb Iran"
option.
It is noteworthy that the diplomatic agreement with Iran to restrain its
nuclear program and to give up much of its low-enriched uranium required
Clinton's departure from the State Department in 2013. I'm told that Obama
understood that he needed to get her out of the way for the diplomacy to
work.
But Clinton's signature project as Secretary of State was another war of
choice, this time the "regime change" in Libya resulting in the grisly
murder of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the descent of Libya into a
failed state beset with terrorism, including the killing of Ambassador
Christopher Stevens and three other US diplomatic personnel in Benghazi on
Sept. 11, 2012, and more recently the emergence of the Islamic State.
Clinton and her "liberal interventionist" allies sold the Libyan war as a
"responsibility to protect" mission -- or R2P -- but the propaganda about
Gaddafi's supposed plans for "genocide" against the Libyan people was wildly
exaggerated and fit with a long and sorry pattern of US officials deceiving
the US public.
Taking Credit
According to all accounts, Obama was on the fence about the wisdom of
joining European nations in undertaking the Libyan "regime change" and it
was Secretary Clinton who tipped his decision toward going to war. The US
military then provided the crucial technological infrastructure for the war
to go forward. Without the US involvement, the "regime change" in Libya
wouldn't have happened.
As the conflict raged, Clinton's State Department email exchanges revealed
that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a "Clinton
doctrine," bragging about how Clinton's clever use of "smart power" could
get rid of demonized foreign leaders like Gaddafi. But President Obama
seized the spotlight when Gaddafi's government fell.
But Clinton didn't miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20, 2011,
after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then
murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi's
demise with the quip, "we came; we saw; he died."
However, with Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic
militants expanded their power over the country. Many, it turned out, were
terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned. Some were responsible for killing
Ambassador Stevens.
Over the next five years, Libya -- a once prosperous North African country
-- descended into anarchy with dozens of armed militias and now three
competing governments jockeying for power. Meanwhile, the Islamic State
expanded its territory around the city of Sirte and engaged in its signature
practice of beheading "infidels," including a group of Coptic Christians
slaughtered on a beach.
Yet, on the campaign trail, Clinton continues to defend her instigation of
the Libyan war, disputing any comparisons between it and the Iraq War by
rejecting any "conflating" of the two. Yet, the two disasters -- while
obviously having some differences -- do deserve to be conflated because they
have many similarities. Both were wars of choice justified by false and
misleading claims and having terrible outcomes.
Clinton's rejection of "conflating" the two wars has another disturbing
element to it, the suggestion that she is incapable of extracting lessons
from one situation and applying them to another. That inability to analyze,
engage in self-criticism, and thus avoid repeating the same mistakes may
indeed be a disqualifying characteristic for someone seeking the US
presidency.
So, is Hillary Clinton "qualified" to be President of the United States?
While her glittering résumé may say one thing, her record -- a litany of
misjudgments, miscalculations and catastrophes -- may say something else.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
ROBERT PARRY
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He is the author of
America's Stolen Narrative and the editor of Consortium News.
RELATED STORIES
Hillary vs. Bernie vs. the 1%
By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org | News Analysis
Hillary Clinton Stalls on Goldman Sachs Speeches
By Chelsea Gilmour, Consortium News | News Analysis
Hillary Clinton Has Big Night; Media Move to Silence Bernie Sanders'
Campaign
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Report
________________________________________
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Is Hillary Clinton "Qualified?"
Monday, 11 April 2016 00:00 By Robert Parry, Consortium News | News Analysis
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reference not valid.
Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event at Industry City in
the Brooklyn borough of New York, April 9, 2016. (Hilary Swift / The New
York Times)
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has dismissed Sen. Bernie
Sanders questioning her qualifications to be President as "silly" -- and
looking at her résumé alone, she'd be right -- but there is also the need to
judge her performance in her various jobs.
What is troubling about Clinton's record is that she has left behind a trail
strewn with failures and even catastrophes. Indeed, her highest profile
undertakings almost universally ended in disaster -- and a person's record
should matter when voters are deciding whether to entrust him or her with
the most powerful office on earth.
