Yes, Madeleine Albright is one of Clinton's main foreign-policy
advisors, so may I ask politely, what else is new? And we don't ignore
the fact that Obama is advised by Zbigniew Brzezinski, an architect of
the strategy of US imperial hegemony for the next fifty years and
counting, and one of the most aggressively vocal supporters of the
bombing of Yugoslavia. We should of course expect nothing different from
the candidates of the parties of transnational corporate-financial
oligarchic dominance. So we who may still believe in fairy tales will
trudge to the polls again, exercising our forlorn right to eject the
present scoundrels every four years, as Walter Lippmann had it, hoping
that the less odious can preserve our dwindling creature comforts and
stave off chaos for another four years.
Bill Fletcher says this morning (on Amy Goodman's program) that people
like Cynthia McKinney and Nader should run within the Democratic Party
if they want to influence and organize effectively. Whatever the merits
of their attempts to run as third party candidates, how many times do we
have to rediscover that dissident candidates and labor and other
organizations who attempt to work within the major parties are quickly
ridiculed, ignored, coopted, and/or trapped and disgorged in the
entrails of the parties' power trains? In case this isn't clear, how
conclude other than that hope lies virtually exclusively in the
offensive - no longer defensive - extra-parliamentary route - - or chaos
for sure. rj
Jim Devine wrote:
[Madeleine Halfbright is one of Clinton's main foreign-policy advisors, no?]
from Juan Cole:
Hillary Clinton's win in Pennsylvania just was not big enough to allow
her to hope to win the elected delegate count. She is increasingly
using dark and exaggerated rhetoric and 2/3s of Democrats complain
that she has gone too negative (less than half say that about Obama).
Her exaggerations yesterday extended into the realm of international
politics in a most unfortunate way. It seems clear to me that she
cannot win the nomination via elected delegates and that she is hoping
to win by scaring the super delegates about Obama. This strategy is
counterproductive for the Democratic Party and for the country.
Clinton needed to win by well into the double digits in Pennsylvania
(which is how she began in the polling there months ago) in order to
remain credible. 10 points doesn't do it. Obama actually won Texas,
which will be a headline in June when all the counting is done there
(don't ask). It is over. She should stop before more damage is done.
The Israeli spy ring that penetrated the US Pentagon to steal
high-tech secrets including nuclear ones was bigger than just Jonathan
Pollard. It is an open secret in US security circles that no foreign
country spies on the US more intensively than Israel. And, apparently,
none has been more successful in actually prying loose top secret
documents. Sy Hersh's sources alleged to him that secrets that went to
Israel were either in turn picked up by Soviet moles in Israel or were
sold on the black market and ended up with the Soviet Union.
The damage that Israeli spying has done to US security is immense, not
only because of such leaks but also because of Israeli reverse
engineering of US technology and the pirating of it. Further, the
nuclearization of the Middle East that the Israelis initiated has the
potential to drag us all into Armageddon.
The Israeli Right is always going on about threats to Israel's
existence, even though it is the most powerful country in the Middle
East. But no one ever brings up its strangulation of the Palestinian
nation, its siege of Gaza, its dispossession of the West Bankers. The
right makes an imagined future threat the basis for actual
victimization of others in the present. America's security is deeply
threatened by the ongoing Israeli colonization projects in the Middle
East, as should have been clear for some time.
How dangerous the phantasms of the Right really are is underscored by
Hillary Clinton's remarks yesterday:
' In an interview with ABC's Good Morning America, Clinton was asked
what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.
She replied: "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly
consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally
obliterate them. That's a terrible thing to say but those people who
run Iran need to understand that, because that perhaps will deter them
from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic." '
Clinton has unfortunately fallen in typical Washington fear-mongering
fantasy. Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. As of last fall, US
intelligence determined that it was not trying to get a nuclear
weapon. There is no realistic likelihood of Iran having a bomb 'in the
next ten years.' Israel on the other hand has hundreds of bombs and
has threatened to use them.
So the statement seemed incommensurate with the known facts. It was
counter-productive because Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei has
denounced nuclear weapons. Khamenei says that nuking civilians is
contrary to the Islamic law of war, which only allows warriors to kill
other warriors:
' "Their other issue is [their assertion] that Iran seeks [a] nuclear
bomb. It is an irrelevant and wrong statement, it is a sheer lie. We
do not need a nuclear bomb. We do not have any objectives or
aspirations for which we will need to use a nuclear bomb. We consider
using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules. We have announced this
openly. We think imposing the costs of building and maintaining
nuclear weapons on our nation is unnecessary. Building such weapons
and their maintenance are costly. By no means we deem it right to
impose these costs on the people. We do not need those weapons. Unlike
the Americans who want to rule the world with force, we do not claim
to control the world and therefore do not need a nuclear bomb. Our
nuclear bomb and our explosive powers are our faith, our youth and our
people who have been present on the most difficult scenes with utmost
power and faith and will continue to do so.'
Khamenei's quaint chivalry in this age of total war stands in contrast
to Clinton's chilling contemplation of genocide against 70 million
Iranians in retaliation for something they would and could have had no
part in deciding. Mutual Assured Destruction is a security
underpinning of the contemporary nuclearized world, but it is a
diplomatic weapon that works best by allusion.
If you were an Iranian and you heard Clinton talking like this, would
it make you more or less interested in acquiring your own nuclear
weapon? That is, Clinton's rather bloodthirsty pandering to what she
thinks the Israel lobbies want to hear is likely actually to produce
the opposite of the desired reaction in Iran itself and is most
unwise.
Clinton also does not mention that Israel is already protected by MAD
because it has several hundred nuclear warheads (see the beginning of
this essay). Senator Clinton is by now just flailing around
fantasizing about incinerating children in playgrounds in Isfahan.
Mark 8:36 is relevant here, and I commend it to the good senator: "For
what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
his own soul?"
--
Posted By Juan Cole to Informed Comment at 4/23/2008
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