Armageddon (6 page)

But years later, as she began her campaign for president, Hillary was inducted into the “Irish Hall of Fame”
in recognition of her role in the Irish Peace process.
Yes, looking back, some of Bill's cronies and Hillary supporters actually arranged for this dubious award. What Hillary's role was never really came out. It couldn't because it never existed. It wasn't either the Irish government or the principals in the peace process who arranged the prestigious award from an Irish magazine. It was cronies of Bill's who promoted the Clinton Foundation with international businesses and who coincidently were awarded lucrative business opportunities in Haiti and elsewhere. Several of them were big whigs at Teneco, where big business, foreign governments, and the Clinton Foundation all help each other out. None of these folks had anything whatsoever to do with the peace process.

In a foreign policy speech on Iraq on March 17, 2008, Hillary recounted how she had “landed under sniper fire” during a trip to Tuzla, Bosnia, in March of 1996. She said, “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
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What guts! What an experience! But it never happened. In fact, when Hillary's jet touched down she was greeted by a young girl who presented her with a poem. No snipers. So why the lie? Again, to create the charisma and experience that she lacks. Hillary wanted to show how important her role was as First Lady. The fact is the only snipers she has ever faced are political critics.

Hillary's had dozens of other lies: There was her famous claim that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House,
despite having an income of over $10 million. She hides everything but pretends to be so open. Hillary once said that she is “the most transparent person in public life.” She's right. So transparent that we can see right through her!

In the ultimate insult, Hillary even lies about lying! Pressed at a Nevada town hall in early 2016 about whether she is truthful to the American people, she answered: “I do my best to level with the American people.”
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She does her best to tell the truth? What does that mean? It means that she will tell the truth when there is no better option.

Note to Hillary: Donald Trump will be watching. Be careful with your tales.

Would President Hillary Clinton tack to the left, as Obama has, on economic and social policy or move more to the center as Bill did? We don't know. But on foreign policy, there can be little doubt that Hillary Clinton is much more likely to get us into a war. Perhaps because she is a woman eager to cast herself in the mode of Margaret Thatcher; she has been hawkish ever since she launched her independent political career as a senator from New York in 2000.

She took office in January 2001, just eight months before her adopted state of New York was devastated by the horrific terror attacks of 9/11. Eager to prove herself worthy of being trusted to be the senator from a state in which she had never lived, she postured herself as a hawk during her tenure in the Senate. When time came to choose committee assignments, for example, she broke with the pattern of liberal Democrats and opted to join the Senate Armed Services Committee. And when President Bush sought congressional approval for the war in Iraq, she joined 29 of the 50 Democrats in voting for the use of force, putting her squarely on the hawkish end of the Democratic policy spectrum.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump opposed the war in Iraq, predicting, accurately and depressingly, that it would land us in an open-ended
commitment from which we would have great difficulty extracting ourselves. He also predicted that thousands of Americans would never be extracted but would perish in the war and that hundreds of billions would be squandered, not to disappear but to be included for years on end as part of our national debt.

Hillary went down the line supporting the war in Iraq and also voted for the Patriot Act and most of the appropriations to fund the war. She now says it was a mistake. In her 2014 book,
Hard Choices
, Hillary apologized. “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn't alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong,”
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she wrote. “Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote. I certainly wouldn't have voted that way.”
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When the Iraq War bogged down in 2007, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) pushed for a “surge” in American forces to drive back the dissidents and establish control over the country. President Bush adopted the idea, but the Left fiercely opposed it. Supporters of the surge were surprised to see Clinton vote against it, in view of her earlier support for the war. But observers came to understand her switch in positions after Bush's and Obama's Defense Secretary Bill Gates quoted in his book a conversation between Hillary and Obama in the Oval Office shortly after she became secretary of state.

Gates wrote: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”
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Once in office as secretary of state, she reverted to a warlike attitude as she aggressively pushed for US intervention in Libya and in Syria, involving us in one war and seeking to ensnare us in another. Hillary was determined to go to war over Libya. She fantasized that genocide was unfolding in the streets of Tripoli, with no evidence, and hyped demands for US intervention. Everyone agreed that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was
a monster. He ordered the bombing of a night club frequented by US troops in Berlin and orchestrated the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in 1988.

Responding to the Berlin bombing, President Reagan ordered a devastating air strike against Gaddafi, killing his son. Chastened, the dictator began to pull in his horns and, when Saddam Hussein was toppled in Iraq by US forces, he saw the handwriting on the wall and gave up his ambitions to build weapons of mass destruction (WMD). He had been minding his manners ever since. But Hillary, fed by almost daily e-mails from her close aide Sydney Blumenthal warning about slaughter in the streets of Libya, was determined to have the United States intervene and depose Gaddafi. Blumenthal's interests in hyping the situation may have been financial.
The New Republic
reported that Blumenthal was pushing for armed intervention while he was “both employed by the Clinton Foundation and advising businessmen angling for contracts from the country's transitional government.”
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On Hillary's part, she was worried about the political implications of ignoring genocide as she and Bill had done in Rwanda during the mass slaughter/genocide there in 1994. Widely criticized for their inactivity in the face of the death of millions, she was loath to risk being criticized for inaction again. Samantha Power, who served on the National Security staff as Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, had studied Rwanda and was obsessed with the possibility of another genocide. She warned Hillary that a human tragedy might be unfolding. When Hillary told the Joint Chiefs of Staff of her concern over events on the ground in Libya, they dispatched their own intelligence officer to check things out and he reported that there was no genocide in progress.

