The Clinton Wars

In a recent speech before a US Veteran’s organization, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that “we” should not be concerned about past wars, and that “we” should be preparing for what she called, “the new war.” As a result of her speech, media pundits spent quite a bit of time asking and answering questions related to Clinton’s position on the Iraq war, since she had also said in the same speech that Bush’s surge strategy was having some success in the Anbar province of Iraq, perhaps signaling that her strong opposition to the war is softening.

The media completely ignored the arguably more controversial Clinton statement, which was her pronouncement that the US is about to embark upon a “new war,” except that they played it over and over again as part of the news clip featuring the Anbar success proclamation This should cause us to ask if Clinton was actually signaling Benjamin Netanyahu and other ultra-Zionists who authored, supported and initiated the implementation of the Israeli Clean Break policy paper, that the mission in Iraq is finally accomplished? Did she call for, or advise these same people about a new war, perhaps with Iran or Syria? Whereas the media seems to believe that Clinton’s pronouncement of success in Al-Anbar was the big story, the big story might be that Clinton tipped her hand, and all but said that the US is preparing for a new war in the Muslim world. Such a pronouncement might explain the bipartisan opinion, publicly shared by Republican Senator Warner of Virginia, and Democrat Senator Carl Levin, both on the Armed Services Committee. They agreed that the Al-Maliki government is a failed government, and that there is little hope that a political environment will be created in Iraq to sustain alleged US military progress, or to warrant the continued expenditure of roughly 9 billion US taxpayer dollars per month on Iraq. In other words, as stated earlier, Mission Accomplished in Iraq, like it or not! And, prepare for the new war.

Not only is Iraq’s infrastructure almost completely destroyed, and its people psychologically traumatized, its population has been culled by approximately 1.4 million people. Iraq has been poisoned by depleted uranium, and now, the suspicious sectarian violence that took hold of Iraq with a vengeance, has fractured that society to the extent that it is also politically paralyzed. You might say that Iraq is pretty much destroyed for the near future, and no longer either a challenger or a threat to Israel. Bush was premature in his pronouncement of Mission Accomplished; he must have really believed that the objective of the war was regime change rather than complete destruction. That’s hard to imagine, considering the statement made by the Clinton State Department hold over, Richard Armitage, who supposedly threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Middle Ages, and who admittedly leaked former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to someone, just around the time that her husband made it pretty clear that certain people in Washington, and Israel were lying about a nuclear weapons program in Iraq, just like they are now lying about a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Ironically these lies did not start in the Bush Administration. In the mid 1990’s, Bill Clinton held a forum of so-called Middle East experts where the charges against Iran were reported, and examined as part of a Middle East policy discussion. Those who supported the contention that Iran posed a nuclear threat to Israel argued that Iran had no need for a nuclear energy program because of its oil. Those who disagreed did so based upon the fact that there simply is no proof what so ever, of an Iranian nuclear weapon’s program. This same forum was the stage for discussion on US foreign policy towards the Islamic movements, and their bids to come to power through democratization. The FIS had recently won an election in Algeria that resulted in pretty much the same type of response we see in Palestine, in response to the Hamas parliamentary election victory. The election results were cancelled, and society was purged of all FIS supporters through a series of brutal massacres that resulted in the deaths of approximately 300 to 350 Algerians per day. Steven Emerson reported to the US Congress, for the record, that these massacres were being carried out by an Al-Qadea like group called the GIA. By contrast, Algerian human rights activists issued a 1000 page or more report, arguing that it was in fact the Algerian government carrying out these murders through a foreign paramilitary unit that was disguised and drugged prior to carrying out the most bloody and violent political purging in modern history.

The Bush administration democratization and freedom in the Middle East rhetoric, that was used to justify the Iraq war under Bush, was either borrowed, or forced upon Bush like most of the White House, State Department and Pentagon personnel that stayed in place even after Clinton’s departure. The Clinton Middle East policy team, who became the Bush Middle East policy team, all AIPAC loyalists, had introduced it.

The Clinton years were marked by anti-Muslim and anti-Islam propaganda that saturated the Western and Arab media, and that only intensified after 9/11. While the Western media focused primarily upon defaming Islam the religion, claiming that the Qur’an was the inspiration for terrorism, the Arab media was busy attacking Islamic movements and the straw man known as “Islamism,” or political Islam. Islamic politics were being blamed for everything from the poverty and illiteracy that plagues the Muslim world, to honor killing, genital mutilation, polygamy, and violence, all ancient Arab cultural traditions that preceded Islam, and some are traditions that originated in, or were practiced in ancient Europe even before they found their way to the Muslim world, female circumcision being such a practice. Islam and Islamic political activism was blamed for everything wrong in the Muslim world, including the despotism of the strongmen that were installed by the colonial powers to serve as Western proxies. Even the Beijing Conference, to which the Clinton’s sent a delegation headed by Hillary and Madeline Albright, was used as a platform to argue for more population control in the developing world, more economic freedom for women, the elimination of religion, and especially Islam.

