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In his 1923 book The Goose-Step, renowned muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair examined the consequences of plutocratic capitalist control of American colleges and universities, writing that “our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist.”

If Sinclair were alive today, he would likely be horrified though not surprised by the appointment of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a professorship at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Presidential Fellow at Columbia World Projects (CWP).

Clinton is offering a class at the school this fall, with Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, called “Inside the Situation Room.” It will have students “examine decision-making in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts, from the search for Osama bin Laden, to the ‘red line’ in Syria, to negotiating with Iran,” according to a press release from the University.

Source: nypost.com

Clinton is also, along with Dr. Yarhi-Milo—a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a protégé of the late CIA-connected Columbia professor Robert Jervis—helping to set up a new Institute of Global Politics at Columbia, where an inaugural group of fellows include Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine; Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia candidate for governor, and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and Chairman of Google.

These choices reflect a partisan bias in favor of corporate Democrats and anti-Russia and anti-China war hawks. Schmidt is currently involved in a crusade to undermine China’s economy as a member of the National Security Council’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Yovanovitch played a key role in U.S. political interference in Ukraine and the escalation of the conflict with Russia. She is now championing the provision of lethal weapons supplies to Ukraine, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called “a money-laundering scheme,” taking wealth out of the pockets of tax-payers and putting it into the coffers of Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed-Martin,” which are are owned by the investors of “BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard.”

Clinton’s course is biased because it assumes that U.S. intervention in countries like Syria is legitimate and does not question dominant narratives about U.S. foreign policy that may be flawed or based on imperialist assumptions.

Among the assigned readings is Clinton’s memoir, Hard Choices (2014), which was found to have numerous distortions and whitewashes the Obama administration’s record, including in helping to coordinate the 2009 coup in Honduras, which transformed the country into a narco-state under Juan Orlando Hernández.^[1]

According to The New York Times, a small group of activists on campus protested outside the building where Clinton began teaching, chanting “shame on you! Kick Hillary out.”

One of the activists was Dahoud André, an organizer with a group called Komokoda (Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti), who has helped expose the Clintons’ corruption in managing earthquake relief aid in Haiti in 2010 and Hillary’s role in propping up an illegitimate administration under Michel Martelly that systematically repressed dissent and aided in the looting of Haiti by multi-national corporations.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, after hearing about Clinton’s new gig, tweeted

“the U.S. official who has urged more wars than anyone over the last 3 decades with the possible exception of John Bolton—including Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine—is teaching Columbia students a class called ‘Foreign-Policy Decision-Making.’ And boy they’re excited!”

As they should be.

Clinton’s most shameful action as Secretary of State was her championing Operation Odyssey Dawn over Libya, which contributed to the destruction of what had been Africa’s most prosperous country under Muammar Qaddafi. Tens of thousands of Libyans were killed and the country was plunged into chaos and civil war afterwards and even saw the return of slavery.^[2]

Clinton promoted disinformation about Qaddafi to support the U.S. military intervention, and met with opposition forces before the war to help plan for the post-Qaddafi order after Qaddafi was removed.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates (2006-2011) told  The New York Times that Hillary Clinton’s backing of military intervention in Libya was decisive. President Barack Obama had told him privately in the Oval Office that the Libya decision was “51-49,” and Gates said:

“I’ve always thought that Hillary’s support for the broader mission in Libya put the president on the 51 side of the line for a more aggressive approach.”

After Qaddafi, was lynched, Hillary jubilantly told a reporter, “We came, we saw, he died,” a twisted play on the words of Julius Caesar following his victory over the King of Bosporus at the Battle of Zela around 47 BC.

Hillary the Hawk

Clinton’s performance concerning Libya was not out of character for her.

A 2016 profile in The New York Times Magazine referred to her as “Hillary the hawk.”

The article written by Mark Landler noted that,

“for all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that [Hillary] Clinton has.”

According to Landler, Clinton tried to pressure Obama to a) increase the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan even more than under his “surge policy”; b) sustain a U.S. troop presence in Iraq; c) funnel more arms to anti-government rebels in Syria; d) dispatch a U.S. aircraft carrier in waters between North Korea and China as a show of U.S. force; and e) reject any symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of goodwill in resetting the relationship, the latter position earning her the respect of Cold War hardliner Robert Gates.

Source: ebay.com

After 9/11, when she was a New York Senator, Clinton traveled to Fort Drum at the invitation of General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, who tried to warn her about the risk of invading Iraq—which he said would be “like kicking over a bee’s nest.” But Hillary ignored his advice and voted to authorize U.S. military action in Iraq.

Subsequently, she took a seat on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee alongside fellow hawks like John McCain (R-AZ), and grew close with General Jack Keane, a board member of General Dynamics and key architect of George W. Bush’s 2007 troop-surge strategy in Iraq.

Democratic Party’s Nixon

Described by one of her detractors as a “cool and hardened political operative,” Hillary had honed her political skills in the early 1970s, when she served as an investigator on the House Judiciary Committee set up to decide whether Richard Nixon should be impeached for his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

Clinton learned a lot from studying Nixon’s political tactics, and later deployed those skills in a truly Nixonian manner by manufacturing the bogus Russiagate scandal to malign her political rival Donald Trump and explain her humiliating loss to him in 2016.

