Foreign Policy: There Is a Difference Between the Parties!

[JackRiddler]

No, I am not talking about the Democratic and Republican parties.

I am talking about the informal Obama and Clinton parties (or the conservative imperialists vs. the interventionist maniacs, if you prefer).

And I'm inviting you to read this fairly historic interview with Obama published in the April issue of The Atlantic. (Excerpt & link below. First my own views...)

For my part I'm certainly in firm opposition to drone wars, covert political interventions of any kind, the continuation of the "war on terror" under other names, the enormous surveillance/National Security State, the attacks on whistleblowers, the continued high military expenditure and a lot of other deadly irrationality and imperialism in U.S. policy under any president. And Sanders sadly endorses all of the above, along with Obama.

But you can see an important difference in Obama's relative caution about the direct use of force, his gradual distancing from certain aggressive allies (Saudi Arabia and Israel, even as the U.S. continues to back the wars of both), in contrast to Clinton's enthusiasm for new wars and a more aggressive stance to Russia and Iran.

This is clear from Clinton's record as the most hawkish in the Obama administration - and from Obama's recent open, if modest, break with the DC foreign policy establishment to which Clinton belongs, by way of this fascinating interview in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/

Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and?‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’?” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)

(snip)

For some foreign-policy experts, even within his own administration, Obama’s about-face on enforcing the red line (in Syria) was a dispiriting moment in which he displayed irresolution and naïveté, and did lasting damage to America’s standing in the world. “Once the commander in chief draws that red line,” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and then as secretary of defense in Obama’s first term, told me recently, “then I think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at stake if he doesn’t enforce it.” Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”

(snip)

But what sealed Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent the country’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security team—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Biden’s national-security adviser—lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed.

But Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster.

[JackRiddler]

1. Let's give this a second try.

I realize this forum has really important things to discuss, like the fourteen daily worthless polls and who pointed a finger and how can we smear this and that... I wonder if issues actually matter?

[BernieforPres2016]

2. If Biden is acerbic about Hillary's foreign policy judgment

Can he really want her to win the Democratic nomination? There have been suggestions they aren't exactly pals, but this suggests more animosity between them than I realized.

[JackRiddler]

3. More than that, read what Obama has to say.

[BernieforPres2016]

4. I did read it, but he's a Third Way Democrat

And he still wants to see her as the next President even with her terrible judgment and knee jerk hawkish mentality on foreign policy.

[JackRiddler]

5. Sure, he does and yet...

It's important to highlight the difference, because even though we're counting fractions in killing fields, it means a lot - one is far more dangerous than the other.

[BernieforPres2016]

6. I appreciate you posting that article

It was a bit chilling to read that both Obama and Biden view Hillary as such a loose cannon with bad judgment on military matters. It is a demonstration of just how corrupt our system has become that they would at least tacitly support her anyway. Obama even stayed quiet while Hillary was saying she would basically be a third Obama term.