It was Bill's war; Dubya flubbed it and Hill's gonna fix it. That's the message encoded in the statement:
"I'm going to call my secretary of defense, my joint chiefs of staff, my security advisers to give me a full briefing on what is the planning that has gone on in the Pentagon," she said. "You know, planning hasn't exactly been a strong suit of the Bush administration."
It was Bill's plan. Or, at least, it was the plan developed by the Pentagon during the Clinton administration. Perhaps it was sold as a contingency: that, just in case all the pressure on Saddam Hussein and the continuing embargo didn't have the desired result of securing basing rights for U.S. military assets that weren't wanted in Saudi Arabia or no longer needed in Germany, Italy and Turkey, the U.S would march into Baghdad and take them. So, Bill Clinton approved of the planning. But, in typical Bill fashion, he wasn't willing to commit his own reputation to something that might not work. As a result, it was left to Dubya's men and they botched it, prompting Kerry to utter that un-forgettable "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and then shut his mouth, lest it come out that what the Congress had been funding and planning should have been carried out while a competent Democratic administration was still in charge.
Presumably, as First Lady, Hill wasn't in on the Pentagon plans for fourteen long-term military bases on which our ground-based missile defense systems, radar installations and communications intercept facilities could be set up in Iraq. So, she can honestly propose to do in the future what she hasn't been able to accomplish in the past, even though, as a Senator, she should have been apprised of the Pentagon's plans during the last six years. Given the penchant for secrecy on the part of Dubya's men, it's just possible that the Congress is in the dark about what those billions spent on base construction have actually bought, but "plausible deny-ability" is wearing very thin. Be that as it may, Hill's reference to my secretary of defense, etc. suggests that it's not just her plans that are similar to Dubya's.
David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, said that Clinton's plans for Iraq sounded very similar to President Bush's.
"It's a very small difference, and when you tick off the tasks she said the troops would do while she was president - if that happened - counterterrorism, protection of the Kurds, training of the Iraqi army and then protecting us against Iran, that's a big set of tasks," Sanger said. "And it's very hard when you talk to Pentagon people to have them figure out how you do that with fewer than 100,000 troops."
She's got the same mind-set. Hillary Clinton, like Dubya, thinks all those people are working for her and are going to tell her what she's supposed to do. Nowhere is there a sense that, according to our Constitution, it's the people who give the orders and it's the job of the agents of government, including the chief executive, to carry those orders out, no more and no less.
Some people have dubbed the Bush Two regime the nanny state. That's not just because Dubya has surrounded himself with a number of enabling females, rather it's based on the perception of government as a sort of parental substitute, giving orders and directions to an incompetent populace; in need of protection not just from external hazards, but from itself.
The nanny state has become the very essence of the Republican party and grows out of the conviction that societies are organized for the purpose of controlling an otherwise unruly population--a perception that Republicans can justifiably claim to be shared by some Democrats, as evidenced by the use of bribes (benefits) instead of threats (punishment) to effectuate the same ends (compliance with the law). That neither of the two major political parties has been keen on government by the people has been fairly obvious for some time. Which is why, for example, Howard Dean's claim in 2004 to represent the democratic wing of the Democratic party made sense to a large segment of the population--a segment that's been steadily increasing now that the meager benefits (bribes), with which the economically disadvantaged used to be pacified, have been shifted to the ruling elite as entitlements, earned in the service of their global ambitions.
That the United States are a nation of laws, not men is generally uncontested and widely approved of because it implies that well reasoned legislation, rather than the whim of individual men, will govern the affairs of state. But, what's been overlooked, especially of late, is that when the whims of individual men are codified as law, the very essence of government by the people can be quite easily subverted. Nor is the fact that the Supreme Court has determined a significant number of laws to be inconsistent with the restraints outlined by the Constitution particularly reassuring, since the injuries inflicted by the use of force cannot be undone. Indeed, what's particularly worrisome is that the principle of law as defining the boundaries, beyond which those entrusted with the power to use physical force may not go, seems to be increasingly ignored.
The erosion of the principle of limited government seems to rest on the rationale that, since the chief executive has been given autonomy in the conduct of foreign affairs, limits and restrictions on the behavior of our agents of government need be honored only within the confines of the nation and, more recently, only with respect to United States citizens and officially recognized residents. And, even though the Constitutional specification of person as the defining entity by which governmental behavior is to be judged has been challenged repeatedly in the context of the state providing mandatory services as an egalitarian entitlement to minors and equally repeatedly affirmed by the courts, the effort to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens persists. As does the effort to restrict full civic involvement to adult citizens deemed to be compliant and fully subservient to the law.
In other words, it seems not too far-fetched to conclude that the very principle of human equality is under siege. Not only are foreigners, whether at home or abroad, defined as lesser persons, not entitled to the rights of citizens, but minors and those individuals convicted of crimes against the property or person of another may be deprived of their rights and (not inconsequentially) their obligations as full members of the community. Indeed, the most recent legislative efforts, responding to what only be characterized as a whim of the Bush Two Administration, have been aimed at making suspicion of nefarious intent, rather than conviction, sufficient to prompt the suspension of human and civil rights. While these efforts, codified in the various iterations of the so-called Patriot Act, are equally likely to be declared un-constitutional by the courts, they are relevant in the context of Bill's war and Hill's response to it because, like the invasion of Iraq, the erosion of equal rights was also planned on Bill Clinton's watch.
