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http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_03_27/cover.html
March 27, 2006
Issue
Copyright © 2006 The
American Conservative
Hillary the Hawk
The Democrats Athena only differs from Bush on the
details.
by Justin
Raimondo
When the Moose
talks, Democrats listenjust like the Republicans did when he was
flacking on their behalf. And the Democrat listening the closest to this
Trotskyist-turned-neoconservative is Hillary Rodham Clinton, supposedly
the leader of the partys far-left wing.
With his reputation for giving good
quote, the Moose, a.k.a. Marshall Wittmann, formerly John McCains
communications director and now a bigwig at the Democratic Leadership
Council, is a legendary character in Washington circles. Once a member
of the Trotskyist Spartacist League and an officer in the Young Peoples
Socialist League, Wittmann, like many admirers of the Red Armys
founder, moved rightward during the Reagan era and eventually wound up
as the Christian Coalitions political director. From this strategic
vantage point he jumped on McCains Straight Talk Expressand then
jumped ship entirely, falling into the arms of the DLC and landing, as
always, on his feet.
From Leon Trotsky to Ralph Reed to
Hillary Clinton is a long, torturous road to follow, yet the
chameleon-like Wittmannwho styles himself a Bull Moose progressive in
the tradition of his hero, Theodore Roosevelthas navigated it expertly.
Wittmanns new role as Hillarys unofficial Rasputin is perfectly suited
to her current political needs. Eager to overcome her reputation as the
leader of the partys left wing, Hillary is repositioning herself, in
modern parlance, as a centrist, i.e. a complete opportunist. She could
have no better teacher than Wittmann, who from the pulpit of his
Moose-blog, advises her to seize the issue of Iranian nukes to draw a
line in the sand. While paying lip service to multilateralism, she
should make it clear that while force is the last resort, she would
never take it off the table in dealing with the madmen mullahs and the
psychotic leader of Iran.
This advice was proffered on the morning
of Jan. 18. By that evening, when Hillary gave her scheduled speech at
Princeton Universitys Woodrow Wilson School, it had clearly been taken
to heart: I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran,
she averred. Accusing the White House of choosing to downplay the
threats and to outsource the negotiations, she disdained Team Bush for
standing on the sidelines.
Lets be clear about the threat we face
now, she thundered. A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its
neighbors and beyond. The regimes pro-terrorist, anti-American and
anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it
poses. U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot and should
notmust notpermit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. To be
sure, we need to cajole China and Russia into going along with
diplomatic and economic sanctions, but we cannot take any option off
the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of
Iranthat they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear
weapons.
Wittmann celebrated his apparent success
in influencing the Democratic presidential frontrunner by exulting that
the Moose has a mind meld with Hillary. Taking the opportunity to
rally the shrinking but strategically placed pro-war wing of the
Democratic Party around a united front, he staked out for her a
position in favor of multi-lateral action, if possible, but unilateral
action, including military options, if necessary, against the growing
Iranian nuclear threat.
Hillarys newfound centrism isnt
completely insincere. Her bellicose interventionism has a history: it
was Hillary, youll recall, who berated her husband for not bombing
Belgrade soon enough and hard enough. As Gail Sheehy relates in
Hillarys Choice:
Hillary expressed her views by phone to
the President: I urged him to bomb. The Clintons argued the issue
over the next few days. [The president expressed] what-ifs: What if
bombing promoted more executions? What if it took apart the NATO
alliance? Hillary responded, You cannot let this go on at the end of
a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we
have NATO for if not to defend our way of life? The next day the
President declared that force was necessary.
Together with Madeleine Albrightwho
famously complained to Colin Powell, What good is it having this superb
military youre always talking about if we cant use it?Hillary
constituted the Amazonian wing of the Democratic Party during the years
of her husbands presidency. Her effort to outflank the Republicans on
the right when it comes to the Iran issue is a logical extension of her
natural bellicosity.
Hillary is nothing if not consistent: in
her floor speech to the Senate during the debate over the resolution
authorizing the use of force in Iraq, she declared, the facts that have
brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubta statement she has
never acknowledged regretting. Particularly endearing to the War Party,
she framed her aye vote in terms of the classic neoconservative myth
of Bush Is betrayal:
The first President Bush assembled a
global coalition, including many Arab states, and threw Saddam out after
forty-three days of bombing and a hundred hours of ground operations.
The U.S.-led coalition then withdrew, leaving the Kurds and the Shiites,
who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging, to Saddams
revenge.
Hillary would have occupied Iraq a decade
earlier, riding into Baghdad at the head of her troops like Pallas
Athena descending on the Trojans, striding boldly into what Gen. William
E. Odom has described as the greatest strategic disaster in our
history.
