2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumIs Hillary Still the Candidate of the War Machine?
Have things changed over the past couple of months? Has she announced regret for her actions regarding Libya, Honduras, and Syria? Will she double down on the "incompetence and warmongering" Sachs refer to in the article or will she reject her past mistakes and embrace efforts to create a more peaceful, more just world?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/hillary-is-the-candidate_b_9168938.html
Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine
Jeffrey Sachs
Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University
02/05/2016
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Hillarys record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and disastrous, of modern US history. Some experience. Hilary was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria.
Hillary has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster. Hillary strongly promoted NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of international law but counter to the most basic good judgment. After the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil war while the paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread west across the African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, Hillary found it hilarious to declare of Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died.
Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Hillarys relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration Assad must get out of the way, backed by secret CIA operations.
Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war, and no place poses a great threat to US security. More than 10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks.
The list of her incompetence and warmongering goes on. Hillarys support at every turn for NATO expansion, including even into Ukraine and Georgia against all common sense, was a trip wire that violated the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in 1991 and that led to Russias violent counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine. As Senator in 2008, Hilary co-sponsored 2008-SR439, to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. As Secretary of State, she then presided over the restart of the Cold War with Russia.
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djean111
(14,255 posts)harbinger for a new and peaceful Hillary - I would suggest that she would be lying through her teeth, would bitterly resent apologizing, and so would be giving one of those "I am sorry if all the killing upset you" apologies, and then find it hard to get through the "no more senseless bloodshed" part without collapsing in laughter.
Thanks for the OP, I intend to pass it on.