Hillary Strangelove

When Hillary committed to expanding a nuclear deterrence umbrella over not only Israel, but other allies in the Middle East, something that even Bush and the neocons haven't voiced support for, many people were shocked, yet the media made almost no mention of this fairly insane foreign policy statement. She basically said she would commit the US nuclear arsenal to attacking any country that used weapons of mass destruction against another country in the Middle East. The Middle East, just in case some are unaware, is a giant mess of conflicts. Hillary feels we should throw ourselves and our nuclear weapons right in the middle of it.

Then, just a few days later, she nonchalantly threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran (apparently not realizing that there are millions of innocent civilians in Iran) if the Iranian government nuked Israel. Just imagine, for a moment, if a terrorist group got a nuke from North Korea or a former Soviet republic, and detonated it in Israel. Suddenly there is panic, no one knows where it came from or who was responsible, but Israel assumes it was Iran, whether because they really think it was Iran, or because they want an excuse to annihilate Iran, so Hillary with her finger on the button launches nukes against Iran from submarines stationed in the Middle East. BOOM! Game over. There are countless ways mistakes can be made, and Hillary's willingness to "totally obliterate" Iran turns a bad situation into a nightmare scenario. And not to mention, Israel has its own nukes that it isn't supposed to have (notice, the US doesn't care that Israel have nukes, which only encourage its Arab neighbors to develop them to defend themselves, nor does the US seem to notice that its own bellicosity in the region only proves to Middle Eastern countries that they need a nuclear deterrence if they are to be safe from the US and its allies--just like North Korea is safe).

Anyway, all of these comments show two things: A) Hillary is nearly as hawkish as McCain and the neocons, and B) Hillary, despite all of her bragging about her superior experience, has very short-sighted and naive foreign policy ideas, just like Bush and the neocons. Anyway, at the time all this went down, I wanted to write a blog about it, but unfortunately other campaign coverage took up my time. Here is a repost of an article which mentions some of the reaction to her ignorant Republicanesque bellicosity:



Hillary Strangelove
by The Boston Globe

AMERICANS have learned to take with a grain of salt much of the rhetoric in a campaign like the current Democratic donnybrook between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Still, there are some red lines that should never be crossed. Clinton did so Tuesday morning, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, when she told ABC's "Good Morning America" that, if she were president, she would "totally obliterate" Iran if Iran attacked Israel.

This foolish and dangerous threat was muted in domestic media coverage. But it reverberated in headlines around the world.

Responding with understatement to a question in the British House of Lords, the foreign minister responsible for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, said of Clinton's implication of a mushroom cloud over Iran: "While it is reasonable to warn Iran of the consequences of it continuing to develop nuclear weapons and what those real consequences bring to its security, it is probably not prudent in today's world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country."

A less restrained reaction came from an editorial in the Saudi-based paper Arab News. Being neighbors of Iran, the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs have the most to fear from Iran's nuclear program and its drive to become the dominant power in the Gulf.

But precisely because they are most at risk from Iran's regional ambitions, the Saudis want a carefully considered American approach to Iran, one that balances firmness and diplomatic engagement.

The Saudi paper called Clinton's nuclear threat "the foreign politics of the madhouse," saying, "it demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush's foreign relations."

The Saudis are not always sound advisers on American foreign policy. But they understand that Rambo rhetoric like Clinton's only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.

While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.