According to Barbara Olson, chief counsel for the House Oversight Committee that investigated an assortment of Clinton scandals, “few Americans realize the extent to which Hillary burnished her political skills [by] practicing the bare-knuckle tactics of the highly politicized House Judiciary Committee on the Watergate impeachment investigation.”^[3] 

Image: Hillary Clinton as a young Watergate lawyer. [Source: conservativebookclub.com]

Hillary skillfully used an arsenal of “opposition researchers and private detectives,” that her mentor Dick Morris identified as “secret police,” in a systematic campaign to “intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans [critical of the Clinton’s] whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth.”^[4]

Another example of what Hillary learned from Nixon is how useful it can be to portray oneself as a victim of powerful anti-democratic forces. Nixon had complained of a “vast left-wing conspiracy” arrayed against him; Hillary turned that on its head, claiming that she and her husband were victims of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” As a master manipulator, she made that charge stick by cultivating influential journalists and turning them into “surrogates” or “fans” who duped the public on her behalf.

Ozark Corruption

Clinton’s students at Columbia are unlikely to be aware of the skeletons in her closet from her tenure as First Lady of Arkansas during Bill Clinton’s governorships (1979-1981; 1983-1992).

According to The Washington Post, Hillary used her position as partner at the prestigious Rose Law Firm in that era to cultivate support for Bill among Arkansas’ economic elite.

Rose’s clients included: Wal-Mart; Stephens, Inc., the largest investment house in the U.S. outside of Wall Street; Dan Lasater, a bond trader convicted for cocaine trafficking who was Bill’s largest campaign donor; and Tyson Foods, which allegedly provided Bill with envelopes filled with cash in support of his political campaigns.^[5]

As part of the quid pro quo, Hillary recommended many of the regulators and judges who wound up favoring the clients of her employer and who donated money to Bill’s campaigns.

During Bill’s first gubernatorial term, Hillary appears to have been involved in an illicit pay-to-play scheme involving cattle futures trading that enabled the Tyson Chicken dynasty to give the Clintons in excess of $100,000 in campaign donations.

There is also strong evidence indicating that Clinton and Rose Law Firm colleagues such as Vince Foster, who died under suspicious circumstances after he became Deputy White House Counsel, helped launder money from illicit Whitewater land deals and a drug-trafficking and arms-smuggling operation run by the CIA under Bill Clinton’s oversight at the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport in western Arkansas.^[6]

The Clintons’ corrupt ways and backstabbing made them many enemies in Arkansas who saw through their phony veneer.

In his memoir, Jim McDougal, who took the fall for the Whitewater scandal and died of a heart attack in prison, wrote that the Clintons were “like a tornado who came into people’s lives” and “destroyed them”; they “took without giving back in return.”

In a just world, Bill and Hillary Clinton would have long ago been jailed for their many crimes and condemned by society. Instead, sadly, they continue to be given honors and prestigious appointments.

Why No Student Protest?

Columbia University’s decision to make Clinton a professor follows Yale University’s hiring of General Stanley McChrystal, who presided over a large-scale assassination program as head of the Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC), to teach courses in leadership at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, and Stanford’s appointment of Condoleezza Rice, a key architect of the Iraq War, as a faculty member in its business school.^[7]

When a New York Post journalist interviewed students at Columbia about Clinton’s appointment, some expressed belief the university was trying to capitalize on Clinton’s celebrity; however, not one rebuked her for the ghastly policies that she helped to perpetuate in Libya or for her personal corruption, and none said they believed it was inappropriate for a university to appoint an arguable war criminal who lacks scholarly credentials or a Ph.D., to its faculty.

The reason is that most students at Columbia, like other universities, are unaware that Clinton can be considered a war criminal.

Wrapped up in their social media feeds, students today read very little about history or politics and are mostly oblivious to the role that their country plays in the world, confining any activism primarily to issues of identity politics and the culture wars.

This is all to the delight of the U.S. foreign policy elite, which is able to carry out deadly imperialist schemes with almost no societal pushback, and can then reward the architects of those schemes with professorships at Ivy League schools that will allow them to indoctrinate the next generation and cultivate new protégés.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), for discussion of Clinton’s omissions in her memoir and role in the 2009 Honduran coup. 

2. Alex Lantier reported in an article on the World Socialist website that economic production and average personal income in Libya since Operation Odyssey Dawn have been cut in half. Lantier blamed Operation Odyssey Dawn for catastrophic flooding in eastern Libya caused by a storm after two dams burst. The dams were in poor condition because of a lack of government investment in them since the war. Lantier wrote that “Those who launched the NATO war in Libya or applauded it as a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, and who today are backing a NATO war against Russia in Ukraine on similar grounds, bear direct political and moral responsibility for the Derna catastrophe.” Chief among these people, of course, is Hillary Clinton. 
3. See Barbara Olson, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001). 
4. Olson, Hell to Pay, 4, 5. 
5. See Roger Morris, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996). 
6. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, War Monger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory from Bush II to Biden (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023) for more details and sources. 

7. In 2016, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) also invited disgraced General David Petraeus, who commanded illegal U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, to be a keynote speaker at its annual conference. 

Featured image is from Counterpunch