The Clinton era war against Islam was marketed as a war against terrorism, even though the eradication of terrorism was clearly not its intent. It was the Israeli Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu who first used the term war on terrorism. Following former President Clinton’s executive order declaring the military wing of the Islamic movement in Palestine terrorists, Netanyahu used the term war on terrorism to justify Israel’s criminal genocide in Palestine, along with the Wye Memorandum. After 9/11, US law enforcement, policy makers, and the media fell into preordained lock step with Netanyahu. Acts of horrendous violence perpetrated by non-Muslims and non-Arabs were carefully referred to by the media as massacres, or carnage, and civil wars, yet acts of violence either blamed upon, or carried out by Muslims and Arabs was deemed terrorism, or attempted terrorism, or potential terrorism, etc. As far as the media and law enforcement were concerned, only Arabs and Muslims commit terrorism, everyone else commits crimes, and Israeli violence was always characterized as self-defense and war on terrorism. None of this changed under the Bush administration.

We would not come to understand the benefits of the word war, as taught by Netanyahu and the Likud, over the limits of law enforcement until the Bush administration, 9/11 and the Patriot Act, warrant less wiretapping, and the political purging of US Attorneys and an Imperial presidency. All served to seriously deconstruct US life, economy and politics. All were institutionalized in response to the so-called war on terrorism, which existed, at least according to Clinton and the Likud, prior to 9/11. They were preceded under the Clinton administration by secret evidence, roving wire taps, and other so called Anti-terrorism Acts that were arguably the first government attacks on US civil liberties, and our Constitution, all of which were preceded by horrendous acts of violence such as the Oklahoma City bombings, and the first World Trade Center bombing. All ironically seemed to bolster Israel’s position geo-politically and militarily, while diminishing the US in the exact same ways.

Few if any mainstream writers or analysts dared at the time, to write much about the Clean Break strategy that Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others had drawn up during the Clinton administration, as a blueprint for Israeli expansion and domination of the Muslim and Arab world. It called for wars against Iraq, Iran and Syria, and spells out the type of misinformation that would be employed to force what it termed, Israel’s proxy, or the US military, into these wars. Israel’s Likud propagandists such as Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes and Judith Miller, preached to the Congress, owned by Zionist lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and through the mainstream media against Islam, and also against Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, creating both an environment and a cause for war. It is no coincidence that these three non-state actors were mentioned, along with Iran, Syria and Iraq in the Clean Break policy paper. They were marked for elimination, because only these three movements, and nation/states had dared to stand up militarily to Israel, and only these three stood in the way of Israel’s expansion beyond its 1967 borders and into south Lebanon, occupied Palestine, Egypt and Jordan. As time progressed, and the dots inched ever closer together, it became very obvious that these movements were also considered serious threats to Israel’s aspirations because they also stand as popular opposition movements, challenging Israel effectively, and also the US friendly Arab governments in these border nation/states.

Analysts differ over the real reasons that the US and Israel expanded the war on terrorism from an Israeli war against Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah into a regional war that would involve pre-emptive strikes by the US against Israel’s other Muslim and Arab enemies. Some argued that it was the US desire to control oil that spurred the international war on terrorism, and that Christian and Jewish religious fanaticism was the fuel that fed Israel’s more localized war with the Islamic movements. Others argue that it is Israel’s desire to control oil that gave rise to the international war on terrorism, and also Israel’s desire to control the region militarily that caused the US to be involved militarily. They believe that the US military is only needed to do the heavy lifting, and once all of Israel’s biggest foes no longer exist, or have been significantly weakened, Israel will no longer be dependent upon the US for anything. So why all the talk about freedom when clearly the objective is to win control over the oil, and over the region, and to limit, if not completely eliminate anything even close to freedom for the people of that region? For the answer to all such questions, we probably should ask Bill Clinton and AIPAC, and not Bush.

Before William Clinton left the Whitehouse, he said that he would always be there. He was right. He was with us for 8 years as President, followed by eight more as the Commander in Chief of the theoretical and rhetorical US war on terror, which became the very real war after 9/11, while all of his people were still in place, blocking a Bush transition to power. He was with us then as Bill Clinton, and he might be with us now just as Netanyahu is poised to return as prime minister of Israel, as his wife Hillary come before us to announce that it is time to prepare for the New War, and perhaps stage two of the implementation of the Israeli Clean Break strategy.