By Adam Johnson

Hillary Clinton’s support for regime change in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Honduras is seldom recalled when comparing her foreign policy to Donald Trump’s. (photo: David J. Marshall/US Army)

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a much-anticipated “foreign policy” speech (6/2/16) in which she took presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump to task for what she called his “dangerously incoherent” foreign policy stances. The speech was widely met with praise from the pundit class:

• Hillary Clinton Rolled Out the Anti-Trump Argument That Could Deliver a Landslide: Vox
• Hillary Clinton Just Kicked Trump in the Shins: And Showed That She’s Certainly Tough Enough for the Long Haul: Slate
• Hillary Clinton Just Proved She Is Very Good at Taunting Donald Trump: Washington Post
• Hillary Clinton Eviscerates Donald Trump in Her Best Speech Yet: Huffington Post
• Clinton Targets the ‘Blame America First’ Republicans: Bloomberg View

Almost all of the praise was premised on two assumptions: A) Trump presents a horrific risk to the planet and B) Clinton is the antidote to this, a “steady hand” in a dangerous world.

Point A, it’s worth emphasizing, is true. Trump’s Muslim immigration ban and his claim that climate change is an “expensive hoax” that was “created by and for the Chinese” are certifiable and racist. His plan to seize the natural resources of other countries reverts us back to outright 19th century colonialism. His violent and inciting rhetoric presents a clear danger to immigrants, women and people of color.

Matthew Yglesias in Vox (6/2/16): “You can at least be sure that a Clinton presidency won’t lead to some enormous unforeseen cataclysm.”

But B, the idea that Clinton is, by contrast, a prudent foreign policy moderate, is an establishment media assertion with little or no supporting evidence.

Clinton has a long, objectively verifiable track record of acting recklessly on matters of foreign policy that seems to have slipped into a memory hole as the prospect of a Trump presidency looms overhead. While one would expect this rewriting of history to come from Clinton surrogates, it’s increasingly bizarre coming from nominally independent media pundits.

Over at Vox, Matt Yglesias has positioned Clinton as the sensible, reliable choice on foreign policy and, in doing so, failed to mention Iraq, Libya, Syria, Honduras or any other of the list of nations that Clinton has helped to make, in some capacity or another, much worse off. When comparing the high stakes of statecraft, Yglesias even laid out this ahistorical comparison:

But at the end of the day, even though real estate is a game for risk takers, it’s also a game where the downside risk is very limited. At the absolute worst, you can’t repay your debts and it becomes a bit harder to get a loan the next time.

Running a country isn’t like that. If you make a big mistake, you can’t just go to court and have the slate wiped clean. A casino bankruptcy hurts the bottom line of a few banks. A sovereign default of the United States — something Trump has floated — would destroy the global economy.

But “wiping the slate clean” is exactly what Iraq War boosters have done. Bush and Rumsfeld are currently playing golf, while those who supported the war, like Clinton, continue to hold positions of power. Clinton issued a belated and perfunctory apology—and that was it. And that’s just the one “mistake” she’s been called to answer for. Clinton’s support of a right-wing coup in Honduras, or the disastrous regime change in Libya, are seldom brought up, much less apologized for.

Yglesias: A worthless imperialist cheerleader.

Perhaps Yglesias is referencing the material consequences to the world, rather than to the politician, but if this is the case, then why not address the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis resulting from the war Clinton pushed? Why not bring up the disastrous government she forced upon Haiti? Yglesias is right: The stakes are high, and, time and time again, Clinton has made decisions that resulted in material harm.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan and Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake also neglected to mention the Iraq War when recapping Clinton’s “experience.” It could be because they, like Yglesias, also pushed for that particular disaster. Indeed, as we’ve seen before, to indemnify Clinton for her past “bad judgments,” is to do the same for most of the pundit class who also followed Bush off the cliff. Her rebranding is their rebranding. This may serve immediate political interests—especially if one views Trump as existentially dangerous—but it doesn’t serve history, and it certainly doesn’t serve readers.

The media has a duty to vet the foreign policy record and plans of the respective candidates. As such, the pundits are right to pinpoint some of Trump’s more dangerous plans. Where they’ve consistently fallen short—and this was on full display in response to Thursday’s speech—is also contextualizing and harshly critiquing Clinton’s brand of measured, polite recklessness.

