Greens Oppose Nomination of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State

The Capital District Greens criticized President-elect Obama today for nominating Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) to be his Secretary of State, saying it contradicted the anti-war rhetoric he initially based his campaign on.

The Greens said Obama has put together a hawkish, right of center foreign policy team that is opposed to the positions of most Americans.

The Greens also called upon Governor Paterson to appoint a Senate replacement for Clinton that was more in touch with New York voters on issues such as peace, combating climate change and supporting single payer universal health care than Clinton was.

“When Senator Obama launched his campaign, much of his appeal to voters in the primaries was his initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq during his time as a state senator. During the presidential primaries, Obama positioned himself as a peace candidate, despite his consistent votes for funding the Iraq War during his time in the U.S. Senate. Senator Clinton has refused to admit that her support for the invasion of Iraq was a mistake,” said Howie Hawkins, the Green Party nominee for US Senate from NY in 2006.

The Greens pointed out during her 2006 campaign for US Senate, Hillary Clinton boasted that it was her husband, not Bush, that had first implemented the doctrine of pre-emptive invasion with his attacks on Somalia and the Balkans.

“The Democrats told the American people that the best way to reject Bush and his various wars was by given the Dems control of the White House and Congress. Now that they won, once again the Democrats are giving the American people something quite different. Putting the Clinton White House back together was not the change the Senator Obama talked about during his campaign,” noted the Capital District Greens.

"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"

The Obama transition team recently announced that President Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates will retain his position. There are many troubling questions about Gates’ role in Iran-Contra, as well as his shaping of intelligence about Russia. Vice-President Joe Biden, who backed the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, was selected for his hawkish views John Brennan, who played a major role in extraordinary rendition, torture at Guantánamo and warrantless wiretapping, was picked to lead the review of intelligence agencies. Obama sent former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, famous for stating in a 60 Minutes interview that the death of up to 500,000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions was worth the price, to represent him at the recent G20 meeting. Not one of the US Senators and House members who voted against the war in Iraq are being considered by Obama’s foreign policy team.

With so many former Clinton staff moving into the Obama Presidency, the Greens said it was important to look at President Clinton’s foreign policy record. It was President Clinton who first initiated the policy of overthrowing Saddam Hussein by force with the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which led to covert operations and increased bombing of Iraq intended to destabilize Iraq at enormous cost to innocent civilians Under the pretext of enforcing the No-Fly Zones in Iraq, he initiated the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam. Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled. Hillary Clinton has strongly defended her husband’s decision to attack Yugoslavia, saying in 1999, "I urged him to bomb. … You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"

As reporter Jeremy Scahill recently pointed out, under Bill Clinton, Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) dramatically accelerated the corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton escalated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

Hillary Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military war against Iraq. As a U.S. senator, she enthusiastically embraced the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising in October 2002 to support the invasion. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."

Senator Clinton voted for the anti-civil liberties Patriot Act. She has consistently opposed any efforts to end the illegal occupation of Palestine, including the recent brutal blockade of Gaza. In 2006, she gave unconditional support to the bombings and attacks on civilians in Lebanon by Israel.

The Green Party of the US recently noted that along with Clinton, the appointment of Cong. Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff means that Obama is likely to maintain the same uncritical support for Israel as the Clinton and Bush administrations, whose policies resulted in increasing human rights violations against Palestinians and greater instability in the region. Mr. Emanuel was one of the original drafters of NAFTA and now favors similar antidemocratic 'free trade' pacts with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, which would cost more US jobs and suppress environmental and labor protections.

The Greens also called for a full public disclosure of the Clinton family finances and fundraising. Clinton herself has raised enormous sums of money from a slew of corporate interests to fund her Senate and Presidential campaigns. Clinton’s husband, Bill, poses numerous conflicts of interests for her as Secretary of State. He has been widely accused of raising funds by use his stature as former President to put together shady deals. The most notorious involves receiving a $31 million donation to his Presidential library shortly after he helped broker a deal between Canadian financier Frank Giusta and the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giusta ended up with a contract for access to Kazakhstan’s Uranium, and Nazarbayev got appointed the head of an international election-monitoring organization that had ruled his election fraudulent.

Hawkins added that The US cannot afford to continue spending over a trillion dollars a year maintaining a global military empire of over 700 military bases in over 100 countries. We face a choice: empire or economic recovery. Obama's stated commitments to increased military spending, deficit reduction, and trillions for financial corporation bailouts will mean a radical reduction in the living standards of Amerca's working families through increased regressive payroll taxes coupled to cuts in Medicare and Social Security, as Obama's budget manager, Peter Orszag, advocates. Economic recovery requires deep cuts in military spending of at least 50 percent and investing the peace dividend in economic recovery by building a green economy of renewable energy, mass transit, green buildings, sustainable manufacturing, and organic agriculture. Unfortunately, the neoliberals on Obama's economic team complement the neoconservatives on his national security team and indicate that his green energy rhetoric has been as disingenuous as his peace rhetoric."