In other words, it's not just a question of her holding one prestigious job
or another; it's also how well she did in those jobs. Otherwise, you have a
case of the Peter Principle Squared, not just letting someone rise to the
level of his or her incompetence, but in Clinton's case, continuing to get
promoted beyond her level of incompetence.
So, looking behind Clinton's résumé is important. After all, she presents
herself as the can-do candidate who will undertake small-scale reforms that
may not move the needle much but are better than nothing and may be all
that's possible given the bitterly divided Congress.
But is Hillary Clinton really a can-do leader? Since she burst onto the
national scene with her husband's presidential election in 1992, she has
certainly traveled a lot, given many speeches and met many national and
foreign leaders -- which surely has some value -- but it's hard to identify
much in the way of her meaningful accomplishments.
Clinton's most notable undertaking as First Lady was her disastrous health
insurance plan that was concocted with her characteristic secrecy and then
was unveiled to decidedly mixed reviews. Much of the scheme was mind-numbing
in its complexity and -- because of the secrecy -- it lacked sufficient
input from Congress where it found few enthusiastic supporters.
Not only did the plan collapse under its own weight, but it helped take many
Democratic members of Congress with it, as the Republicans reversed a long
era of Democratic control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Because
of Hillary Clinton's health-care disaster, a chastened Democratic Party
largely took the idea of providing near-universal health-insurance coverage
to Americans off the table for the next 15 years.
In Clinton's next career as a senator from New York, her most notable action
was to enthusiastically support President George W. Bush's Iraq War. Clinton
did not just vote to authorize the war in 2002, she remained a war supporter
until 2006 when it became politically untenable to do so, that is, if she
had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination against
anti-war Sen. Barack Obama.
Both in her support for the war in the early years and her politically
expedient switch -- along with a grudging apology for her "mistake" --
Clinton showed very little courage.
When she was supporting the war, the post-9/11 wind was at Bush's back. So
Clinton joined him in riding the jingoistic wave. By 2006, the American
people had turned against the war and the Republican Party was punished at
the polls for it, losing control of Congress. So it was no
profile-in-courage for Clinton to distance herself from Bush then.
Not Learning Lessons
Still, Clinton seemed to have learned little about the need to ask probing
questions of Bush's team. In November 2006, she completely misread Bush's
firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replacing him with ex-CIA
Director Robert Gates. Serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
Clinton bought the conventional wisdom that Gates's nomination meant that
Bush was winding down the Iraq War despite warnings that it actually meant
the opposite.
If Clinton had done any digging, she could have discovered that Rumsfeld was
dumped not because of his warmongering but because he backed his field
generals -- George Casey and John Abizaid -- who wanted to rapidly shrink
the US military "footprint" in Iraq. But Bush and his neocon advisers saw
that as effectively an admission of defeat, so they got rid of Rumsfeld and
recruited the more malleable Gates to front for their planned escalation or
"surge."
Not only did Consortiumnews.com spell out that reality in real time, but it
also was explained by right-wing pundit Fred Barnes in the neocon Weekly
Standard. As Barnes wrote, Gates "is not the point man for a boarding party
of former national security officials from the elder President Bush's
administration taking over defense and foreign policy in his son's
administration.
Rarely has the press gotten a story so wrong."
Barnes reported instead that the younger George Bush didn't consult his
father and only picked Gates after a two-hour face-to-face meeting at which
the younger Bush got assurances that Gates was onboard with the neocon
notion of "democracy promotion" in the Middle East and shared Bush's goal of
victory in Iraq. [The Weekly Standard, Nov. 27, 2006]
But the mainstream press -- and much of Official Washington -- loved the
other storyline. A Newsweek cover pictured a large George HW Bush towering
over a small George W. Bush. Embracing this conventional wisdom, Clinton and
other Senate Armed Services Committee members brushed aside the warnings
about Gates, both his troubling history at the CIA and his likely support
for a war escalation.
In his 2014 memoir, Duty, Gates reflects on his 2006 nomination and how
completely clueless Official Washington was. Regarding the conventional
wisdom about Bush-41 taking the reins from Bush-43, Gates wrote about his
recruitment by the younger Bush: "It was clear he had not consulted his
father about this possible appointment and that, contrary to later
speculation, Bush 41 had no role in it."
