Clinton's Threats Against Iran Provide Cover for Dubya's War Crimes (Page 1 of 1)

Newsweek recently charged that Dubya is “phoning it in” when it comes to issues facing the twilight months of his bleak swagger through American history. Damn, I sure hope so. From my lofty perch in East Tennessee, it appears the body count rises when he’s working from an actual plan from, say, the Iraq Study Group.

Still, should President George W. Bush’s late-term bumbling result in missiles screaming across ancient Persian skies while dropping serial bombs, he could do worse than cite remarks by Sen. Hillary Clinton to justify such war crimes.

As I wrote in a recent blog post, Bush might say something like this the day after: “Even my severest critics have suggested we should totally obliterate Iran with massive retaliation if that country attacks Israel. Thanks to brave American pilots and sailors who conducted last night’s pre-emptive strike that won’t be necessary.”

Had Clinton set out to turn the Middle East to ash, she could hardly do better than to speak glibly of totally obliterating 
Iran — a country that aided our war on Afghanistan, that’s made overture after overture for better relations, despite our constant meddling in its affairs in the past century.

Why would Clinton suggest “we would be able to totally obliterate” 71 million people who have little or no control over the theocracy running their country? Can she countenance the murder of 20 million innocent children? Has she the capacity to imagine their big eyes and beating hearts? Their feet and hands and wondering minds? Their tiny shoes? Would she send radiation burning through the hearts and bones of their beloved mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters? Is she indeed capable of sacrificing them on the altar of personal ambition?

I’d like to think she exaggerated in the heat of political debate two weeks ago when she told ABC’s Good Morning America “we would be able to totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Unfortunately, she reiterated the threats just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, telling reporters “massive retaliation” would be the price Iran would pay for attacking our ally.

President Theodore Roosevelt suggested one should speak softly and carry a big stick. I’d recommend a medium stick. As Mark Twain said: “To a man with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.” As Jackson Browne sings: “The hammer shapes the hand,” but I digress.

The problem with speaking loudly is that it inflames animal passions and exaggerates danger, providing cover for war-mongers on all sides and seldom has this country been manipulated by a more brutish merchant of war than Bush.

Is Clinton so clueless about his psychology and history that she’d grant him cover to bomb Iran?

Bush’s presidency could be summed up in a phrase: “My finger in your eye.” So often the only motivation for Bush’s perverse actions is a cruel and ignorant arrogance, though Oedipal issues surely pertain. I’ve chronicled Dubya’s systematic and pathological cruelty, starting as a boy who enjoyed stuffing firecrackers in frogs’ mouths and setting them off. Then there’s his record-setting performance as executioner-in-chief while governor of Texas, attempts to grant waivers to allow the Navy to blast sonar that kills and disorients migratory whales and so on.

Even after it became clear Iraq was a horrible mistake, costing at least 1,000 percent more in blood, treasure and time than Bush experts predicted, he continued his death-dealing ways. Even as a lame duck “phoning it in,” the temptation to strike Iran is no doubt hard for him to resist.

Recently, Bush moved a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. Between the two, they contain unimaginable firepower. There they sit vibrating with hair-trigger tension in the world’s most explosive powder keg. Contingency plans for bombing Iran have long since been drawn up. Bush long since fired CENTCOM commander, Adm. William Fallon, who publicly opposed bombing Iran. Should Bush say ‘go,’ large portions of that country could be “totally obliterated” within hours or minutes. If that happens, Clinton will bear some responsibility.

Instead of helping Sen. Barack Obama and Fallon and others create a zeitgeist in which such a move would be unthinkable, Clinton is providing cover. This is not news. She long ago voted to give Bush unlimited powers to make war on Iraq and in 2007 she voted for an amendment naming Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a ‘foreign terrorist organization,’ which implicitly grants Bush such powers regarding Iran. It’s sobering to recall she did so back when she seemed a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. She’s yet to apologize for those votes.

To be fair, Obama’s statements on Iran have been mixed. He suggested in their last debate that he’d leave all options on the table, code for bombing Iran.

Clinton and Obama might’ve lifted the tone of that debate by undermining the basis for the question in pointing out that our National Intelligence Esti-
mate — the combined insight of 16 U.S. spy 
agencies — concluded months ago Iran’s nuclear weapons program had been put in mothballs in 2003.

Still, Obama’s longstanding opposition to war and his history of supporting sane steps toward nuclear disarmament speak well for him. Clinton, on the other hand, has put millions of lives at risk by making whatever horrors Bush decides to unleash seem reasonable in comparison to her own threats. Why would she provide Bush such cover?

Has she forgotten how he and others lied us into a war in Iraq that’s resulted in graft, torture, kidnapping, kangaroo courts, domestic spying, Orwellian disinformation, millions of refugees, millions of casualties, suicides and the prospect of miseries without end? The answer appears to be yes. Given Sen. John McCain’s “bomb-bomb Iran” refrain, that leaves Obama as the only voice approaching sanity in the ongoing struggle for the hearts and minds of our world.