Nor did Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) dedicated to battling genocide, find evidence suggesting an impending slaughter by the time NATO intervened: “Our assessment was that up until that point, the casualty figures—around 350 protesters killed by indiscriminate fire of government
security forces—didn't rise to the level of indicating that a genocide or genocide-like mass atrocities were imminent.”
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Nevertheless, Hillary pounded away at Obama and the national security staff to push for armed intervention in Libya to topple Gaddafi. In March of 2011, she told an interviewer, “Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled. . . . The cries would be, ‘Why did the United States not do anything?'”
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Under unrelenting pressure from Hillary, Obama agreed to participate in the NATO no-fly zone over Libya that led to Gaddafi's killing.
The Washington Post
called it “Hillary's War” and, after the dictator fell, the former secretary of state proudly paraphrased Julius Caesar, “We came, we saw, he died.”
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Is Julius Caesar to be the role model for the new president?

The fact is that the Libya invasion opened the door to Islamist terrorists, the very ones who killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. Many of the weapons we supplied to the rebels in Libya ended up in ISIS hands during the ensuing years. The Libya invasion may yet lead to another ISIS-controlled state, all because Hillary wouldn't let well enough alone and insisted on sending in the cavalry.

Fortunately, Donald Trump is calling Hillary to task for her role in advocating intervention in Libya. In an interview with Chuck Todd on
Meet the Press
, he said: “If you look at Libya, look at what we did there—it's a mess—if you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look at what we did there—it's a mess—it's going to be the same thing.”

When Todd asked if the Middle East would be better if Gaddafi and Saddam were still in power, Trump answered “It's not even a contest, Chuck. It's not even a contest. Of course it would be [better]. You wouldn't have had your Benghazi situation which is one thing which was just a terrible situation. But, of course, nobody even knows what's going on over there. It's not even a country anymore.”
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In Syria, Hillary clamored for American arming of the rebels against dictator Bashar al-Assad, but the White House resisted. Like much of the Arab Spring, the rebellion in Syria began as an effort by democratic forces to topple a horrific dictator who had slaughtered his own people by the hundreds of thousands. But the rebellion was soon co-opted by the extremist Islamist forces that ultimately formed the core of ISIS. Hillary was intent on finding “moderates” to arm, hoping that they would serve as a counterweight both to al-Assad and to the Islamists.

In her memoir,
Hard Choices
, Hillary writes that “wicked problems rarely have a right answer; in fact, part of what makes them wicked is that every option appears worse than the next. Increasingly that's how Syria appeared.” Returning from an overseas trip, Hillary recounts how she became convinced that arming and training the rebels might strengthen their hand against al-Assad: “The risks of both action and inaction were high, [but] the president [Obama]'s inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels. . . . No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the president's call and I respected his deliberations and decision.”
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But eventually, Obama did decide to try to arm and train the Syrian “moderates” on a limited and secret basis. That proved to be a disastrous decision.

The
International Business Times
reported that “by the reckoning of experts and members of Congress from both parties, that strategy [of arming the moderates] appears in tatters. The moderates the United States bet on as the means of pressuring al-Assad have been routed by . . . ISIS.”
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The US-led strategy of airstrikes and arming Syrian moderates may have “actually hurt the moderate opposition,” reported Robert S. Ford, former Obama administration ambassador to Syria. He said US intervention had led to retaliation by ISIS “against the moderate rebels, who were largely unprepared to deal with such attacks and fled.”
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Leslie Gelb, an assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the moderates in Syria “are not a viable fighting force. They
couldn't win no matter how many arms we gave them. That has been the story war after war, I don't know why we have to learn this one lesson administration after administration. We learned this in Iraq.”
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Indeed, since many of the so-called moderates we armed in Syria ended up fighting for ISIS, we may well have armed our enemy by following Hillary's recommendations. But the question lingers: Why is Hillary so hawkish, voting for wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria?

One theory is that she perceives it as a political need for a woman in politics to be a hawk. She may worry that people don't trust a woman to be commander in chief, and that her strong defense record is a reassurance. She may also be casting herself, consciously, in the mold of Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, two highly successful wartime leaders of their countries. Or it could be an offshoot of her own personality. Everyone who knows Hillary describes her as combative, stubborn, and fixedly determined to defend her views. She values courage above all and places great store in standing up for herself. She constantly repeats her mother's advice, given when she was four after a playmate hit her, to never back down. But in either case, one thing is most likely: if Hillary is elected, we will probably get into at least one war.

Donald Trump has understood from Day One that Hillary Clinton's vote on the war in Iraq and her hawkish record is a big negative. We can count on him to remind the voters about it over and over again.

Donald Trump is under no compulsion to show his macho qualities by wading into wars. He has been reluctant to back a no-fly zone in Syria and is demonstrating a maturity in restraint in the use of force we know will be absent in Hillary Clinton.