Hillary Clinton's NeoCon Resume

[amborin]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/20/hillary-clintons-neocon-resume/

Liberal Democratic Hillary Clinton supporters get defensive when they hear that Mrs. Clinton is favored over Donald Trump by right-wing billionaires like Charles Koch and (with much more enthusiasm) by leading arch-imperial foreign policy Neoconservatives like Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Eliot Cohen. But an honest look at Hillary’s record should make the support she is getting from such noxious, arch-authoritarian “elites” less than surprising.

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The first entry on Hillary’s Neocon foreign policy résumé is Madeleine Albright. As First Lady, Hillary successfully lobbied her husband Bill to appoint Albright – a right-wing Russia-hating Czech emigre dedicated to the provocative, ever-eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – as Secretary of State (the nation’s top diplomat of all things) in 1997. Albright had already achieved notoriety as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in May of 1996 by telling CBS News reporter Leslie Stahl that the death of half a million Iraqi children due to U.S.-led “economic sanctions” was “a price worth paying” for the advance of U.S. goals in the Middle East.

snip

Serbia

Another line on Hillary’s Neocon résumé is Serbia. She urged an initially reluctant Bill Clinton to launch what became a two-and-a-half month bombing campaign that killed many thousands of Serb civilians. In urging this carnage on the president, she used the false claim that lethal military force was required to stop Hitler-like “genocide” in Yugoslavia.

This would become a leading Hillary war theme: the disingenuous and cynical assertion that foreign governments had to be targeted and overthrown by the world’s only military superpower and its top European allies (claiming together to represent “the international community”) so as to protect innocents against modern-day Holocausts (like the one the Clinton administration unmentionably aided and abetted in Rwanda in 1994).

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A fourth line on Hillary’s Neocon résumé is Honduras. With her appointment as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State (of all things), Hilary’s first test on the foreign policy meaning of “change” came in late June of 2009. That’s when a right-wing business and military coup overthrew Honduras’s democratically elected and populist, Hugo Chavez-admiring President Manuel Zelaya. “It is easy,” the veteran left journalist and author Diana Johnstone notes, “to see what real change would have meant. The U.S. could have vigorously condemned the coup and demanded that the legitimate President be reinstated. Considering U.S. influence in Honduras, especially its powerful military bases there, U.S. ‘resolve’ would have given teeth to anti-coup protests…”

Instead, Secretary Clinton played along with the coup regime’s bogus claims that Zelaya had been trying to establish a dictatorship and that Hondurans had after the coup experienced “free and fair elections” that restored “democratic and constitutional government” in Honduras. The nation has been mired in corruption, poverty, misery, repression, and extreme inequality ever since.

[leveymg]

1. There are people here who love her for this. But most just don't give a damn

Don't know which is worse, the war lovers or the dirt ignorant.

[PufPuf23]

4. War lovers are worse because they should know better.

Dirt ignorant is a too common American affliction.

Some people are deliberately and proudly ignorant.

Others are taught to be ignorant.

[Optimism]

2. Most excellent post.

How can any progressive support this?

[AtomicKitten]

3. Kissinger as her mentor should give every Democrat pause.