By now, you may have read that Hillary Clinton’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg was not quite the unadulterated love-fest that Goldberg described in his intro to the rap session. It was only 99 percent unadulterated. At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky wants us to believe that Hillary isn’t really a neocon. She’s just a “muscular internationalist”: As proof, Mike offers us this “money quote”:
“I think we’ve learned about the limits of our power to spread freedom and democracy. That’s one of the big lessons out of Iraq. But we’ve also learned about the importance of our power, our influence, and our values appropriately deployed and explained. If you’re looking at what we could have done that would have been more effective, would have been more accepted by the Egyptians on the political front, what could we have done that would have been more effective in Libya, where they did their elections really well under incredibly difficult circumstances but they looked around and they had no levers to pull because they had these militias out there. My passion is, let’s do some after-action reviews, let’s learn these lessons, let’s figure out how we’re going to have different and better responses going forward.”
Well, if that’s a money quote, I want my money back. Hillary isn’t saying that we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, or that we shouldn’t have invaded Libya. No, our problem was that we didn’t do it effectively! Yeah, that’s the problem!
Any time I hear someone talking about their “passion,” I start to gag. And when their “passion” is doing a whole shitload of “after-action reviews” of the Iraqi invasion so we can learn how to do it “better” the next time around, well, I start to get more than a little afraid.
I’d like to believe that Hillary was triangulatin’ with Jeff when she pitched all this neocon jive, but the more I read, the less optimistic I became. Hillary is well-known for her lack of bullshitting skills. She’s so convinced of her own virtuousness that when she tries to finesse an issue she ends up stepping on her own message, with the unmistakable subtext of “Goddamn it, how dare you ask me questions I don’t want to answer! I’m the good guy, goddamn it! I’m the good guy!”
There’s none of that in this interview, or at least too damn little. Hillary speaks with confidence because she believes in what she says, she believes the double-dome foreign policy buro-babble false dichotomies and false equivalencies about leadership versus “hunkering down” and about how the lessons of the Cold War are supposed to shape our response to 10,000 “terrorists” whose main skill at this point appears to be the ability to pick up weapons that other people have dropped.
As many people have noted, Clinton’s “hard line” on Iran—her argument being that they somehow have no “right” to do anything that we don’t want them to do—is particularly disappointing. The U.S. spent more than a decade, under George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush, backing Saddam Hussein into a corner, relentlessly harassing him until he stepped over the line (which in fact he didn’t, but never mind). So, basically, we had to do invade Iraq! He put us on the spot! It was his fault!
Clinton seems to want to play exactly the same game with Iran—a long series of false, contrived crises leading up to a final showdown. Like her self-professed brother in arms, Bibi Netanyahu, she appears to be pursuing a new Cold War as an end in itself, a self-perpetuating crisis machine that will generate endless tension and “purpose.” That’s the bad news. The really bad news is that the Republicans will almost surely be driven to be “tougher than Hillary.”
Afterwords
Again, it would be nice to believe that that is Hillary’s “long game”: “They won’t be able to get to the right of me without falling off a cliff, which means that foreign affairs will be a big fat zero all the way to the election. And on domestic matters I can’t lose.” It would be nice to believe that, but I don’t.
Mark Lynch and Fareed Zakaria1 both demonstrate that Hillary is totally talking out of her ass when she suggests (she does not claim definitively) that arming the Syrian rebels would have been a good idea. (Kudos to the Washington Post for running both pieces, which directly contradict the neocon “wisdom” ladled out on the Post’s editorial page.) Peter Beinart demonstrates how grossly inaccurate—not to say explicitly and disgracefully deceitful—was Clinton’s account of recent Israeli history.