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Obama team tilts right, doves keep faith

By JONATHAN MARTIN
Politico, November 27, 2008
www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/16034.html

Leading opponents of the war have mostly been silent as president-elect Barack Obama, who first built his national image on the foundation of his early opposition to the Iraq war, assembles a group of national security hands that is anything but a team of doves.

It's a disorienting moment for the peace wing of the Democratic Party, at once elated America selected a new president opposed to the Iraq war and momentarily disoriented by the imminent removal of a commander-in-chief whose every action they've opposed for the past eight years.

“Shock has paralyzed them for the moment,” said Steven Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes The Washington Note, a popular foreign policy blog. “We are in an Obama bubble now. And it’s tough to step out and be first to deflate the bubble.”

Especially, he added, before that bubble takes shape.

“You’ve got some people like myself who are saying there may be an interesting design in what Obama is trying to do. Maybe it doesn’t fit easily in a neatly sculpted box of liberal pacifist and warmonger hawk. Maybe it’s more complex than that.”

Still, it’s clearly a team that tilts to the right of Democratic foreign policy thought.

Vice-president-elect Joe Biden initially backed the war in Iraq and has supported other military interventions in his long Senate career. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton also supported the Iraq war resolution, a vote that Obama framed as a critical failure of judgement during the primary. She's also taken a harder line on Iran than the president-elect—and is in line to be his Secretary of State.

Jim Jones, a retired Marine General who advised Clinton, Obama and John McCain during the campaign and has refused to disclose his partisan leanings, is slated for National Security Adviser. And running the Pentagon? For at least the first year of his administration, it’s virtually certain that the new president will retain Robert Gates—the Secretary of Defense appointed by President Bush.

Liberals scored one victory, though, when a top candidate to take over the CIA withdrew from consideration this week after concerns surfaced over his views on the agency’s interrogation methods. In a letter taking his name out of consideration, John Brennan said he didn’t want to be a “distraction” to the president-elect.

Yet most leaders on the left are keeping to themselves any criticisms of the centrist quartet that will help shape and implement Obama’s foreign policy.

For now there is a measure of trust from liberals who believe Obama will hold to the principles he espoused during the campaign: end the war in Iraq, negotiate with adversaries and restore America’s standing in the global community.

“We should have a simple sign on our wall saying, ‘It’s the policy stupid,’” said Tom Andrews, the former Maine congressman, riffing off James Carville's 1992 Clinton campaign mantra. “Many will give President-elect Obama the benefit of the doubt about who is executing the policy as long as there is no comprise or backtracking on the policy itself,” added Andrews, who now heads the group “Win Without War.”

There is, Andrews noted, a reluctance to carp before Obama is even sworn in. “He hasn’t been president for one second yet,” the former congressman observed.

Progressives who knew Obama before his ascent onto the national stage also suggest that he’s remaining on the same course he's always charted – one that hews closer to the middle than those on the right will give him credit for or those on the left would prefer.

Maryiln Katz, a veteran of the peace movement dating back to her days as a member of Students for a Democratic Society, helped organize the October 2002 rally in Chicago’s Federal Plaza where Obama declared his opposition to what he called a “dumb war.”

But, Katz recalled, the then-state senator also made certain to point out he was no pacifist.

“He asserted his own position in contradiction to [the] anti-war movement,” she said. “He wasn’t us. He didn’t pander to the crowd.”

But Katz, a well-connected Chicago public-relations executive, said that some liberals chose to ignore the part of the speech where Obama stressed that he was not against military force and actually urged more aggressive pursuit of al Qaeda.

“A lot of people took his position on Iraq and projected our politics onto him,” she said. “And that was never him. It was never true.”

Still, President Obama sounds a lot better than President Bush to a peace movement whose members have spent the last seven years in a posted of principled, if often powerless, opposition—and who now have to find a new point of orientation.

“It’s a real challenge to those of who have grown up in opposition to everything,” said Katz. “How do we behave in a way that it expands the progressive point of view? How do you maintain an independent NGO, issue-based infrastructure based on something other than a culture of complaint?”

Some clues could come in Chicago, where from January 1st to the 19th (MLK Day and the day before Obama’s inauguration), a coalition of liberal groups will rally in Hyde Park at what they're calling “Camp Hope” to push for various liberal priorities at home and abroad. Still, the language of their "presence" -- they do not call it a protest—highlights the confusion as to how to relate to an incoming president who is, at the least, less adversarial to their agenda.

