Hillary Clinton Votes for War — Again
Yesterday, by a vote of 76-22, the Senate passed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment in support of military actions against Iran. This is the second such endorsement of the president by a senate majority in just three months. In July, the Lieberman amendment to “confront Iran” passed with the far stronger majority of 97-0.
The original draft of Kyl-Lieberman had asked U.S. forces to “combat, contain, and roll back” the Iranian menace within Iraq. But the words “roll back” were all too plainly a coded endorsement of hot pursuit into Iran; and the senators did not want to go quite so far. To assure a larger majority the language was accordingly trimmed and blurred to say “that it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside Iraq the violent activities and destabilizing influence of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies.”
The inclusion of Hezbollah deserves some notice. It is part of a larger attempt, already apparent in the Lebanon war of 2006, to manufacture an “amalgam” of all the enemies of Israel and the United States throughout the region, and to treat them all as one enemy. Those who believe in the amalgam will come to agree that many more wars by the United States and Israel are needed to crush this enemy.
More provocative is a secondary detail of the amendment, which received less notice from the mainstream media. Kyl-Lieberman approves the listing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran as a “foreign terrorist organization.” Now, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard is the largest branch of the Iranian military. By granting Vice President Cheney’s wish (a distant dream in 2005) to put the Iranian guard on the U.S. terrorist list, the Senate has classified the army of Iran as an army of terrorists. The president, therefore, as he follows out the Cheney plan has all the support he requires for asserting in his next speech to an army or veterans group that Iran is a nation of terrorists.
It was said during the Vietnam War that “a dead Vietnamese is a Viet Cong.” It will assuage the conscience for U.S. bombers of Iran to know that a dead Iranian is a terrorist. The Senate, by this classification, has absolved the bombers in advance.
Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to press the army toward war with Iran. This was an important step, for her, and a vote as closely considered as her vote to authorize the bombing and occupation of Iraq.
Here are the senators who voted against Kyl-Lieberman:
Biden (D-DE) Bingaman (D-NM) Boxer (D-CA) Brown (D-OH) Byrd (D-WV) Cantwell (D-WA) Dodd (D-CT) Feingold (D-WI) Hagel (R-NE) Harkin (D-IA) Inouye (D-HI) Kennedy (D-MA) Kerry (D-MA) Klobuchar (D-MN) Leahy (D-VT) Lincoln (D-AR) Lugar (R-IN) McCaskill (D-MO) Sanders (I-VT) Tester (D-MT) Webb (D-VA) Wyden (D-OR)
John McCain and Barack Obama did not vote.
It is a remarkable fact that the war meditated against Iran, like the war on Iraq, is sought most keenly by a vice president and president who went further than most of their generation to avoid serving their country in Vietnam. The fact becomes the more remarkable in view of the contempt shown by both men for those who did not cheer and avoid, but opposed the Vietnam war by conscientious dissent. The same is true across the range of non-combatant neoconservative war architects and propagandists. Psychological compensation of an astonishing kind (to say no more) is at work in this display of rashness disguised as courage in the later careers of our war leaders behind the lines. For several years now, the mainstream press and media have said as little as possible about it.
Two votes against Kyl-Lieberman were issued from veterans with considerable experience and firsthand knowledge of war, Chuck Hagel and Jim Webb. If these two men were now to sharpen their dissidence, if they could make their reasons articulate and see the present as a time that calls them to the sustained work of opposition– we might have the beginnings of a potent resistance which will never come from Harry Reid.
What of the absence of Barack Obama? In a speech in Iowa on September 12, he addressed by anticipation the matter before the Senate in Kyl-Lieberman: “We hear eerie echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq in the way that the President and Vice President talk about Iran. They conflate Iran and al Qaeda. They issue veiled threats. They suggest that the time for diplomacy and pressure is running out when we haven’t even tried direct diplomacy. Well George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear–loud and clear–from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.”
It is baffling that a man who spoke those words two weeks ago could not find the time or the resolve to cast his vote in a conspicuous test for authorizing war on Iran. This seems to be one more demonstration of Obama’s tendency never to take a step forward without a step to the side. As for his own message about Iran, it has not been “loud and clear,” but muffled, wavering, experimental.
With Hillary Clinton, we know where we stand. Yesterday she voted to bring the country a serious step closer to war against Iran. And she did so for the same reason that she voted to authorize the war on Iraq. She thinks the next war is going to happen. She hopes the worst of its short-term effects on America will have died down before the election. She suspects the media and voters will show more trust for a candidate who supported than for one who opposed the war. She wants a ponderous establishment of American troops and super-bases to remain in the Middle East for years to come. If she wins the presidency, she will inherit the command of that army and those bases, and she believes she can manage their affairs more prudently than George W. Bush.
Hillary Clinton is consistent. Every move is calculated, her actual intentions are masked, but the total drift is easy to comprehend. It is not so with Obama. How can he expect anyone to back a man who will not back himself?
David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale. He has written on politics and culture for The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.
© 2007 Huffington Post
Just watch this corporate whore/psychopath in action…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3gQfz8GC0o
Chilling.
LET’S DO THE TIME-WARP AGAIN!!
Murdoch & the Rethugs want her because (a) they can re-run all the tremendously successful trash from the ’90s and (b) she largely agrees with the BushCrime family.
The Molluscrats want her because she bothers the Rethugs & because they’re still wrapped in the delusion that the Clintons are liberals rather than opportunists.