On this we have some pretty stark examples. The right-wing coup Clinton backed in Honduras in 2009 eventually led to the assassination of indigenous leaders and displacement of thousands of Hondurans as they fled right-wing violence.

One email from her aide Sid Blumenthal in March 2011 informed then-Secretary Clinton that a Libyan rebel commander told him that “his troops continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting.” (“Foreign mercenaries” being code for black Africans loyal to Gaddafi). In response, the State Department continued to support the rebels without any clear concern for their war crimes. A BBC report that December detailed how 30,000 black Libyans were ethnically cleansed from the town of Misrata. A report the following year in the New York Times detailed how US arms “fell into the hands of jihadis” in an effort to overthrow Gaddafi.

Clinton’s eagerness to back dubious groups in the interest of regime change wouldn’t stop there. For years, the State Department watched  Qatar and Saudi Arabia arm jihadists in Syria while pledging millions to overthrow the Syrian government themselves. Time and time again, Clinton’s desire to overthrow unfriendly governments resulted in arms “ending up in the hands” of designated terrorist organizations.

As for the former Secretary’s famous “wonkishness,” there’s evidence, as Peter Beinart noted in The Atlantic in 2014, that Clinton didn’t even review the NIE report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before voting to authorize the war in October 2002.

Unlike Trump’s rhetoric, these were actual reckless decisions that affected real people. Of course, media should critique Trump’s outlandish, ofttimes cartoonish campaign promises. But they don’t have to whitewash Clinton’s foreign policy record to do so.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By= Brian Cloughley

Erdogan, by nature a ruthless despot, is obviously Washington’s man for the Eastern flank of NATO. Lapdogs like these proliferate in the Empire of Chaos.

There are embedded contradictions in the enthusiastic support of Erdogan by the US and the EU. The US argument is that Erdogan is a staunch ally in the effort to bring down Assad and oppose Russia. Supposedly, he is also critical in the fight against the so0called Islamic State. However, Erdogan has been benefiting handsomely by the constant passage of ISIS oil tankers into Turkey and off-loading at Turkish ports. This is not some sporadic event that slips under the radar, this is a constant flow of a fleet of trucks. Given the blatant wink and nod to ISIS by Erdogan (and therefore the US, EU, and the rest of the “alliance”) are we suppose to pretend that the US is not also supporting ISIS in a host of ways – Erdogan’s gloved fist being just one example. The grotesque irony of holding the World Humanitarian Summit it Turkey speaks volumes about the woeful lack of a true humanitarian response to the ongoing displacement of millions of people across the Middle East … and Africa. Of course the US supports Erdogan for he is little more than the henchman in this plot. -rw

On May 6 a court in Istanbul, acting on the orders of Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan, sentenced the editor of the Cumhuriyet newspaper to five years and ten months in prison for publishing a report about illegal provision of weapons to Islamist terrorists in Syria by Turkey’s secret service. His bureau chief got five years.

Two weeks later Istanbul was host to the World Humanitarian Summit, which was held «to stand up for our common humanity and take action to prevent and reduce human suffering». Attendance included 65 heads of state. It was the usual total waste of time (Oxfam called it «an expensive talking shop» and those who refused to be there included President Putin and the global medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières), but the point is that a humanitarian conference should never have been held in Turkey, which is being transformed into a dictatorship by a president who is well-described by Professor Alan Sked of the London School of Economics as «a volatile, unstable, highly authoritarian personality».

The professor went on to observe that Erdogan «has pursued a civil war in his own country and has clamped down on the opposition and social media at will. Thousands have been imprisoned for merely criticising him. He has ordered the shooting down of a Russian warplane, and his country has been accused by Russia of trafficking secretly in oil with Isis. He cannot be trusted…»

Erdogan is a bigoted thug, yet the international community rushed to his country to hold a humanitarian conference and foreign heads of state flock to press his hand in friendship. He is treated with deference around the world and there can be no public criticism of him in the many countries that have laws prohibiting disparagement of heads of state and holding defamation and insult of their leaders to be a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment.