Regarding the mainstream news media's wrongheaded take on his nomination,
Gates wrote: "There was a lot of hilarious commentary about a return to
'41's' team, the president's father coming to the rescue, former secretary
of state Jim Baker pulling all the strings behind the scenes, and how I was
going to purge the Pentagon of Rumsfeld's appointees, 'clean out the E-Ring'
(the outer corridor of the Pentagon where most senior Defense civilians have
their offices). It was all complete nonsense."
Though Gates doesn't single out Hillary Clinton for misreading the
significance of his nomination, Gates wrote: "The Democrats were even more
enthusiastic, believing my appointment would somehow hasten the end of the
war.
They professed to be enormously pleased with my nomination and
offered their support, I think mainly because they thought that I, as a
member of the Iraq Study Group [which had called for winding down the war],
would embrace their desire to begin withdrawing from Iraq."
In other words, Hillary Clinton got fooled again.
Surging for Surges
Once installed at the Pentagon, Gates became a central figure in the Iraq
War "surge," which dispatched 30,000 more US troops to Iraq in 2007. The
"surge" saw casualty figures spike. Nearly 1,000 additional American died
along with an untold number of Iraqis. And despite another conventional
wisdom about the "successful surge" it failed to achieve its central goal of
getting the Iraqis to achieve compromises on their sectarian divisions.
Yet, the mainstream press didn't get any closer to the mark in 2008 when it
began cheering the Iraq "surge" as a great success, getting spun by the
neocons who noted a gradual drop in the casualty levels. The media honchos,
many of whom supported the invasion in 2003, ignored that Bush had laid out
specific policy goals for the "surge," none of which were achieved.
In Duty, Gates reminds us of those original targets, writing: "Prior to the
deployment, clear benchmarks should be established for the Iraqi government
to meet during the time of the augmentation, from national reconciliation to
revenue sharing, etc."
Those benchmarks were set for the Iraqi government to meet, but the goals
were never achieved, either during the "surge" or since then. To this day,
Iraq remains a society bitterly divided along sectarian lines with the
out-of-power Sunnis again sidling up to Al Qaeda-connected extremists and
even the Islamic State.
But Clinton didn't have the courage or common sense to recognize that the
Iraq War "surge" had failed. After Obama appointed her as Secretary of State
-- as part of a naïve gesture of outreach to a "team of rivals" -- Clinton
fell back in line behind Official Washington's new favorite conventional
wisdom, the "successful surge."
In the end, all the Iraq War "surge" did was buy President Bush and his
neocon advisers time to get out of office before the failure of the Iraq War
became obvious to the American public. Its other primary consequence was to
encourage Defense Secretary Gates, who was kept on by President Obama as a
gesture of bipartisanship, to conjure up another "surge" for Afghanistan.
In that context, in Duty, Gates recounts a 2009 White House meeting
regarding the Afghan War "surge." He wrote: "The exchange that followed was
remarkable. In strongly supporting the surge in Afghanistan, Hillary told
the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political
because she was facing him in the Iowa primary [in 2008]. She went on to
say, 'The Iraq surge worked.'
"The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been
political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of
me, was as surprising as it was dismaying." Obama's aides disputed Gates's
suggestion that the President indicated that his opposition to the Iraq
"surge" was political, noting that he had always opposed the Iraq War. The
Clinton team never challenged Gates's account.
In other words, having been an Iraq War hawk when it mattered -- from
2002-06 -- Hillary Clinton changed direction when that was politically
expedient, apologizing for her "mistake," but then returned to her
enthusiasm for the war by accepting the benighted view that the "surge
worked."
Clinton's enthusiasm for "surges" also influenced her to side with Gates and
General David Petraeus, a neocon favorite, to pressure Obama into a "surge"
for Afghanistan, sending in an additional 30,000 troops on a bloody,
ill-fated "counterinsurgency" mission. Again, the cost in American lives was
about 1,000 soldiers but their sacrifice did little to shift the war's
outcome.
Winning Praise
Again and again, Hillary Clinton seemed incapable of learning from her
costly errors -- or perhaps she just understands that the politically safest
course is to do what Washington's neocon-dominated foreign policy
establishment wants done. That way you get hailed as a serious thinker in
the editorial pages of The Washington Post and at the think-tank
conferences.
