Battle of the Hawks

In the increasingly unlikely event of a McCain-Clinton election, folks who care about the peace issue would have serious reason to worry. Both of these candidates are inveterate hawks, and what we would be up against is a choice between the neoconservatives and the neoliberals as to who could be more adventurous in getting us into unjustifiable foreign wars.

Both not only voted to authorize President Bush's irrational invasion of Iraq but also have failed to apply those lessons to the real challenges we face, particularly concerning Iran. On the one hand, we have Sen. John McCain's wildly inane "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" singing refrain, and on the other, Sen. Hillary Clinton's commitment to "totally obliterate" Iran in response to any nuclear attack by Tehran on Israel.

Clinton has stood by her implicitly genocidal threat against the 70 million innocent Iranians, who have no effective control over their government's policy, a threat made in response to a question raised in the heat of primary day in Pennsylvania. She later extended the threat to include retaliation on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab countries if they were attacked by Iran.

Her statement extending the U.S. "nuclear umbrella" far beyond the threat to retaliate against a Soviet nuclear attack during the Cold War was greeted with a yawn by the media, which interpreted it as an election-day ploy to appear tough and pro-Israel. The Washington Post referred to "Clinton's apparent effort to distinguish herself from her rival for the Democratic nomination ... by offering a more hawkish approach to world affairs." That rival, Barack Obama, has called for negotiations with Iran's leaders and condemned Clinton's proposal as saber rattling.

But the Washington Post story provided evidence that Hillary's hawkishness is not merely a campaign posture, as evidenced by her two key foreign policy advisers, who the Post reports helped come up with the "obliterate Iran" idea. One of them is Martin S. Indyk, the former Clinton administration ambassador to Israel, who was as strong as any of the neoconservatives in advocating the invasion of Iraq. In an article he co-wrote with Kenneth M. Pollack for the Los Angeles Times three months before the Iraq invasion, which cited their insider status as former government officials who "had access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iraq," the two claimed that Iraq had "thousands of tons of precursor chemicals for chemical warfare agents, thousands of liters of biological warfare agents. ..." That "insider" information was false.

The Clinton campaign's national security director, Lee Feinstein, is another leading Democratic hawk and Clinton administration alum who promoted the threat to obliterate Iran. Feinstein, like Indyk, had strongly disparaged the work of the U.N. inspectors before the invasion. And even a month after the U.S. occupation began, as U.S. troops scoured all of the suggested weapons locations, Feinstein argued, "I believe they will find weapons of mass destruction."

The dark irony here is that the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq has elevated Iran to a position of enormous power over events in the region, beginning with its influence over the puppet government in Iraq's Green Zone, many of whose key members, including the prime minister, spent many years in exile in Tehran, where they were trained. The ability of Iran to make life miserable for the American occupation is the main counterweight to a tougher stance on Iran's nuclear program, and that is the direct consequence of a war for which Clinton and McCain both voted.

Clinton seems to be far more hawkish than her husband, and her increasingly bellicose remarks support that perception. If she is chosen as the Democratic Party's standard-bearer, she can be expected to tack further in that direction, once the primaries are over and the peace vote has been counted out.

I do not think this a matter of a female candidate having to prove that she is capable of being a macho commander in chief, although there is a whiff of Margaret Thatcher here, so proud of taking her nation to unneeded war. With Clinton, as with Thatcher, quite apart from gender, there seems to be a more basic philosophical commitment to using military force before other options have been seriously explored.

That the force cited by Clinton portends the "total obliteration" of another people raises the prospect of the United States, the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons, doing so again. It suggests that such weapons of mass destruction are not heinous inventions but rather instruments of rational policy when in the hands of the virtuous. That is a message that we dare not deliver to the world.

Robert Scheer's new book is "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America."

Comments

[MNCurler]

The other option we have under Obama is to go back to the "do nothing" policy on terrorism and hope it goes away. We all know how successful that was.

[SamThornton]

Assume you're referring to the policy of the Bush Administration before 9/11?

[MajorKong]

Ah yes. I remember how the Bush administration sprang into action against terrorism after taking office.

Well no, actually they were totally obsessed with missile defense and trying to provoke a conflict with China. Terrorism - not so much.

