Hillary Clinton’s Likely Pentagon Chief Already Advocating for More Bombing and Intervention
Glenn Greenwald
June 22 2016, 9:42 a.m.

They know who is best for business. No other candidate can move more arms. Clinton's military rhetoric had better scare whatever enemy she's talking to because it sure scares me.

"Obama, to his credit, admitted in a recent interview with The Atlantic that his biggest mistake as president was Libya—specifically, failing to plan for the aftermath. He has also blamed U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron for getting “distracted” and the French for not following through to secure the country.

But his owning up to the mistake was nonetheless breathtaking, for a very obvious reason: Obama was elected in part for his opposition to a dumb war run by an administration that had no clue what would happen once Saddam was gone. That *his* administration—the purveyors of “smart power’’—would forget Colin Powell’s famous “Pottery Barn” rule—you break it, you own it—is beyond ironic.

It also poses a problem for Clinton, and forces her to answer for her role in the debacle—something the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has not yet had to do in detail, in part because Republicans became obsessed with the four deaths at the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. That tragedy, it turns out, was but a harbinger of a much bigger, far more dangerous problem, whose menace grows by the day."

"Libya, Syria and Iraq are the jewels in the crown of the Queen of Chaos, as Diana Johnstone has aptly described her. But nearly everything that the Madam Secretary did at State went awry. She is the Empress of Ineptitude too."

"That thought is bound to occur to readers of Andrew Bacevich’s new book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (Random House: 2016)."

"Too bad that he listened as much as he did to his guileful National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and therefore signed off on providing arms and diplomatic support to political Islamists in Afghanistan and anywhere else where they could harm the interests of the USSR.

This made Cold War sense; it was a way to force the Soviets into a situation similar to the one America got itself into in Vietnam. That Machiavellian démarche was not exactly Carter’s idea; Brzezinski and the people around him came up with it. But the buck stops in the Oval Office."

"This is why we Americans now live in a state of perpetual war that counts many of our rights and liberties among its casualties. And it is why, in large swathes of the Greater Middle East, people live amidst death and destruction, and in constant fear of coming to a violent end – whether from bullets or bombs or, most terrifying of all, from Barack Obama’s drones.

It is also why humanitarian and refugee crises abound – not only in the Greater Middle East, but now also in Europe as well.

This is the world that the Clintons helped make, and that Hillary Clinton will dedicate her presidency to advancing."