Bush and Cheney launched two disastrous and totally unnecessary wars which increased terrorism and undermined America’s standing in the eyes of the world.
Hillary Clinton is at least as bad …
She is largely responsible for the war in Syria, which is plunging the Middle East and Europe into chaos.
The New York Times confirms that Clinton is responsible for the violent regime change in Libya, which was also completely unnecessary.
Hillary is largely responsible for the bombing of Yugoslavia … another wholly unnecessary war. Diana Johnstone writes:
In her star-struck biography of the First Lady, Hillary’s Choice, Gail Sheehy reported Hillary’s plea in favor of bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 as a major point in her favor. According to Sheehy’s book, Hillary convinced her reluctant husband to unleash the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs with the argument that: “You can’t let this ethnic cleansing go on at the end of the century that has seen the Holocaust.”
This line is theatrical and totally irrelevant to the conflict in the Balkans. As a matter of fact, there was no “ethnic cleansing” going on in Kosovo at that time. It was the NATO bombing that soon led people to flee in all directions – a reaction that NATO leaders interpreted as the very “ethnic cleansing” they claimed to prevent by bombing.
Joshua Marshall notes:
At least 15,000 Kosovars gathered in the central square of Pristina, the country’s capital, to demand the government’s resignation. In January, thousands of protesters clashed with police, hurling Molotov cocktails, setting a major government building and armored police cars on fire, and wounding 24 police officers.
The aim of this protest was to overthrow the government with violence, as the government said in a statement. The U.S. ambassador chimed in, “Political violence threatens democracy and all that Kosovo has achieved since independence.”
This violence gets little attention from the American media in part because, unlike the Ukrainian demonstrators who overthrew their democratically elected government in 2014, Kosovo’s protesters are targeting a pro-Western government that eagerly seeks membership in the European Union.
But it’s no wonder that Kosovo’s political fabric is so rent by violent confrontations. The rump state was created by a violent secessionist movement led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). That guerrilla band of Albanian nationalists was covertly backed by the German secret service to weaken Serbia. Its terrorist attacks on Serbian villages and government personnel in the mid-1990s prompted a brutal military crackdown by Serbia, followed by NATO’s decisive intervention in 1999.
During the fighting the KLA drove tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to promote independence for the majority Albanian population. It recruited Islamist militants – including followers of Osama Bin Laden – from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and other countries.
President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, called the KLA “without any question, a terrorist group,” and a Council on Foreign Relationsbackgrounder added, “most of its activities were funded by drug running.”
None of that, however, stopped Washington from embracing the KLA’s cause against Serbia, a policy spearheaded by the liberal interventionist First Lady Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Without authorization from the United Nations, NATO began bombing Serbia in March 1999, killing some 500 civilians, demolishing billions of dollars’ worth of industrial plants, bridges, schools, libraries and hospitals, and even hitting the Chinese embassy. (“It should be lights out in Belgrade,”demanded New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation.”)
Following Serbia’s capitulation, according to Human Rights Watch, “elements of the KLA’€ engaged in “widespread and systematic burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma, and other minorities and the destruction of Orthodox churches and monasteries. This destruction was combined with harassment and intimidation designed to force people from their homes and communities. By late-2000 more than 210,000 Serbs had fled the province . . . The desire for revenge provides a partial explanation, but there is also a clear political goal in many of these attacks: the removal from Kosovo of non-ethnic Albanians in order to better justify an independent state.”
Former KLA leaders, including its political head Hashim Thaqi, went on to dominate the new Kosovo state. A 2010 report by the Council of Europe declared that Thaqi, who was then Kosovo’s prime minister, headed a “mafia-like” group that smuggled drugs, guns and human organs on a grand scale through Eastern Europe. The report’s authoraccused the international community of turning a blind eye while Thaqi’s group of KLA veterans engaged in “assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations” to maintain power and profit from their criminal activities.
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In 2012, Madeleine Albright and a former Clinton special envoy to the Balkans bid to take control of the country’s state-owned telecommunications company despite widespread allegations of corruption, the attempted assassination of the telecommunications regulatory chief, and the murder of the state privatization agency’s chief.
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In 2014, a three-year E.U. investigation concluded that “senior officials of the former Kosovo Liberation Army” should be indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”
Under tough pressure from the United States and E.U., Kosovo’s parliament finallyagreed last summer to permit a special court to prosecute former KLA leaders for war crimes. The court will begin operating this year in The Hague.
“The sad thing is that the United States and European countries knew 10 years ago that Thaqi and his men were engaged in drug smuggling and creating a mafia state,” said one European ambassador last year. “The attitude was, ‘He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.’”
Hillary also backed coups against the democratically-elected leaders of Haiti, Honduras and other countries.
And she helped create the idea of “humanitarian war”, where the U.S. brutally overthrows a government by military force … justifying the action by falsely claiming that otherwise civilians will be.
Hillary has also literally supported Islamic jihadis with arms, money and logistical support.
For example, the U.S. under Clinton supported Al Qaeda (and see this) so that it could overthrow Libya’s government.
And the U.S. under Clinton supported Islamic jihadis so that they would overthrow Syria’s government.
- The U.S. started plotting regime change and arming jihadis in Syria – in an effort to topple Assad – adecade ago
- Hillary Clinton – as secretary of state – admitted that arming the rebels would strengthen Al Qaeda
So while Bush and Cheney’s foreign policy was utterly despicable, Hillary Clinton has wreaked havoc on the world stage on a scale which is comparable … if not worse.
Postscript: It’s telling that the Neoconservative hawks – the same people who brought us the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan (which Hillary also supported) – HATE Trump and LOVE Hillary.
