[Peace-discuss] Continuity in killing

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...the next president has no intention of genuinely getting out of Iraq ... he
will make symbolic withdrawals of combat brigades, but plans to make permanent
most of the 14 military bases constructed since the invasion ... [And his]
commitment to troop escalations in Afghanistan ... represents continuity with
the Bush Doctrine more than it does rupture..."

	A Hypocrite as Our Diplomat in Chief
	by John R. MacArthur

WHEN IT COMES to foreign affairs, Barack Obama seems like a serious person with
an authentic liberal's concern about the health of the world beyond our borders.
After all, he campaigned for president in Berlin and his blurb appears on the
back of a book by Reinhold Neibuhr, the great liberal theologian and
internationalist.

But so far, the president-elect's Cabinet choices make a joke of the liberals
who backed him in the hope that something fundamental might change in America's
belligerent behavior abroad. As the neo-conservative Max Boot approvingly
observed, the appointment of Gen. James Jones as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and the retention of Robert Gates as defense secretary "could just as
easily have come from a President McCain."

So too, in principle, could that of hawkish Hillary Clinton as secretary of
state, which makes Obama's rhetoric of restraint in foreign affairs begin to
sound as empty as President Bush's professed skepticism about "nation building"
eight years ago during his race against Al Gore.

It's worth recalling that in the second debate with Gore, Bush even smirked at
the concept: "I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the
lands they live in to build the nations. . . . I mean, we're going to have kind
of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant
to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops."

He had that right. Indeed, you wouldn't recognize the pre-emptive war fanatic of
post 9/11 if it weren't for Bush's earlier statement during the debate in
support of the U.S.-led bombing of Yugoslavia/Serbia during the Kosovo crisis of
1999. It was then that the Clinton administration initiated its own pre-emptive
war - in response to Serbia President Slobodan Milosevic's alleged "genocide"
against the Kosovar Albanians. The three-month bombing campaign was conducted
under the auspices of NATO, not the United Nations, and thus was every bit as
illegal under international law as the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. At
the time, Kosovo was formally part of a sovereign Yugoslavia and NATO could not
argue that the Milosevic regime had threatened or attacked a NATO member.

Hillary Clinton favored both pre-emptive wars, and was particularly aggressive
in the case of Serbia, according to Gail Sheehy's book, Hillary's Choice. Sheehy
quotes Hillary's recollection of a talk with her husband: "I urged him to bomb."
Challenged by the president on the possible consequences - for example, more
executions of ethnic Albanians and damaging the NATO alliance - Hillary replied,
"You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major
holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"

At the very least, this was a gross exaggeration. Serb repression of Kosovo's
national aspirations, while often brutal, was nothing resembling a "holocaust,"
and the Kosovo Liberation Army's provocation, including the assassination of
Serb policemen, helped worsen the conflict. No doubt Milosevic was a very bad
man, but that didn't stop U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard from calling the
KLA, in 1998, a terrorist organization. Civilian casualties on the two sides are
impossible to pin down accurately, but they appear to have been comparable,
perhaps 2,000 Albanians killed by Serb forces and 1,500 Serbs killed by NATO
warplanes in Belgrade and elsewhere.

This all may be blood under the bridge, but it gives us an insight into the
shoot-first temperament of the future secretary of state. According to former
Clinton adviser Dick Morris, "Hillary has a Manichean view of issues, splitting
the political world into dueling forces of good and evil. . . . She sees herself
as idealistic, moral, and righteous, and can only conclude that those with
opposing views must have opposite motives."

After Bush offered his solidarity with the Clintons over bombing Belgrade,
Hillary was happy to return the favor over bombing Baghdad. In her Oct. 10,
2002, Senate speech explaining her vote for war authorization, she declared that
"perhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other
end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with
serious challenges to our nation." Like little Serbia's oppression of its
Albanian minority and its alleged threat to the American "way of life"?

Politician to the core, Hillary couldn't resist the following hypocrisy: While
she wanted "to ensure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national
unity and support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against
terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," she insisted that her vote was not
"a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or of unilateralism, or for the
arrogance of American power or purpose."

Well, they say you can't have it both ways. And trying to may well have cost
Hillary the presidency, since Obama's early stance against the war is what gave
him a leg up in the primaries.

But it's not Hillary's bellicose positions that are surprising. As a
long-standing member of the Washington policy establishment and a "humanitarian
interventionist," it's easy to see why she went along with the received
political wisdom on Kosovo and Iraq.

What's harder to understand is why Obama - elected on a platform of greater
prudence - chose a trigger-happy hypocrite, who once mocked his "lack of
experience" in foreign affairs, to be his diplomat-in-chief. I suspect it's
because the next president has no intention of genuinely getting out of Iraq -
that he will make symbolic withdrawals of combat brigades, but plans to make
permanent most of the 14 military bases constructed since the invasion.

Furthermore, I think that his foolish commitment to troop escalations in
Afghanistan - much of which will come from troops transferred from Iraq -
represents continuity with the Bush Doctrine more than it does rupture.

In the end, maybe Hillary and Barack don't make such an odd couple. We won't
know for sure, however, until a Democratic Party-sponsored cluster bomb -
dropped in the name of women's rights and democracy - kills a lot of women and
children in a village near Kandahar.


John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine. Among other books, he is the
author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.

Published on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 by The Providence Journal