The group will congregate daily to "congratulate Senator Obama as our new President-elect and recommit ourselves to progressive actions he promoted on his campaign trail," states the message on their Web site, which adds, “We earnestly hope his presidency will signal the dawning of long-needed progressive change in the United States.”

To be sure, there are some voices who haven't hesitated to take on the president-elect when he's departed from their line, but those voices have found themselves increasingly marginalized by the press and those in the peace movement willing to give Obama a chance.

"He is violating the people's mandate," complained Jodie Evans, a Code Pink co-founder who emailed from Tehran, where she was meeting with government officials and other peace activists. "The people elected him over her precisely because of their different foreign policy stances. Here we are in Iran, working to establish citizen diplomacy, hearing the concerns of the Iranian people and how it feels to have [Clinton] say she wants to obliterate Iran. Those comments are not taken lightly and [are] seen as policy positions here."

Evans, who with her husband helped raise money for Obama during the primary and general election, hinted at how the new president-elect has kept the left-wing at bay since winning the election—by focusing on the issue that first brought them to his side.

Recalling her interaction with Obama at fundraisers, the veteran liberal activist said: "It has gotten to the point where he sees me coming and before I am close he just keeps repeating, 'Jodie, I PROMISE, I will end the war, I promise I will end the war.' It is effective in limiting the amount of time I have to complain about what ever is up [to] at the moment."

Those vested in power, though, are less inclined to complain just yet.

"My immediate reaction was that I feel sure that President Obama knows that he was elected on a campaign of change, and that includes on foreign policy," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), a Bay Area liberal who co-chairs the House Progressive Caucus, when asked about the new commander-in-chief. “Regardless of who advises him, he must and I believe he will embrace a bold agenda that uses our non-military power,”

Woolsey said others in the peace movement are holding their fire because they are “so relieved that we will have a leader they can trust,” even as, she said, they are “counting on the progressives in the Congress to keep his feet to the fire."

So far, though, Obama's yet to feel the flame.

Observed Clemons: “It’s very hard for even leaders of the left to poke holes because too many of their followers will say, ‘give the guy a break—he hasn’t even been in there yet.' You should see the ridicule or hate at anyone that tries to poke a hole in the Obama myth right now.”

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Neocons, Republicans, and War Criminals Rave about Obama's "Team of Rivals"
by Jeremy Scahill

As Barack Obama's opus, Team of Rivals, continues its rolling debut, the
early reviews are in and the "critics" are full of praise for the cast:

"[T]he new administration is off to a good start."
-- Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell
(www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AK6DW20081121)

"[S]uperb . . . the best of the Washington insiders . . . this will be a valedictocracy -- rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes."
-- David Brooks, conservative New York Times columnist
(www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/opinion/21brooks.html)

"[J]ust about perfect. . . ."
-- Senator Joe Lieberman, former Democrat and John McCain's top surrogate in the 2008 campaign.
(www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/16007.html)

"[R]eassuring."
-- Karl Rove, "Bush's brain"
(online.wsj.com/article/SB122783239069463007.html)

"I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain . . . this all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign . . . [Hillary] Clinton and [James] Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for 'neo-liberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 'neo-conservativism.'"
-- Max Boot, neoconservative activist, and former McCain staffer.
(www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/44551)


"I see them as being sort of center-right of the Democratic party."
-- James Baker, former Secretary of State, and the man who led the theft of the 2000 election.
(www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27873500/page/2/)

"[S]urprising continuity on foreign policy between President Bush's second term and the incoming administration . . . certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush. . . ."
-- Michael Goldfarb, of the neoconservative Weekly Standard
(www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/11/obama_the_realist_1.asp)

"I certainly applaud many of the appointments. . . ."
-- Senator John McCain
(latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/john-mccain-pal.html)

"So far, so good."
-- Senator Lamar Alexander, senior Republican Congressional leader.
(www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/us/politics/24bipartisan.html)

Hillary Clinton will be "outstanding" as Secretary of State
-- Henry Kissinger, war criminal
(www.bloomberg.com/apps/news)

Rahm Emanuel is "a wise choice" in the role of Chief of Staff
-- Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, John McCain's best friend
(lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm)

Obama's team shows "Our foreign policy historically is not partisan."
-- Ed Rollins, top Republican strategist and Mike Huckabee's 2008 campaign manager
(transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/30/le.01.html)


"The country will be in good hands."
-- Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's Secretary of State
(www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/11/112423.htm)

**Team of Rivals will be p laying all day, every day for at least the next four years**