Equality is the central issue of our time. Though it can't be admitted, equality is the bugaboo of the elite. Which is why even as one American group or another (blacks, the physically handicapped, homosexuals) insists on being included and having its entitlements recognized, the Equal Rights Amendment has to be opposed. The purpose of this opposition is to maintain the fiction that equality is universally recognized, even as it makes it possible to designate some group or other for exclusive behavior (foreigners and the undocumented, along with the long-term incarcerated, are the current targets of choice) and insure that the elites have someone they can feel better than.
The need to insure elite status is actually rather recent. Even though the principle that "all men are created equal" has been central to our nation's development, there were exceptions from the very beginning in that most African Americans and women were excluded from civic participation. In addition, certain people, such as public officials, enjoyed a special protected status by virtue of their office under the principle of sovereign immunity, which protected the individual office holders from being personally accountable for any negative consequences of their performance or non-performance in office. That this protection from accountability was virtually removed by the passage of a law, the Federal Tort Claims Act in 1947, following the end of the Second World War, was probably not widely noticed but may well have set the stage for civil and consumer rights movements that began percolating in the fifties and sixties and put the nail in the coffin of government sanctioned segregation. And, effectively removed the official supports of a ruling elite.
The proponents of equality (and government in the sunshine) generally do not perceive themselves to be in conflict with other segments of the community. The elite, on the other hand, or those who consider themselves to be the elite, most certainly do. Elite status depends on subordinates to define itself. So, it's not surprising, albeit unnoticed by the vast majority, that there has been a push back by the elites to re-establish and secure their exceptionalism by various means--the most successful of which has been privatization. But, mainly because the desire to be unaccountable and inaccessible to public review, like the rejection of equal rights, would not be attractive to the general public, the agenda of the elite had to evolve in secret and the real goals of privatization were hidden behind the promise of increasing efficiency and reducing costs--promises which have now been demonstrated to have been entirely empty. Also not surprising, since increasing someone's power almost inevitably costs the rest of us more.
The accretion of power is the key. It's hard to know whether, in addition to leading to the drive for privatization as a compensatory mechanism, the ruling elites' loss of status in the process of promoting equal rights spawned a desire to establish themselves as a global elite. Perhaps searching out other venues where local regulation to promote social or environmental or even aesthetic goals would be less restrictive was just a natural response on the part of people who don't like being told what to do and their successful global ventures merely serve to certify their specialness. In other words, has American enterprise sought out global venues to escape local control or is it driven by a desire to dominate the globe?
There's hardly a community in America which hasn't heard the threat that, if you won't let us do what we want, we're going somewhere else. The consequences litter our landscape. They can be seen in our urban ghettos, largely emptied of the adult population and their places of employment. They can be seen in the vacant strip malls along our highways, rusting rail lines, crumbling industrial buildings, vacated town centers in middle America, as well as the increasing need for health care and a burgeoning inventory of the implements of warfare with which we aim to acquire what other nations refuse to sell us for our increasingly worthless dollars.
In this video, Senator Hillary Clinton justifies her warlike intentions in 2003 with her suspicions about the weapons we now know the nation of Iraq didn't have (although, to be fair, she does mention that Saddam Hussein's failure to account for the weapons [he didn't have] weighed heavily against him), as well as the world community's failure to fully endorse the assault on Kosovo, whose altruistic nature subsequent developments, such as the establishment of Camp Bondsteel, might call into question. In other words, she was and is promoting an agenda for the Middle East and Eurasia that was developed during the administration of Bill Clinton, though perhaps not as a result of his inspiration, and has been followed, badly, by the Bush Two administration.
Since I don't want American military installations in either Iraq or the other nations bordering Russia and China and would prefer a program of arms reduction and nuclear weapons elimination, the Russian and Chinese response to the provocations is, however logical, an unwelcome development and certainly not to be taken as evidence that we are living in an increasingly dangerous world. What the United States has been up to in the region is offensive. If I were Putin, I'd send my fleet of aircraft on patrol, as well.
A total of ten presidents of member and candidate countries were present. Many others sent observers and asked to be considered for membership. The novelty this year was that the SCO also became a military alliance -- Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) -- and Vladimir Putin and the Chinese President Hu Jintao presided over substantial military maneuvers, "Peace Mission 2007," with mostly Russian and Chinese troops that intended to demonstrate that local countries are going to defend and patrol" their strategic space, without need of US or NATO. Reportedly, the US asked to participate as observers. But their request was rejected. At the end of the first ever military maneuver of this kind, Putin announced: "I have decided that Russia's strategic aviation will resume patrols on a permanent basis. At midnight today, August 17, 14 strategic missile carriers, support and refueling aircraft took off from seven air force bases in different parts of the Russian Federation and began a patrol involving a total of 20 aircraft. As from today, such patrols will be carried out on a regular basis. These patrols are strategic in nature."