In January over 1,100 Turkish academics signed a letter asking Erdogan to cease his merciless blitz on Kurdish centres in the south east of the country. Thousands of Kurds had been (and continue to be) killed and crippled by ground and air assaults of merciless savagery. Erdogan’s response to the petition was to declare that these compassionate scholars «spit out hatred of our nation’s values and history on every occasion. The petition has made this clearer… In a state of law like Turkey, so-called academics who target the unity of our nation have no right to commit crimes. They don’t have immunity for this».

Some thirty of the humanitarian signatories were arrested and fifteen were dismissed from their university posts. They live under constant threat, as do all who attempt to disagree with the imperial president.

Yet Erdogan’s Turkey is strongly supported by the United States and by the European Union, albeit for very different reasons.

The US backs him because he supports Washington’s efforts to destroy President Assad of Syria and is a strident and aggressive opponent of Russia, while the EU is behind him because if he chose he could control the influx of Syrian refugees to Europe. So Erdogan can persecute and jail as many journalists and academics as he likes, while continuing to slaughter Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and although there may be a few murmurs of disapproval in Brussels and Washington there will be no action whatever taken by either the US or the EU to stop the President of Turkey wielding absolute power over his people.

In March, while Erdogan was attending the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington (yet another total waste of time and money, except for the travel industry) he met separately with the US president and vice-president, neither of whom had the moral courage to take him to task for his blatant oppression of those of his citizens who dare to have ideas and opinions contrary to his own.

As the Voice of America reported on March 31, «President Barack Obama assured his Turkish counterpart of American commitment to the security of Turkey, a critical ally in the fight against the Islamic State group», while the White House “readout” of the Erdogan-Biden meeting recorded that «the Vice President reiterated the United States’ unwavering commitment to Turkey’s national security as a NATO Ally». They discussed «ways to further deepen our military cooperation» which was no doubt heartening to a bellicose thug whose aim is to persecute and preferably kill Kurds wherever they may be.

In spite of all the evidence, the United States refuses to acknowledge that Erdogan’s Turkey has sent massive quantities of weaponry to Islamic terrorist groups who are prepared to kill Kurds. It does not appear to matter to Washington that «Not only has Erdoğan done almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting ISIS; there is considerable evidence that his government has been at least tacitly aiding ISIS itself».

The countries of the European Union, in similar blinkered mode, ignore Erdogan’s transformation of Turkey from democracy to dictatorship because they are prepared to make almost any sacrifice to reduce the flood of refugees now threatening their countries. Their leaders are terrified that behaving in a humanitarian manner will damage their domestic electoral chances and have set up an extraordinary deal with Erdogan who has agreed to «do more to prevent refugees from traveling to Europe via its territory and take back all migrants and refugees who manage to cross into Europe from Turkey … In return, the European Union has doubled the financial aid it promised Turkey from 3 billion to 6 billion euros, has agreed to take in more Syrian refugees from Turkey, and will move to provide visa-free travel to Turks and reopen EU accession talks».

Little wonder that Erdogan is on the crest of a wave and can persecute dissenters and slaughter Kurds with hardly a word of international criticism. In March, when he took over Turkey’s largest newspaper, the independent Zaman, and replaced the entire staff with his supporters, US State Department spokesman John Kirby called the seizure «troubling». And it was reported on 25 May that, «the EU wants Ankara to narrow its definition of terror to stop prosecuting academics and journalists for publishing ‘terror propaganda’, but Turkey has refused to do so».

Unless the US and the EU bring pressure to bear on Erdogan to restore democracy in his country, he will continue to suppress and persecute his critics and continue his killing spree. But he is too valuable to them for that to happen. All they will do is hold more humanitarian conferences.

Brian Cloughley: British and Australian armies’ veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir and Australian defense attaché in Pakistan

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

FRONTLINE
N e w s

Reports, News Flashes, and Commentary from Various Conflict Zones Around the Globe
HUMANITY IN TORMENT

=Intro by=
Alexandra Bruce, Forbidden Knowledge

Pro-Bandera March, Kiev, January 2015. Source: AFP. Bandera, hailed as a nationalist hero by the new regime, was a prominent Nazi collaborator. Now, thanks to Washington’s coup and support, Nazis and their organizations are proliferating on Russia’s doorstep, a clear threat and affront to a nation that suffered 26 million casualties to the fascists in WW2.

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