If
Elected, Hillary Clinton Vows
To Keep US Troops In Iraq
By
Bill Van Auken
19 March, 2007
World
Socialist Web
In
a calculated bid to position herself for the 2008 Democratic nomination,
Senator Hillary Clinton told the New York Times Wednesday that, if elected
president, she would keep significant US military forces in Iraq for
the foreseeable future.
Based on a half-hour interview
with the New York Senator and putative front-runner in the Democratic
presidential contest, the Times reported that Clinton “articulated
a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign
events, where she has backed the goal of ‘bringing the troops
home.’”
Clinton told the newspaper
that there are “‘remaining vital national security interests
in Iraq’ that would require a continuing deployment of American
troops.”
The US troops, according
to Clinton’s plan, would be used to “fight Al Qaeda, deter
Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi
military.”
They would not, she stressed,
be deployed to secure Baghdad or to quell sectarian violence “even
if it descended into ethnic cleansing.”
As for Iraq’s importance
to US “national security,” Clinton could not have been clearer:
“It is right in the heart of the oil region.”
Asked how many troops would
be left behind under such a plan Clinton demurred, claiming that she
would bow to “the advice of military officers.” Undoubtedly,
however, these open-ended missions—securing Iraq’s borders,
suppressing resistance, training its military and, above all, assuring
control of its oil, not to mention protecting and supporting all those
engaged in these activities—would require the permanent basing
of tens of thousands of US soldiers and marines in an occupation that
would last for decades.
Indeed, as the Times notes,
Clinton’s proposal closely resembles the position taken by Dov
Zakheim, the Pentagon’s comptroller under Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. He estimated that such a “limiting” of missions
would reduce the number of troops required to 75,000.
The timing of Clinton’s
interview was hardly a coincidence. The article appeared the day before
the Democratic-led Senate voted on a resolution setting a timetable
for withdrawing US combat troops by March 31, 2008. While the mass media
routinely referred to this measure as a Democratic proposal to end the
war, it fell far short of that.
In fact, as a number of leading
Senate Democrats explained, the timetable was a “goal” rather
than a legislative mandate backed by the cut-off of war funding. Moreover,
like Clinton, the resolution itself clarified that US troops would remain
in the country for the “limited” missions of training and
supplying Iraqi forces, conducting “targeted counterterrorism
operations” and protecting US personnel and infrastructure. Again,
these are operations that would keep tens of thousands of US military
personnel in the country indefinitely.
In any case, the Senate failed
to pass the resolution, voting 50 to 48 to reject it. The Democrats
would have needed 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster and pass
the measure.
In the end, the Senate approved
two nonbinding resolutions—one Republican and one Democratic—declaring
support for the troops in Iraq. The Republican version included a clause
vowing never to cut any funds for “troops in the field.”
Both passed overwhelmingly.
Just hours earlier in the
House of Representatives, members of the Appropriations Committee voted
36 to 28 to approve a package—ironically dubbed an antiwar measure—that
provides over $100 billion more to finance the Bush administration’s
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the escalation announced by
the White House earlier this year.
This legislation calls for
most US combat troops—again, by no means all—to be withdrawn
by August 31, 2008, and sets earlier deadlines if the Iraqi government
fails to show progress in key areas, including the passage of a new
oil law, allowing US energy monopolies to begin exploiting the country’s
vast oil reserves. Like the Senate resolution, however, these deadlines
have no force of law, and no teeth should Bush ignore them.
Also attached to the war
spending bill are requirements that US troops be fully trained, equipped
and rested before being redeployed to Iraq. The Democratic leadership,
however, added language empowering the president to waive these requirements
as he sees fit, so as not to interfere with the planned deployment of
some 30,000 more troops in the “surge” announced in January.
As the Senate vote indicates,
the chances of even these empty restrictions on Bush’s power to
continue the war passing both houses of Congress are nil. Even if they
were to be approved, the Bush White House has vowed to veto them.
The political developments
on Capitol Hill, as well as the continued carnage in Iraq itself, are
demonstrating the undeniable truth that the massive repudiation in last
November’s election of both the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s
policies as a whole have failed to change anything.
On the contrary, a vote that
represented a popular mandate for ending the war has been answered with
the war’s escalation. This is the result of the increasingly undemocratic
character of the US government, which openly rejects the will of the
people in order to serve the interests of the big oil monopolies, the
Wall Street banks and America’s ruling oligarchy as a whole. It
is also a product of the complete duplicity of the Democratic Party,
which gained control of both houses of Congress on the basis of the
antiwar vote, but represents these same interests and is therefore committed
to continue the fight for “success” in Iraq.
