Hillary Clinton says that in hindsight she would not have voted to give President George W. Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq. She called her Senate vote “the hardest decision I have ever had to make. … It is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president. And we say to him: Use these powers wisely.”
Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice — hawks all — were bent on war and eliminating Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Clinton needed very little foresight to recognize this.
According to Iraq Body Count, more than 152,142 civilian deaths have been documented between the start of the U.S. invasion from March 2003 through June 2015. We have destabilized Iraq, and Daesh now exerts power over large sections of the country. Recall the anti-war slogan, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” Still true.
In June of 2008, General Romeo Vasquez led a coup d’etat against the democratically elected President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. President Zelaya was kidnapped, taken to the airport in his pajamas and flown out of the country. The Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations General Assembly called the coup an illegal action and demanded the return of Zelaya.
Instead of cutting off U.S. aid to the country, which is pro forma, under Secretary of State Clinton’s direction, our State Department questioned whether or not a coup had actually taken place. Instead of working with and through the OAS, Clinton pushed deliberations in Costa Rica where representatives of the coup were granted equal status with representatives of the constitutionally elected government.
Since the coup, violence in Honduras has become rampant. For a while, Honduras led the world murder rate. Drug violence and the murder of peasant organizers and women have accelerated. Coup leader Vasquez is an alumnus of the U.S. School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. Honduran security forces are responsible for many killings and human rights crimes.
In Libya, Secretary of State Clinton pushed the Obama administration to bomb Libya under the pretext that the U.S. had to stop the pending slaughter of innocent civilians in Benghazi. According to Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch, “Our assessment was that up until that point, the casualty figures … didn’t rise to the level of indicating that a genocide or genocide-like atrocities were imminent.”
The African Union (AU), preferring diplomacy to military intervention, was trying to negotiate a plan for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to go into exile. Violent regime change was orchestrated in no small part by Clinton, who upon hearing of Gaddafi’s death allegedly declared, “We came, we saw, he died.”
So what has become of Libya? There are two armed “governments” at war with each other over resources. Daesh has surfaced in Libya. What a long strange trip it’s been for Clinton: erstwhile Goldwater Girl to staff attorney at the Children’s Defense Fund to anti-democratic hawk.
Tom Broderick
Oak Park