Hillary Clinton is the Bomb!

Hillary Clinton is the Bomb!

I responded by saying that I thought that “defeating fascism and communism is a pretty big deal.” In other words, that the U.S., on balance, has done a good job of advancing the cause of freedom.

Clinton responded to this idea with great enthusiasm: “That’s how I feel! Maybe this is old-fashioned.” And then she seemed to signal that, yes, indeed, she’s planning to run for president. “Okay, I feel that this might be an old-fashioned idea, but I’m about to find out, in more ways than one.”

Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS, The Atlantic - Jeffrey Goldberg - Aug 10, 2014

“History merely repeats itself.  It has all been done before.  Nothing under the sun is truly new.”  Ecclesiastes I, Chapter One, Verse Nine.

By J.M. Hamilton 8-23-14

No, Mrs. Clinton, bombing oil rich countries to do U.S. multinationals, and the MICs, bidding isn’t “old-fashioned,” it is a timeless distraction from domestic politics and real U.S. problems (i.e. Ferguson/income inequality/tax avoidance/political reform).  And it is a practice that has failed the U.S. and indigenous peoples throughout the world, repeatedly.  Foreign misadventure has left the U.S. martially winded, fiscally bankrupt, and led to blowback with unintended consequences for the U.S. and the world, time and time again. 

Among the political elite, nation building, despite the fact that the FED is printing money to keep our nation afloat, apparently, never goes out of style.  Particularly to enforce arbitrary nation state lines established by two colonial powers, post WWI.  Nation building is an expensive and repeatedly failed concept (e.g. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq). 

Bombing nations is old-fashioned, particularly when we can often utilize sanctions and international banking to achieve the same geo-political outcomes.  Witness, Mr. Putin’s stalled empire-building efforts in the Ukraine. 

But where’s the “fire-works” in sanctions and international banking?  America needs a show of force and a bogeyman to justify all that extravagant military spending.

In an economically interconnected world, the MIC doesn’t want to hear that it is obsolete.  The fable surrounding the most recent U.S. bombings in Iraq, that the cavalry had come to save Yazidi, is nothing new (read Ecclesiastes I); arguably, the latest Iraqi bombings are nothing more than an excuse to protect U.S. multinational, oligarch, and sovereign foreign interests operating in resource rich Iraq. 

Our puppet, P.M. al-Maliki, blew it, and now we have to clean up the Cheney administration’s mess, yet again.  Senator Clinton, of course, voted to support Cheney’s war in Iraq, and so maybe she’s looking for justification and vindication for that hawkish vote.  That the U.S. set current events in the Middle East in motion with the 2003 Iraq invasion, is conveniently, rarely discussed.

Neo-conmen and unintended consequences?  You bet.  You’re looking at them right now on CNN.

Our corporate owned and run U.S. news media has embedded ISIS, chronically, into the 24-hour news cycle.  Concern over a rag-tag group of mercenaries and “jihadis” has reached a fever pitch.  “This is an organization(ISIS) that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated,” said the chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, as reported in the NY Times.  Clearly, something must be done, even though the U.S. is energy independent, and the U.S. has already burned at least two trillion dollars in an Iraqi money-pit.  (That’s two-trillion that could have gone to disadvantaged youth, the poor, to pay down student loans, or to rebuild America’s infrastructure.  Hell, we could have given $2 trillion to the Wall Street cartel to check again, and learn one more time that “trickle-down” economics really is a dead-end ideology.)

Haven’t we heard this fever dream before, from the Joint Chiefs?  Gulf of Tonkin, weapons of mass destruction, yellow-cake…. Oh yes, we’ve heard it all before.  Conveniently, omitted from the dialogue is that the GOP's hero, Ronald Reagan, defeated the Soviet Union without starting up a hot war. Conveniently, omitted from today’s scare-mongering from the military brass is the former Soviet Union was once declared the “evil-empire.”  It’s like each enemy we encounter is larger, more evil and malevolent than the prior.  The American public has grown so inured/jaded to the Joint Chiefs chronic cries for war, that the generals have to top themselves with each new call.  Really, ISIS is more scary than the former Soviet Union?  Yet, ISIS has no air force, no nukes, and is supported by captured U.S. military surplus, left behind in Iraq.  

