As the first Democratic presidential debate drew to a close, moderator Anderson
Cooper posed a question to Hillary Clinton: How might her presidency differ
from Barack Obama’s?
Clinton smiled. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious,” she
replied to rapturous applause. “Being the first woman president would be
quite a change from the presidents we’ve had.”
Indeed, a Hillary Clinton presidency would shatter the glass ceiling for women
in the United States. But it would also leave intact the old boys’ military-industrial
complex that’s kept our nation in a perpetual state of war for decades.
Clinton, it seems, failed to learn anything after supporting the disastrous
Iraq War, which plunged a huge swath of the Middle East into chaos and cost
her the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Instead of embracing diplomacy,
she continued to champion ill-conceived military interventions as secretary
of state.
In 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Libya, Clinton was the Obama administration’s
most forceful advocate for intervening to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. She even
out-hawked
Robert Gates, the Pentagon chief first appointed by George W. Bush who was
less than enthusiastic about going to war in Libya.
Ironically, the political grief Clinton has suffered over the subsequent attack
on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, which killed four Americans, might
never have occurred if Clinton had opted against intervening in Libya’s civil
war.
While House Republicans recently spent 11
hours relentlessly drilling Clinton about Benghazi and her personal email
account, the larger disaster by far is the postwar chaos that’s left Libya without
a functioning government, overrun by feuding warlords and extremist militants.
Clinton favors greater military intervention in Syria’s civil war, too.
In her presidential bid, she’s joined hawkish Republican senators like
John McCain and Lindsey Graham in supporting the creation of a no-fly
zone over the country.
That puts her at odds not only with
President Barack Obama, but also with her Democratic presidential rival
Bernie Sanders, who warned
that it could “get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead
to a never-ending US entanglement in that region.”
Clinton did end up supporting the administration’s Iran nuclear deal, but her
support came with a history of bellicose baggage.