Hillary Is Running the NeoCon Plan to Own the World

Formerly known as Project for the New American Century.

October 2015:

In an apparent break with the Obama White House, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for the creation of a no-fly zone inside Syria Thursday, the day after Russian warplanes started bombing rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I personally would be advocating now for a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock of what’s happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees,” Clinton said in an interview with NBC affiliate WHDH in Boston after a campaign event nearby.

  MSNBC

At a CNN/NY1 Democratic debate [...] with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton reiterated her support for such a move.

"I do still support a no-fly zone because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and so they have some place they can be safe," she said.

  CNN

So far, the Obama administration has resisted. But I expect President Hillary will go for it. Let's look at that No-fly Zone approach as implemented in Libya.

In this fifth anniversary week of the U.S.-led Libya intervention, it’s instructive to revisit Hillary Clinton’s curiously abridged description of that war in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices. [...] In late March 2011, Clinton quotes herself telling NATO members, “It’s crucial we’re all on the same page on NATO’s responsibility to enforce the no-fly zone and protect civilians in Libya.”

Just two paragraphs later [...] [t]here is an abrupt and unexplained seven-month gap, during which the military mission has inexplicably, and massively, expanded beyond protecting civilians to regime change — seemingly by happenstance. The only opposition combatants even referred to are simply labeled “the rebels,” and the entire role of the NATO coalition and its attendant responsibility in assisting their advance has been completely scrubbed from the narrative.

[...]

[It is pertinent] to treat Libya as a case study for the ways that supposedly limited interventions tend to mushroom into campaigns for regime change. Five years on, it’s still not a matter of public record when exactly Western powers decided to topple Qaddafi.

  Foreign Policy

But I believe it would be safe to say it was when the Project for a New American Century was rolled out in 1997.

[PNAC] was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership." The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."

Of the twenty-five people who signed the PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

  Wikipedia

(For a better reading of PNAC, click on those two links at the beginning of this post.)

To more fully comprehend what actually happened in Libya five years ago, let’s briefly review what the Obama administration proclaimed and compare that with what actually happened.

[...]

Two days [after President Obama announced a no-fly zone in Libya], Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon declared, “The military mission of the United States is designed to implement the Security Council resolution, no more and no less.… I mean protecting civilians against attacks from Qaddafi’s forces and delivering humanitarian aid.” The following day, Clinton’s deputy, James Steinberg, said during a Senate hearing, “President Obama has been equally firm that our military operation has a narrowly defined mission that does not include regime change.” [ed: emphasis mine]

[...]

Given that decapitation strikes against Qaddafi were employed early and often, there almost certainly was a decision by the civilian heads of government of the NATO coalition to “take him out” from the very beginning of the intervention.

[...]

On March 20, 2011, just hours into the intervention, Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from a British submarine stationed in the Mediterranean Sea struck an administrative building in Qaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia compound, less than 50 yards away from the dictator’s residence.

[...]

Later that day, Vice Adm. William Gortney, director of the Joint Staff, was asked by the press, “Can you guarantee that coalition forces are not going to target Qaddafi?” Gortney replied, “At this particular point, I can guarantee that he’s not on a targeting list.” When it was then pointed out that it was Qaddafi’s personal residence that had been attacked, Gortney added, “Yeah. But, no, we’re not targeting his residence. We’re there to set the conditions and enforce the United Nations Security Council resolution. That’s what we’re doing right now and limiting it to that.”

[...]

During the theatrical and exhaustive Benghazi hearing in October 2015, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) asked Clinton about a video clip that read, “‘We came, we saw, he died [meaning Qaddafi].’ Is that the Clinton doctrine?” Clinton replied, “No, that was an expression of relief that the military mission undertaken by NATO and our other partners had achieved its end.” Yet, this was never the military mission that the Obama administration repeatedly told the world it had set out to achieve.

[...]

In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start. The threat posed by the Libyan regime’s military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in retreat and had abandoned their vehicles. Fittingly, on Oct. 20, 2011, it was a U.S. Predator drone and French fighter aircraft that attacked a convoy of regime loyalists trying to flee Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. The dictator was injured in the attack, captured alive, and then extrajudicially murdered by rebel forces.

[...]

