Battle of the Hawks

Battle of the Hawks
truthdig
By Robert Scheer

May 7, 2008


In the increasingly unlikely event of a McCain-Clinton election, folks who care about the peace issue would have serious reason to worry. Both of these candidates are inveterate hawks, and what we would be up against is a choice between the neoconservatives and the neoliberals as to who could be more adventurous in getting us into unjustifiable foreign wars.

Both not only voted to authorize President Bush's irrational invasion of Iraq but also have failed to apply those lessons to the real challenges we face, particularly concerning Iran. On the one hand, we have Sen. John McCain's wildly inane "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" singing refrain, and on the other, Sen. Hillary Clinton's commitment to "totally obliterate" Iran in response to any nuclear attack by Tehran on Israel.

Clinton has stood by her implicitly genocidal threat against the 70 million innocent Iranians, who have no effective control over their government's policy, a threat made in response to a question raised in the heat of primary day in Pennsylvania. She later extended the threat to include retaliation on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab countries if they were attacked by Iran.

Her statement extending the US "nuclear umbrella" far beyond the threat to retaliate against a Soviet nuclear attack during the cold war was greeted with a yawn by the media, which interpreted it as an election-day ploy to appear tough and pro-Israel. The Washington Post referred to "Clinton's apparent effort to distinguish herself from her rival for the Democratic nomination...by offering a more hawkish approach to world affairs." That rival, Barack Obama, has called for negotiations with Iran's leaders and condemned Clinton's proposal as saber rattling.

But the Washington Post story provided evidence that Hillary's hawkishness is not merely a campaign posture, as evidenced by her two key foreign policy advisers, who the Post reports helped come up with the "obliterate Iran" idea. One of them is Martin S. Indyk, the former Clinton Administration ambassador to Israel, who was as strong as any of the neoconservatives in advocating the invasion of Iraq. In an article he co-wrote with Kenneth M. Pollack for the Los Angeles Times three months before the Iraq invasion, which cited their insider status as former government officials who "had access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iraq," the two claimed that Iraq had "thousands of tons of precursor chemicals for chemical warfare agents, thousands of liters of biological warfare agents." That "insider" information was false.

more...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/scheer

is that Obama's belligerent statements (about Pakistan and elsewhere) were in fact largely political theater for the primary election crowd (unlike Hillary's). This is just my own observation, but Obama has never seemed fully comfortable rattling the saber for approval from AIPAC or the CFR crowd. Make no mistake, he's done it plenty, but my read is that it's not a reflection of his core values. He also seems to have backed off that tack a bit lately and conceded the neo-lib vote to Clinton. Not sayin' he's great, just not as bad as Hill.

Edit to add: I think the decline in Obama pandering to the American Empire crowd has been partly due to the surprise growth of his Internet fund raising. You don't need to kiss up to the establishment quite so much when regular peeps can raise you $100 million online.