Hillary Clinton has been chastised by many including the editorial page of the New York Times for saying that if Iran attacked Israel "we could totally obliterate them." Her comment on Iran, which she refuses to retract, has been explained by some as the desperate effort of a losing candidate to fall back on populist hyperbole to defeat her opponent.
Chastising and explaining are not enough. Clinton's threat was criminal. If a major leader in any other country talked about obliterating a country, that leader would be condemned as contemplating mass murder, even genocide. The word "obliterate" extends far beyond the usual American bluster about promoting "regime change" in this or that country, and that bluster has opened the way for invasions and the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
When the would be leader of the only nation ever to drop atomic bombs on human beings threatens the obliteration of a country through the use of nuclear weapons----what else could her remarks possibly mean---the world is awakened to the ultimate meaning of the American Empire. It is a military empire that is capable of killing every man, woman and child on earth. At a time when the economic power of the empire is in serious decline and its conventional forces are failing to win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the nuclear threat is the trump card, the card that makes us all pay attention.
In the 21st century, empires are dangerous beasts. Our survival literally depends on their good humour. Americans who wonder why so many people around the world don't trust their country need to understand that what appears to them as little more than a campaign tactic on Clinton's part, is a reminder to the world of a wholly unacceptable state of affairs.
6 Comments:
that's so scary
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! So true, now that Dr Laxer has pointed this out for me.
Relatively speaking (we are talking about a potential leader leader of a brutal empire, the policies of which are characterised by a kind of madness and obscenity)was this comment really so outrageous? Sounds like a reference to nuclear deterrence, what used to be called "MAD" in another context. Nuclear bullying, perhaps. I'm not surprised.
And McCain would occupy Iraq for a hundred years. And Obama would bomb Pakistan if it didn't do what it was told.
The USA has been lawless on the international front for decades. What we have now is a threesome who openly advocate more murderous wars, attacks and egregious abuses of human rights, world-wide and at home.
Hillary"s threat to obliterate Iran ia par for the course.
Did Hillary Clinton actually say "obliterate"?None of the news clips I saw on tv which purported to replay her using the word "obliterate" ever did show her uttering the word "obliterate". What she said, that kept getting replay, was "massive retaliation".
Hillary Clinton wants to make health care in the US universal. Health care has been an issue dear to her heart since her husband's inauguration, and before that. Universal health care would surely be a tremendously civilizing step forward for that country. A WORLDVIEW- changing step forward for them, surely. (And it would take some of the pressure off Canada that tends towards the dismantling of OUR medicare system.) She is the ONLY presidential candidate offering or promising that. I think it beats talk of "hope", "change", everyone pulling together, and coalitions. Politics is what it is, not Democrats inviting Republicans to sing kum-by-yah around a campfire. The 2 main parties really do stand for different political positions. (And Hillary's husband isn't a hospital executive..not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that.) JFK may have owed his election to his charisma (and to Nixon's lack of it), but the verdict is that he wasn't a great president. And the Bay of Pigs (for instance) occurred during his administration. He had some good speeches. (Ted Sorenson wrote for him and for Barack Obama.) And Hillary Clinton at least hasn't claimed that "only in America" could it happen that she would be a candidate for the hightest office in the land. For Barack Obama to make such a claim about his own candidacy--as he has done over and over!-- is surely--given his education--pandering to the kind of American chauvinism Canadians and others have always found distasteful and even dangerous. Also, as to "negativism": Obama's whole campaign, from the get-go, has been based on a negative attack on Hillary Clinton, positioning himself as the voice of a new politics, and of youth, change and the future and thereby (and also by stating so directly) consigning Hillary Clinton to the so-called 'old' politics. The old politics is probably just politics. Anything else is a Democratic sellout to conservatism, and to the Republicans. Obama could have attacked the kind of nasty politics and disregard of Constitution practised by the Republicans under GW Bush, but instead of such meat he goes for the imaginary and so doing tarred Hillary Clinton with a broad brush she didn't deserve. But after all, so long as they're contending for the same office, that's POLITICS, isn't it? It seems verboten to point out that Obama practises old-style politics at the same time as speaking like a visionary (with few specifics). Truly it seems to me that Hillary Clinton has been given a much tougher time of it by the media and all round. Clinton did make a mistake, I think, in using the phrase "white, hard-working Americans"--not because "white" raises race (as if she were the first to raise the subject!), but because she didn't--so far as I've seen in media clips--also mention black, hardworking Americans in some context, for there surely are many of them, too. The problem isn't injecting "race", it's seeming to have made an invidious comparison between races. It's a seductive thought, for many Americans, that the US have a black president, as if that alone can magically change the face of their country to the world or clean up or atone for the war in Iraq. Just that, and TALK of change and hope, won't change the U.S.
--Polly Tix
Clinton is not calling for Canadian-style medicare. She's not Tommy Douglas.
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