Let me look into the crystal ball here…what will the progressives do? Let’s see…can’t vote for the traitorous Obama or Hillory…I know! Vote for Edwards or Kucinich. Then when they lose and proclaim fealty to Hillory or Obama, progressives can go back to spluttering about the lack of choice other than the Democratic/Republican tweedledee/tweedledum. Hold on America, what’s that they are doing over their in those DEMOCRATIC countries? They don’t just hold their noses on election day and vote for the status quo, “gasp”. They organize and support candidates and parties, who are there before, during and after every election, win or lose. Oh but I’m forgetting, what could Americans possibly learn from people abroad? Just as well, There’s probably something in the US constitution barring more that two political parties.
I agree with the Galen concening Hillary’s professional character. Since Clinton is on her way to locking up the nomination, I am wondering if people who identify themselves as “progressive” are actually going to vote for her in the general election?
I won’t.
Would it be to soon to wonder WHY Bill Clinton turned to Monika?
“They organize and support candidates and parties, who are there before, during and after every election, win or lose. Oh but I’m forgetting, what could Americans possibly learn from people abroad? Just as well, There’s probably something in the US constitution barring more that two political parties.”
You’ll note that the majority here aren’t going to “hold their nose” and follow the instructions of the Dead Dog Democrats.
English voters and French voters both have far better systems and the first re-installed Blair knowing Brown would succeed him, and French voters put in Sarkozy over Segolene Royal.
The ‘don’t-throw-away-your-vote’ plaint has lost its relevance; but we still have much larger obstacles to overcoming the Property Party than any other industrialized country has.
LMAO Galen, after watching her performance at the debate I wonder if it wasn’t Hillary in the oval office holding Monica’s head under the desk…
Kristina40: Why you wicked minx! LOL. Maybe the infamous ‘blue dress’ should be checked for a second set of stains….
clever video mashups are not necessarily the truth even though each item contained in the mashup may be true. in other words the whole is less than the sum of its parts in this case and worthy of a swiftboat ad as well.
do what you want, you will anyway, but after the election, when there is yet another far right, hard right gop administration in the white house because you were too ideologically pure to vote for the democratic candidate, don’t complain because the gop administration does pretty much the exact opposite of everything you want instead of actually doing some of what you want as the democratic candidate would.
Allyourbases: You are assuming there will be another election…
There is no difference between Hillary Clinton and Joe Leiberman. Both are corrupt criminals.
Jaded Prole: There is a difference. Hillary will wear a dress in public…
The same dirty money PROFITS from war fund both parties so why expect change. You think the warmongers are about to give up the ATM. Don’t worry be happy!
Is Obamma “too black” to be president, ot just “too yellow”?
Ewwww Galen, I didn’t need that thought…just…ewwwww
Just resign from the Democratic Party, and let them know they have 1 more year to change your mind, otherwise you don’t vote for the Democratic nominee. Might wake them up.
Hillary is just a Republican dressed up as a Democrat. She is bought and owned by AIPAC and the corporate powers that be, and so she will support perpetual war in the Middle East. But she is consistent.
Q.) If not Kucinich, then what?!
A.)Same old shit; different term of office.
I just registered for the green party, from the democratic party. But there is a democratic presidential candidate that gets very little attention even on common dreams, Mike Gravel. Check him out.
Re Obama: (O-bomber?) -didn’t he recently say something to the effect of being supportive of bombing Iran?
Either way, those palsied politicians who are not loudly speaking out AGAINST wars, are duplicitously FOR them, -one way or another.
This is the not a time for them to be “nailing their colors to the fence” (sic) ~it’s a time when they need to urgently be loudly, proudly ANTI-war, and if they are not, they are decrepit, and useless, and in dereliction of their duty to mankind as a whole.
“Let the dead bury the dead…”
– We, the ones with a clearer vision and who have not sold our souls for pieces of silver, have a new world to make…
Right now I’m still a dem. But if Hillary gets the nod then I’m going indie. So to all dems like me that don’t like Hillary. The only choice is to start working to make sure she doesn’t get the nod. Otherwise maybe a loss will do the dems some good as it will force them to not PO their base.
“Obsessed by Bush, the liberals cannot see Clinton for the light-weight scoundrel he was and have reinvented his terms in the White House as a golden age, whose possible sequel under the aegis of President Hillary Clinton they eagerly await.” Alexander Cockburn
I’ll vote for anyone who has the huevos to tell Israel to kiss their ass.
obviously another loss by the democrats will not do them any good, do you any good, do the environment any good, do the average working class/middle class person any good, do anyone in most any minority (except the wealthy and the coporate elite) any good. but you go right ahead believing that ideological purity is the most important thing in a candidate. then you can continue complaining that no one in power in this country does anything remotely like what you would want done. and the whole ideological purity puts you in good company too — the far right social conservatives in our country and just about every knucklehead group at home and abroad that thinks everyone else must do it absolutely their way or else.
however bad the clinton years may have been, they and virtually any other modern democratic adminstration were a golden age in comparison to the dubya years.
and yes, galen, i think there will be another election. i have some hope that this one won’t be stolen becuase more and more people are stating to be fed up with the way things are going in this country. the gop will try to blame a “do-nothing” democratic congress but maybe ebough people will see that it was the gop that got us in this mess and obstructed a democratic congress’s efforts to start on the cleanup.
it will take a democratic administration to start on the cleanup. staying home and not voting democratic or voting independent or 3rd party guarantees another gop administration and more of a mess. some things such as global warming, environmental issues, the war, and the current economic mess presaging the even further shrinking and possible collapse of labor and the middle class cannot wait another 4 to 8 years!