Already key neocons, such as the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, are signaling that they expect to have substantial influence over Clinton’s foreign policy. Kagan, who has repackaged himself as a “liberal interventionist,” threw his support to Clinton, who put him on a State Department advisory board.
There is also talk in Washington that Kagan’s neocon wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, another Clinton favorite and the architect of the “regime change” in Ukraine, would be in line for a top foreign policy job in a Clinton-45 administration.
Neocons Back in Charge
So, Clinton’s election could mean that some of the most dangerous people in American foreign policy would be whispering their schemes for war and more war directly into her ear – and her record shows that she is very susceptible to such guidance.
At every turn, as a U.S. senator and as Secretary of State, Clinton has opted for “regime change” solutions – from the Iraq invasion in 2003 to the Honduras coup in 2009 to the Libyan air war in 2011 to the Syria civil war since 2011 – or she has advocated for the escalation of conflicts, such as in Afghanistan and with Iran, rather than engaging in reasonable give-and-take negotiations.
Though her backers tout her experience as Secretary of State, the reality was that she repeatedly disdained genuine diplomacy and was constantly hectoring President Obama into adopting the most violent and confrontational options.
He sometimes did (the Afghan “surge,” the Libyan war, the Iran nuclear stand-off) but he sometimes didn’t (reversing the Afghan escalation, finally negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran after Clinton left, rejecting a direct U.S. military assault on the Syrian government, and working at times with the Russians on Iran and Syria).
In other words, Obama acted as a register or brake restraining Clinton’s hawkishness. With Clinton as the President, however, she would have no such restraints. One could expect her to endorse many if not all the harebrained neocon schemes, much as President George W. Bush did when his neocon advisers exploited his fear and fury over 9/11 to guide him into their “regime change” agenda for the Middle East.
The neocons have never given up their dreams of overthrowing Mideast governments that Israel has put on its enemies list. Iraq was only the first. To follow were Syria and Iran with the idea that by installing pro-Israeli leaders in those countries, Israel’s close-in enemies – Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups – could be isolated and crushed.
After Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003, Washington’s neocons were joking about whether Iran or Syria should come next, with the punch line: “Real men go to Tehran!” But the Iraq War wasn’t the “cakewalk” that the neocons had predicted. Instead of throwing flowers at the U.S. troops, Iraqis planted IEDs.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/11/would-clinton-win-mean-more-wars
