[Peace-discuss] Obama (and McCain) run Clinton's foreign policy

[C. G. Estabrook]

...the rise of Barack Obama as the putative Democratic presidential candidate 
augurs the rise of a new liberal internationalism – the very same sort of policy 
that led us to bomb Belgrade, one of the oldest cities in Europe, and paved the 
way for the establishment of the gangster state known as Kosovo.

This was deemed a "humanitarian intervention": we were told that the Serbs were 
"ethnically cleansing" the Kosovars from their own territory, and that tens of 
thousands had been slaughtered. As is the case with other more recent military 
actions, it all turned out to be a crock: the tens of thousands dead shrunk to a 
few thousand, including victims from both sides in what was, after all, a civil 
war. [Cf. Darfur --CGE]

Hillary Clinton recently had the nerve to call the Kosovo war an example of "how 
it should be done." If the near-complete emptying of Serbs from Kosovo and 
Bosnia, the burning of churches, and the establishment of a radical Muslim 
enclave in the heart of Europe is a Clintonian "success," then one has to wonder 
what failure would look like.

It isn't just Hillary, however, whose penchant for "humanitarian" 
interventionism poses a potential danger to peace. Barack Obama, too, has shown 
a weakness for this militaristic form of moral self-indulgence. He is surrounded 
by advisers of the "liberal internationalist" school, such as Samantha Power, 
who pines to send U.S. troops to Rwanda and criticized the Clintons for not 
dispatching troops to the Balkans fast enough. [Obama's adviser Susan Rice, from 
the Clinton State Department, has been urging the US bomb Khartoum --CGE]

It was the Kosovo incursion that set the stage for the Iraq invasion, from the 
rhetoric of "liberation" to the mechanics of "nation-building" [which George 
Bush criticized vigorously when he was running for president in 2000 -- 
illustrating the importance of a presidential candidate's announced policies 
--CGE]. Operation Allied Force had all the elements that were later developed to 
the max in Operation Enduring Freedom – an allied group that provided phony 
"intelligence," i.e., war propaganda, and had the same hubristic, hectoring 
style. Militant interventionists, such as John McCain, jumped on board the war 
bandwagon because they realized that a precedent had to be set in the post-Cold 
War world, an assertion of American hegemony.

Today, we are all paying the consequences.

- Justin Raimondo <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12874>