In reply to the Obama is a war monger thread...

While much attention has been given to Senator Hillary Clinton's
support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, her foreign policy record
regarding other international conflicts and her apparent eagerness to
accept the use of force appears to indicate that her fateful vote
authorizing the invasion and

her subsequent support for the occupation and counter-insurgency war was no aberration.



Indeed, there's every indication that, as president, her foreign policy
agenda would closely parallel that of the Bush administration. Despite
efforts by some conservative Republicans to portray her as being on the
left wing of the Democratic Party, in reality her foreign policy
positions bear a far closer resemblance to those of Ronald Reagan than
they do of George McGovern.



For example, rather than challenge President George W. Bush's dramatic
increases in military spending, Senator Clinton argues that they are
not enough and the United States needs to spend even more in subsequent
years. At the end of the Cold War, many Democrats were claiming that
the American public would be able to benefit from a "peace dividend"
resulting from dramatically-reduced military spending following the
demise of the Soviet Union.



Clinton, however, has called for dramatic increases in the military
budget, even though the United States, despite being surrounded by two
oceans and weak friendly neighbors, already spends as much on its
military as all the rest of the world combined.



Her presidential campaign has received far more money from defense
contractors than any other candidate - Democrat or Republican - and her
close ties to the defense industry has led the Village Voice to refer
to her as "Mama Warbucks." She has

even fought the Bush administration in restoring funding for some of
the very few weapons systems the Bush administration has sought to cut
in recent years. Pentagon officials and defense contractors have given
Senator Clinton high marks for listening to their concerns, promoting
their products and leveraging her ties to the Pentagon,

comparing her favorably to the hawkish former

Washington Senator "Scoop" Jackson and other pro-military Democrats of earlier eras.



Clinton has also demonstrated a marked preference for military
confrontation over negotiation. In a speech before the Council on
Foreign Relations, she called for a "tough-minded, muscular foreign and
defense policy." Similarly, when her rival for the Democratic
presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness

to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with
whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being
"irresponsible and frankly naive."



Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt
instrument of military force to deal with complex international
problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her
husband's inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against
Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to

resolve the Kosovo crisis.



Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians'
nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing
since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she
was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the
militant Kosovo

Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail
Sheehy's book Hillary's Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton
and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would
likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by
provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic

cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully

pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.

She has also defended the 1998 U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant
in Sudan which had provided that impoverished African country with more
than half of its antibiotics and vaccines, falsely claiming it was a
chemical weapons factory controlled by Osama bin Laden.



Immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Clinton went well beyond the
broad consensus that the United States should go after al-Qaeda cells
and their leadership to declare that any country providing any "aid and
comfort" to al-Qaeda "will now face the wrath of our country." When
Bush echoed these words the following week in his nationally-televised
speech, she declared "I'll stand behind Bush for a long time to come."



She certainly did. Clinton voted to authorize the president with
wide-ranging authority to attack Afghanistan and was a strong supporter
of the bombing campaign against that country, which resulted in more
civilian deaths than the 9/11 attacks against the United States that
had prompted them.



Despite recent pleas by the democratically elected Afghan president
Harmid Karzai that the ongoing U.S. bombing and the overemphasis on
aggressive counter-insurgency operations was harming efforts to deal
with the resurgence of violence by the Taliban and other radical
groups, Clinton argues that our "overriding immediate objective of our
foreign policy" toward Afghanistan "must be to significantly step up
our military engagement."



Particularly disturbing has been Senator Clinton's attitudes regarding
nuclear issues. For example, when Senator Obama noted in August that
the use of nuclear weapons -traditionally seen as a deterrent against
other nuclear states - was not appropriate for use against terrorists,
Clinton rebuked

his logic by claiming that "I don't believe that any president should
make any blanket statements with respect to the use or nonuse of
nuclear weapons."



Senator Clinton has also shown little regard for the danger from the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries,

opposing the enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions challenging
the nuclear weapons programs of such U.S allies as Israel, Pakistan and
India. Not only does

she support unconditional military aid - including nuclear-capable
missiles and jet fighters - to these countries, she even voted to end
restrictions on U.S. nuclear cooperation with countries that violate
the Non-Proliferation Treaty.



She has a very different attitude, however, regarding even the possibility of a country the United States does not support

obtaining nuclear weapons some time in the future. For example, Senator
Clinton insists that the prospect of Iran joining its three Southwest
Asian neighbors in developing

nuclear weapons "must be unacceptable to the entire world" since
challenging the nuclear monopoly of the United States and its allies
would somehow "shake the foundation of global security to its very
core."



She refuses to support the proposed nuclear weapons-free zone for the
Middle East, as called for in UN Security Council resolution 687, nor
does she support a no-first use

nuclear policy, both of which could help resolve the nuclear standoff.
Indeed, she has refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against
such non-nuclear countries as Iran, even though such unilateral use of
nuclear weapons directly contradicts the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the
same

treaty she claims the United States must unilaterally and rigorously
enforce when it involves Iran and other countries our government
doesn't like.



Senator Clinton also criticized the Bush administration's decision to
include China, Japan and South Korea in talks regarding North Korea's
nuclear program and to allow

France, Britain and Germany to play a major role in negotiations with
Iran, claiming that instead of taking "leadership to keep deadly
weapons out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists … we have
outsourced over

the last five years our policies." In essence, as president, Hillary
Clinton would be more unilateralist and less prone to work with other
nations than the Bush administration

on such critical issues as non-proliferation.



In Latin America, Senator Clinton argues that the Bush administration
should take a more aggressive stance against the rise of left-leaning
governments in the hemisphere.

Regarding Israel, Senator Clinton has taken a consistently right-wing
position, undermining the efforts of Israeli and Palestinian moderates
seeking a just peace. She’s spoken freely about military action against
Syria and Iran, often repeating Bush administration talking points that
have been proven false. I could go on and on, but I’m nearly out of
space.



Hillary Clinton is no progressive. She’s a war mongering cash cow for the military industrial complex. Don’t let her fool you.