Hillary hails the 1998 bombing of Iraq,
ordered by her husband, which killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and
recounts the official mythology promulgated by the Bush administration:
[T]he so-called presidential palaces
in reality were huge compounds
well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam
Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked
the inspection process, the inspectors left. As we now know, there was
nothing even approaching WMD in those palaces, and Iraq had been
effectively disarmed at that point. In late February or early March,
Scott Ritter, then a UN arms inspector, met with then-U.S. ambassador to
the UN Bill Richardson. Ritter was told to provoke an incident so the
U.S. could finish bombing by the start of the Islamic New Year
holiday.
Hillary, however, didnt let any
inconvenient facts get in her way. She boasted that it was under a
Democratic administration that the U.S. changed its underlying policy
toward Iraq from containment to regime change and took credit for the
bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and known
liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly
Standard editorial, reiterating each of the War Partys talking
pointsthe bio-weapons fantasy, the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the
phantom nuclear arsenal: This much, she maintaind, is
undisputed.
What is undisputed these days is that the
entire rationale for war was based on trumped-up evidence of Iraqs
alleged transgressions, but Hillary is unrepentant: No, I dont regret
giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context
of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and
clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international
community for more than a decade.
But there was no threat to the U.S. and
Hillary knows it. Whats more, her hardcore constituency knows it, and
they are becoming increasingly alienated fromeven actively hostile
totheir putative presidential frontrunner over this issue. Their anger
is stoked by evidence that Hillary has imbibed the same neocon Kool-Aid
that has intoxicated the Bush administration and blinded it to the
failure of its policies in Iraq.
On a trip to Iraq during which 55
peopleincluding one American soldier were killed by suicide bombers,
Hillary was merrily chirping that the occupation was functioning quite
well and that the surge of suicide attacks indicated that the
insurgency was failing. Security was so bad that the road to the airport
was impassable, and the Senate delegation had to be transported to the
Green Zone by military helicopter. They dared not venture out into the
streets of Baghdad.
The disconnect between rhetoric and
reality, between the antiwar views of Hillarys left-wing base and the
militant interventionism of Wittmann and the DLC crowd, finally forced
her to come to grips with the contradictionor at least to appear to do
so. This occurred not in a public speech but in an e-mail sent to her
supporters in which the trouble she is in is acknowledged in the first
sentence: The war in Iraq is on the minds of many of you who have
written or who have called my office asking questions and expressing
frustration. Chances are, these callers were expressing frustration not
only with the policies of the Bush administration but with her own
complicity with Bushs Middle Eastern agenda of seemingly endless
aggression.
She falls back on the old there are no
quick and easy answers ploy to give an aura of thoughtfulness to a
dishonest and constantly shifting position on the war. While insisting
that we should not allow this to be an open-ended commitment without
limits or end, she reassures the War Party by distancing herself from
John Murtha and others who want an orderly withdrawal in a relatively
short time: Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq
immediately. She hails the elections as the signal that we can start
the withdrawal process sometime in the coming year, but not
completely: we must leave behind a smaller contingent in safer areas
with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilitiesa tripwire, in
short, in the form of permanent bases.
This goes beyond anything the Bush
administration would ever admit, even as it starts building those
facilities14 enduring bases across Iraq. The White House has been
cagey about this, preferring to speak in vague generalities: we are not
supposed to notice that construction was begun prior to any agreement
with the Iraqi government. With Hillary signing on to this plan for a
permanent military presence in Iraqin effect, a shadow occupationthe
debate over U.S. policy in the region is settled.
If we knew then what we knew now, Hillary
avers, Congress would never have agreed with the decision to go to
war, but she forgets her previously expressed undisputed certainty
that Saddam possessed and posed a grave threat. She complains that the
administration did not act to gain international support, but it did go
to the UN and made every effort to give the invasion a multinational
gloss. She berates the Bush administration for failing to level with
the American peopleas if they would have gone along with it had they
known that the American presence would be widely detested. She hectors
the White House and Rummy for not heeding the advice of General Shinseki
that as many as 200,000 troops would be necessary to occupy Iraq as if
that wouldnt have caused a great many second thoughts in those who
otherwise supported the war. She has called for more troops to be
senteven as she holds out the prospect of reducing the American
presence in the coming year.
The president, Hillary charges, does not
have a plan for concluding and winning the war. Disdaining a rigid
timetable for withdrawal, she calls for devising a strategy for
successwithout defining what a victory would look like. When push
comes to shove, her position is the same as the administrations, albeit
with minor modifications: well leave when were good and ready and not
a moment sooner.