[Paul]

Arguably, our best course of action after 9/11 was to forgive the terrorists who perpetrated it. Had we done this, the following benefits would have resulted:

1. No invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. This has greatly weakened the US military, cost the lives of over 4000 US servicemen, women and greviously injured thousands more, killed untold tens of thousands of civilians and cost the future generations of Americans over a trillion $.

2. No GITMO or torture of terrorist suspects. We have ceeded the moral high ground to the terroists and are looked upon with fear and suspicion all over the world.

3. No violation of Constitutional rights. Under George W. Bush the US government has detained US citizens and held them without charge or access to council, perpetrated wholesale wiretapping of average Americans and increased surveilance unnecessarily.

After 5 years of the "War on Terror" we are closer to losing it than winning.

So tell me again how successful our policies have been under George W. Bush and the Republicans. Osama is laughing out loud in his cave every day.

Do nothing. It works better than anything the Republicans have tried.

[MajorKong]

Or, here's a thought, we could have concentrated on the country that actually attacked us (Afghanistan) and not gone after the country that didn't attack us but that we really wanted to invade anyway (Iraq).

In Donald Rumsfeld's own words "We don't have good targets in Afghanistan. We have good targets in Iraq."

That's like the guy in the joke searching for his lost car keys on the other side of the street "Because the light's better over here".

[Pinkmarbles]

People like to boo hoo about the war, but it seems like everybody has forgotton the billions of dollars we spent bombing Iraq, containing Iraq, and "negotiating with them" along with several U.N. resolutions in the 1990's trying to force Iraq to comply. And that work out well for us didn't it??? NOT!

Liberals think that you can just sit down with a terrorist and "negotiate" a peace treaty. That is like trying to negotiate sharing a pork chop with a rabid pitbull! It just don't work and the liberals just don't understand that.

If this country had been full of people like the one that wrote this column during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we would all be speaking Japanese.

In the era of bureaucracy, white lies and photo ops, the one sure fire method of giving a rouge nation a moment of pause is the proper application of fear!!!

[SamThornton]

The same logic can be used to justify the existence and operation of criminal gangs such as MS-13, Crips, and Bloods. No negotiation. Shoot first, last, and always. Grab what you want, when you want, how you want. How's that work for you?

[Paul]

So when do we start?

The last five years of the "War on Terror" has only proven we don't know how to fight terrorists.

Never mind the thousands of servicemen killed and wounded, the tens of thousands of civilians killed and the outrageous cost.

And what have we got to show for it?

Osama is still at large and we have created an entire generation of enemies.

[leftcoastliberal]

Belligerent talk might actually make the Mullahs in Iran stronger by making them look like patriots standing up to the Great Satan. A detente could actually help the reformers.

[MajorKong]

I'd say it worked fairly well and for a whole lot less blood and money than what we're spending there now.

At the time we invaded Iraq in 2003 they had no navy, no long range missile force, a hollow army and an air force with maybe 12 flyable aircraft on any given day. And incidentally, no weapons of mass destruction.

With the country being invaded and the survival of the regime at stake they didn't even put a single Mig in the air. Not one single Iraqi aircraft sortied.

The fact that we wiped out their military in three weeks pretty much proves that they weren't much of a threat. We didn't attack because they were strong, we attacked because they were weak.

You can't have it both ways. They can't be a "grave threat" and a "cakewalk" at the same time.

[PADDYWHACK]

Great post,you nailed it.Obama offers hope of ridding us of these twerps who wish to fry anyone who does not meekly accept bullying.We will become a military only power,sucking all our resources dry.

[superlive]

And what exactly will the rest of the world put in their gas tanks after Hillary nukes Iran's petroleum?

[Moose49]

Fortunately, after last night, your very legitimate concerns are now moot!

[LittleBrother]

Yeah, except for some public interaction with Chelsea, Senator Clinton has pretty much shed the kindler, gentler "It Takes a Village" motherliness of a simpler time.

As of today, though, it appears that the biggest worry is a McCain-Clinton ticket.

Maverick of the Living Dead and Calamity Jane! A match made in Hell, needing only a plurality of strange bedfellows to sweep into power.

[LouisPWu]

You gotta remember. SHRILLARY is a COMBAT VETERAN. She ducked snipers' bullets in Bosnia.......... You mean, she didn't? She lied about that? She was getting flowers and a poem from a little girl, instead? You mean the HILDABEAST is a CHICKENHAWK? Oh, my.....