In stating her commitment
to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq if she is elected president
in 2008, Hillary Clinton is merely making explicit the real policy of
the Democratic leadership as a whole, all of the talk about ending the
war and bringing “the troops home” notwithstanding.
This is made clear by the
Democratic Leadership Council, the most powerful caucus within the Democratic
Party, which recently posted on its web site a statement entitled “Plan
B on Iraq,” which ridiculed the demand for a “rapid and
complete withdrawal from Iraq” as “Plan Zero.”
In a fairly straightforward
passage, the article noted that “many of the ‘deadline for
withdrawal’ plans circulating in Congress actually assume we will
leave significant non-conventional-combat forces in Iraq for an extended
period of time; most have loopholes for changing the withdrawal schedule
as necessary.” It continues: “All the focus on deadlines
obscures discussion of the need for a smaller, redeployed force with
a crucially different but still urgent mission. Those offering plans
for withdrawal of ‘combat troops’ need to be much more explicit
about the kind of US troops that should remain.”
The DLC suggests that Washington
would remain in Iraq with a “counterterrorism force” that
“would consist largely of military trainers, special forces, intelligence
and logistics.” It adds, “Some experts also have suggested
that it help Iraqi forces guard borders.”
The statement adds the following
peculiar passage: “In general, our military and diplomatic operations
should acknowledge the especially barbaric Sunni insurgent-Al Qaeda
tactics in Iraq...”
What seems to be suggested
is that the “counterterrorism” actions of the reduced force
in Iraq would be directed at aiding the terror activities of the Shia
militias and death squads in the sectarian civil war that has broken
out in the country, a strategy that some military analysts have dubbed
the “Salvador Option,” for its resemblance to the backing
for the Central American death squad regime in the 1980s.
This outlook seems to be
echoed by Ms. Clinton in her interview with the New York Times. At the
end of the interview, she brushes aside a question over whether US troops
could stand aside in the face of violent sectarian ethnic cleansing
operations, declaring, “Look, I think the American people are
done with Iraq.”
She continued, “No
one wants to sit by and see mass killing. It’s going on every
day.... This is an Iraqi problem; we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves.
If we had a different attitude going in there, if we had stopped the
looting immediately, if we had asserted our authority—you can
go down the lines, if, if, if...”
Of course in all of this
blaming the Iraqis for the historic catastrophe that the US war of aggression
has inflicted upon their country, the Democratic Senator does not raise
the obvious hypothetical: what if she and fellow members of her party
had opposed the war and refused to vote for the October 2002 resolution
granting the Bush administration the power to invade a relatively defenseless
country on the fraudulent pretext that weapons of mass destruction and
terrorist ties (both nonexistent) posed an imminent threat to the US?
Instead, in Clinton’s
view, it is a matter of the Bush administration—which is responsible
for the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, the wounding of countless more and
the imprisoning of tens of thousands—failing to “assert
our authority.”
There is an obvious reason
for Clinton’s refusal to repudiate her 2002 vote to authorize
war against Iraq. She is signaling America’s ruling elite that,
should she be elected president, she is prepared to carry out even more
horrendous crimes against the Iraqi people and to launch future wars
of aggression against other countries in order to assert US hegemony
and seize control of vital resources and markets.
No doubt Ms. Clinton has
been counseled by her husband in this matter. Bill Clinton is the recognized
master of the cynical political technique of triangulation—choosing
a middle position between that of your right-wing supporters and the
sentiments of your liberal backers. He would advise his wife that, while
criticizing the Bush administration’s handling of the war, she
should deliberately distance herself from those Democrats seeking to
identify themselves with mass antiwar sentiments.
According to this political
logic—confirmed in spades by the 2004 election—the base
of the Democratic party may respond to antiwar demagogy in the course
of the primaries, but in the end the party leadership will nominate
a candidate acceptable to the big moneyed interests that control it
and that support the essential aims of the US intervention in Iraq.
The even more cynical corollary to this approach is the conception that,
when all is said and done, the Democrats’ liberal, antiwar constituency
will vote for Clinton anyway in a contest against a Republican. “Where
else are they going to go?”
The four-and-a-half months
since the midterm elections have amply demonstrated that a genuine struggle
against the war in Iraq can be waged only by breaking with the Democratic
Party of Clinton as well as with the Bush administration.
The war cannot be ended by
means of pressure on the existing political parties and state institutions
of the US establishment. It requires the emergence of a new independent
mass movement of workers and youth fighting internationally for the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops and for holding
all those who conspired to launch this war politically and criminally
accountable. This is the crucial importance of the Emergency Conference
against War on March 31 and April 1 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called by
the International Students for Social Equality and the Socialist Equality
Party.
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