Virtually all the major columnists and big-name pundits praised Clinton's
hawkish tendencies as Secretary of State, from her escalating tensions with
Iran to tipping the balance of the Obama administration's debate in favor of
a "regime change" mission in Libya to urging direct US military intervention
in Syria in pursuit of another "regime change" there.
On the campaign trail, Clinton seeks to spin all these militaristic
recommendations as somehow beneficial to the United States. But the reality
is quite different.
Regarding Iran, in 2010, Secretary Clinton personally killed a promising
initiative sponsored by Brazil and Turkey (at President Obama's request) to
get Iran to swap much of its low-enriched uranium for radiological medical
tests. Instead, Clinton followed the path laid out by Israel and the
neocons, ratchet up pressure on Iran and keep open the "bomb-bomb-bomb Iran"
option.
It is noteworthy that the diplomatic agreement with Iran to restrain its
nuclear program and to give up much of its low-enriched uranium required
Clinton's departure from the State Department in 2013. I'm told that Obama
understood that he needed to get her out of the way for the diplomacy to
work.
But Clinton's signature project as Secretary of State was another war of
choice, this time the "regime change" in Libya resulting in the grisly
murder of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the descent of Libya into a
failed state beset with terrorism, including the killing of Ambassador
Christopher Stevens and three other US diplomatic personnel in Benghazi on
Sept. 11, 2012, and more recently the emergence of the Islamic State.
Clinton and her "liberal interventionist" allies sold the Libyan war as a
"responsibility to protect" mission -- or R2P -- but the propaganda about
Gaddafi's supposed plans for "genocide" against the Libyan people was wildly
exaggerated and fit with a long and sorry pattern of US officials deceiving
the US public.
Taking Credit
According to all accounts, Obama was on the fence about the wisdom of
joining European nations in undertaking the Libyan "regime change" and it
was Secretary Clinton who tipped his decision toward going to war. The US
military then provided the crucial technological infrastructure for the war
to go forward. Without the US involvement, the "regime change" in Libya
wouldn't have happened.
As the conflict raged, Clinton's State Department email exchanges revealed
that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a "Clinton
doctrine," bragging about how Clinton's clever use of "smart power" could
get rid of demonized foreign leaders like Gaddafi. But President Obama
seized the spotlight when Gaddafi's government fell.
But Clinton didn't miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20, 2011,
after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then
murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi's
demise with the quip, "we came; we saw; he died."
However, with Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic
militants expanded their power over the country. Many, it turned out, were
terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned. Some were responsible for killing
Ambassador Stevens.
Over the next five years, Libya -- a once prosperous North African country
-- descended into anarchy with dozens of armed militias and now three
competing governments jockeying for power. Meanwhile, the Islamic State
expanded its territory around the city of Sirte and engaged in its signature
practice of beheading "infidels," including a group of Coptic Christians
slaughtered on a beach.
Yet, on the campaign trail, Clinton continues to defend her instigation of
the Libyan war, disputing any comparisons between it and the Iraq War by
rejecting any "conflating" of the two. Yet, the two disasters -- while
obviously having some differences -- do deserve to be conflated because they
have many similarities. Both were wars of choice justified by false and
misleading claims and having terrible outcomes.
Clinton's rejection of "conflating" the two wars has another disturbing
element to it, the suggestion that she is incapable of extracting lessons
from one situation and applying them to another. That inability to analyze,
engage in self-criticism, and thus avoid repeating the same mistakes may
indeed be a disqualifying characteristic for someone seeking the US
presidency.
So, is Hillary Clinton "qualified" to be President of the United States?
While her glittering résumé may say one thing, her record -- a litany of
misjudgments, miscalculations and catastrophes -- may say something else.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Robert Parry
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He is the author of
America's Stolen Narrative and the editor of Consortium News.
Related Stories
Hillary vs. Bernie vs. the 1%
By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org | News AnalysisHillary Clinton Stalls on
Goldman Sachs Speeches
By Chelsea Gilmour, Consortium News | News AnalysisHillary Clinton Has Big
Night; Media Move to Silence Bernie Sanders' Campaign
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Report
Show Comments