Blowback? Talk about your unintended consequences. Oops.

The economic and political elite in this country have been given a freehand on foreign affairs for so long, to such deleterious effect upon the U.S. and its citizens, and our federal budget, that the alleged “isolationist,” Senator Rand Paul, is now one of the leading GOP contenders for this nation’s highest office.  And if he was running against Hillary today, he’d have my vote without question, based upon their respective positions on foreign policy alone.

We have yet to learn the true consequences of the latest wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Right out of the playbook, true to character, the Federal Reserve is busy printing money to inflate away U.S. war debt.

If the U.S. military is so damn effective, why are we having to go back into Iraq yet again?  If dropping bombs and playing army is the end all be all of foreign policy, why is a similar Afghanistan fiasco almost guaranteed?

Where are our so-called European allies in this matter… you know, the folks who actually are not energy independent, and do rely on Middle East oil?  Nowhere to be seen…  it’s August and the Europeans are all vacationing on the French Rivera (along with the legal community in this country).  And the Arab-League…. ?  Forget about it.

Meanwhile, back in the Sudan, Christians have been persecuted, run over, and massacred by Muslims for years…. But Khartoum isn’t oil or resource rich, Sudanese Christians are not white, and there are no U.S. multinationals operating in the region. 

Where’s the U.S. cavalry in the Sudan?  Why aren’t we bombing the Muslims in the Sudan, who are slaughtering and butchering Christian women and children, by the hundreds of thousands? 

That our “altruistic” U.S. foreign policy is based upon a foundation of hypocrisy (and is detrimental to ordinary Americans, who can’t escape paying taxes, and must pay for these foreign adventures – in some cases with their very lives), is on full display for all the world to see.  That U.S. multinational corporations, who enjoy U.S. military support globally to protect world markets, are now fleeing off shore to dodge paying taxes for their own military protection is outrageous.

And to think, we are about to put this relic from a by-gone era in the White House.  Four words:  Complete freaking horror show.  I’m all for putting a woman in the White House, but lets put the right woman in the White House.  Like, I don’t know, a person who’s ready to break with the last five decades of incredibly bad foreign policy; a person who might campaign on reinstating the draft, so that the war burden is shared by all U.S. citizens and not just the poor; a future President, who will actually make multinationals pay for their fair share of the U.S. war machine.

Has it ever occurred to our “foreign policy experts” that the reason there is so much turmoil in the Middle East is because the U.S. and Western democracies keep: propping up thug dictators who terrorize their citizens; that there is no or limited economic opportunity in these countries, and no rule of law (Middle East unemployment is the highest in the world); and so joining jihad and Allah in paradise is perhaps their only and best option?   

If you keep people poor, under-educated, and w/out the basic necessities of life, or a shred humanity, than there is bound to be war, fundamentalist religion, and rebellion (not necessarily in that order)… which keeps the MIC and the war machine humming. 

See, it works out for everybody.

It’s so much easier, and less expensive, to do a drive by, I mean fly by, and a bombing in Iraq, than to address the root causes of the problem.  Right? 

President Clinton III will show the world.  A fiscally bankrupt U.S. will be knee-deep in global blood in no time.  When one examines Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy of a jingoist and bellicose foreign policy (a rehash of Bush/Cheney), President Obama’s foreign policy of not doing “stupid stuff,” sounds exceptionally brilliant.  (Then again, with Hillary enjoying a near lock on the Democratic nomination for 2016, perhaps she’s just pandering to the political right and the foreign policy hawks, in the hopes of obtaining their vote?)

No greater authority than General Stanley McChrystal said that when you kill an enemy combatant in the Middle East, you are likely creating ten terrorists.  At the rate we are going, the U.S. actually might have something to fear.

P.S.

Do you think China would be rattling their saber in the South China Sea, and Putin would be pulling his stunt in the Ukraine, if the U.S. wasn’t hyper-ventilating and grossly overextended, by attempting to play the world’s beat cop?

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2014