This is not likely to assuage her core
constituencyor, indeed, the rest of the countrywhich is increasingly
opposed to continuing the war; the only red meat she throws at her base
is a sharp rebuke to the Bushies for impugning the patriotism of their
critics. Dont mistake criticism for softness, she rails: Hillary,
the war goddess, is no softy. Nor should we confuse her critique of the
administrations means with a fundamental objection to the War Partys
ends.
What does Hillary want? A smarter,
smoother, better-planned interventionism, one that our allies find more
amenable and yet is, in many ways, more militant than the Republican
versionone that levels with the American people about the costs of
empire and yet doesnt dispute the alleged necessity of American
hegemony. As she finds her voice as a would-be commander in chief, it
isnt one the traditional Left in this country will recognize. Hers is
not the party of Eugene McCarthy but of the neoconservative
Wittmann.
If some Democrats have a modicum of
imagination, Wittmann recently wrote, they would move to the
Presidents right on national security. Of course, that would require
them to take on some of those on the left flank. But, if a donkey is
ever to occupy the Oval Office in the foreseeable future, he or she must
be perceived as being as tough or tougher than the Republicans on
national security.
The Hillary wing of the Democratic Party
is taking the Moose up on his bet that they can outflank the Bush
administration on the war front, with Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee head Congressman Rahm Emanuel taking the lead by working
actively to spike antiwar candidates like Paul Hackett. When Congressman
Murtha denounced the war, Emanuel snapped, Jack Murtha went out and
spoke for Jack Murtha. Not true: he spoke for the majority of
Americans, who now oppose the war and want out, and especially for the
activist base of the Democratic party, which cheered while the bigwigs
sought to distance themselves. What then is his partys position on the
central issue of the day? At the right time we will have a position on
the war, he avers, and yet Emanuel has a position decidedly in favor of
continuing and even escalating the conflict.
Asked recently by Tim Russert if he would
still vote for the resolution authorizing war with Iraq knowing that the
WMD meme was a crock, Emanuels answer was an unequivocal Yes. His
critique of the presidents war policy is, like that of many, if not
most, Democrats, limited to means, not ends. There was not a plan for
the wars aftermath, says Emanuel, and all he and his fellows in
Congress want is not a reconsideration of our policy but only a modicum
of competency in the management of this war. Taking up the Kerry
mantra, Emanuel urges the president to level with the American people
about the long hard slog fighting to win in Iraq will requireas if
some magic blueprint could put a wrongheaded policy right.
Russert pulled his quote-out-of-a-hat
trickSo as long as our troops [are] engaged, we should suspend the
debate over how and why, focus on the mission, unite as a country, in
prayer and resolve, hope for a speedy resolution of this war with a
minimum of loss. God bless Americaand wondered whether this didnt
contradict what Emanuel had just said. The answer, a flat No, was
telling: In fact, Tim, what I actually believe its consistent in this
perspective.
I think the president came, as you know, for resolution
to Congress. He got that. Second, he asked multiple times for the
resources to fight that war. He has got that. What we ask in return is a
plan.
Yet what sort of plan could possibly have
prevented the dissolution of the Iraqi state and the onset of civil war?
What would have blocked the Iranians from extending their influence into
the Shiite south of the country and taking over the leadership of the
central government in Baghdad? Its true that General Shinseki warned
that we would need 200,000 soldiers to manage the occupation. Without
radically reducing our commitments elsewhere, however, such a force is
largely imaginaryunless the Democratic plan involves reintroducing the
draft. Nothing quite so forthright has come from Emanuels
directiononly vague hopes that somehow the Europeans will come to our
rescue.
If the Democratic establishments stance
on the war is at odds with the partys antiwar activist base, then their
outright warmongering on the Iranian issue puts the two factions on a
collision course. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosiwho effectively
quashed fellow California Democrat Lynn Woolseys resolution calling for
a withdrawal timetable has followed the Hillary-Emanuel-DLC party line,
while managing somehow to assuage her constituents with plenty of pork
and partisan rhetoric. When it comes to Iran, however, she is just as
belligerent as the next neocon: Pelosi co-sponsored legislation imposing
draconian economic sanctions on Iran and stops just short of calling
another war.
If Hillary maintains her lead in the
Democratic presidential sweepstakesand with over $21 million in the
bank, shes way ahead of any potential rivalsand the party
establishment effectively strangles insurgent antiwar activism at the
grassroots level, an increasingly isolationist electorate will be
faced with a choice between two interventionist candidates, giving
credence to what Garet Garrett, that lion of the Old Right, bitterly
observed in 1951:
Between government in the republican
meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government,
on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity.
Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That
we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people.
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