Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently announced on ABC’s Good Morning America that if Iran mounted a nuclear attack against Israel we could “totally obliterate” Iran in retaliation. Clinton is supposedly a woman and politician of some sophistication but this sounds like the good old malevolent Texas red-neck politics of George Bush. The candidate for change doesn’t appear to be in the mindset for change.
Clinton is in a fight for her political life in a race she was supposed to win handily and her comments smack of political desperation. They also smack of a politician beleaguered by a tortuous, unnecessary and seemingly endless campaign just for the right to represent her party.
Her comments also have an air of unreality. It is Israel that has the formidable nuclear arsenal and is much more likely to use it as it has never been shy about attacking its neighbours with conventional weapons and has done so with impunity as the US stand-in in the Middle East.
The Bush administration was served one of its most stinging rebukes when an intelligence report on Iran’s nuclear capabilities contradicted its claim that Iran was an imminent nuclear threat. Just as intelligence was faulty/contrived on Iraq it is equally faulty/contrived on Iran, and Clinton who made the egregious political error of supporting the invasion of Iraq is now perpetrating the Bush administration’s mythology that Iran is still a nuclear threat.
The vilification of Iran has long since become a tiresome, tawdry and transparent machination of US foreign policy. It is obvious even to the most casual observer that this vilification is really a ploy to justify US hegemonic ambitions in the region.
Any inbound US president would be very wise to adopt a new strategy as 81 % of Americans feel their country is on the wrong course and its allies are equally fed up with its atrocious and ill-conceived foreign policy. Clinton appears unable to separate herself from the Bush administration and set a course of her own which means her political capital has been spent and spent less than wisely.
Clinton might also be reminded that the US is still the only country to use nuclear weapons on a civilian population- this at the end of WWII when Japan was petitioning for peace.
While Clinton is doing her fatuous saber rattling former US president Jimmy Carter is in the Middle East tenaciously pursuing his decades long quest for a solution based on the premise that any settlement must be fair for all and not a rubber stamp for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. It would seem that a good starting point for any new US administration would be to adopt Carter’s premise. Like so many politicians before her Clinton suffers the intellectual paralysis inflicted by the pro-Israeli lobby, and the institutionalized mendacity of the Bush administration.
In her postured rebuke of Iran Clinton says that any such attack on Israel would be “ reckless, foolish and tragic” but she might consider for a minute these words first and foremost apply to American actions in Iraq; the devastation of that country and her support for this atrocity.
Should Clinton become the first woman US president she appears to feel the need to appear tougher than any man and out-Bush-Bush, and this would be less than constructive.
As the US presidency aspires to the role of peerless leadership for Western civilization and beyond it is surely time for a renaissance of noble ideals.