Meanwhile, the public learned just this week — only because Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin was killed on Saturday — that there is a previously unannounced detachment of Marines in northern Iraq providing “force protection” for the Iraqi military and U.S. advisors. The gradual accretion of troops, capabilities, arms transfers, and expanded military missions seemingly just “happens,” because officials frame each policy step as normal and necessary. The reality is that, collectively, they represent a fundamentally larger and different intervention.

  Foreign Policy

How many of the NeoCons who created PNAC are now backing Hillary? How many will she employ in her administration?

We know Robert Kagan has endorsed her campaign, and Paul Wolfowitz recently said he'd probably vote for her. He will - not "probably". "The co-founder of the DLC is a member of PNAC: Will Marshall." [source]

Here we go again. Earlier this year, some were surprised to see Project For The New American Century (PNAC) co-founder and longtime DC fixture Robert Kagan endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president.

They shouldn’t have been. As is now clear from a policy paper [PDF] published last month, the neoconservatives are going all-in on Hillary Clinton being the best vessel for American power in the years ahead.

The paper, titled “Expanding American Power,” was published by the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party-friendly think tank co-founded and led by former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy. Flournoy served in the Obama Administration under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and is widely considered to be the frontrunner for the next secretary of defense, should Hillary Clinton become president.

[...]

Former Secretary Clinton already affirmed her belief in regime change during the campaign, but now it looks like those waiting in the wings to staff her government are anxious to wet their bayonets.

  Off-Guardian

“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”

[...]

Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s hardline assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland, who would likely serve in a senior position in a Clinton administration, supports shipping weapons to Ukraine despite major opposition from European countries and concerns about the neo-Nazi elements those weapons would empower.

Another thing neoconservatives and liberal hawks have in common is confidence that the foreign policy establishment is right, and the growing populist hostility to military intervention is naïve and uninformed.

Kagan complained that Americans are “so focused on the things that have gone wrong in recent years, they miss the sort of basic underlying unusual quality of the international order that we’ve been living in.

[...]

The neoconservative Weekly Standard celebrated Clinton’s 2008 appointment as secretary of state as a victory for the right, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem.”

[...]

“If, as I hope, Hillary Clinton is elected, she is going to immediately be confronting a country that is not where she is,” [Kagan] said. “She is a believer in this world order. But a great section of the country is not and is going to require persuasion and education.”

  The Intercept

Get ready to be persuaded and educated.

Hillary Clinton: where neo-liberalism meets neo-conservatism. "Intersectionality."

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Neocons for Hillary

Of course.  Hillary is a Wall Street Corporate Warmonger, just like all neocons.  Trump is a loose cannon.

“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week.

[...]

As the co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, Kagan played a leading role in pushing for America’s unilateral invasion of Iraq, and insisted for years afterwards that it had turned out great. Despite the catastrophic effects of that war, Kagan insisted at last week’s fundraiser that U.S. foreign policy over the last

25 years has been “an extraordinary success.”

  The Intercept

Begging the question: For whom?

The event raised $25,000 for Clinton. Two rising stars in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Amanda Sloat and Julianne Smith, also spoke.

The way they described Clinton’s foreign policy vision suggested that if elected president in November, she will escalate tensions with Russia, double down on military belligerence in the Middle East and generally ignore the American public’s growing hostility to intervention.

And they say Bernie isn't a Democrat.

“Nothing that [Clinton] did was more clear than the NATO coalition that she built to defend civilians in Libya,” said Sloat, referencing the Obama administration’s overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. That policy, spearheaded by Clinton, has transformed a once stable state into a lawless haven for extremist groups from across the region, including ISIS.

So, a win for US arms manufacturers and defense contractors.

Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s hardline assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland, who would likely serve in a senior position in a Clinton administration, supports shipping weapons to Ukraine despite major opposition from European countries and concerns about the neo-Nazi elements those weapons would empower.

And they say Trump is a Nazi wannabe.

Another thing neoconservatives and liberal hawks have in common is confidence that the foreign policy establishment is right, and the growing populist hostility to military intervention is naïve and uninformed.

[...]

The neoconservative Weekly Standard celebrated Clinton’s 2008 appointment as secretary of state as a victory for the right, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem.”

The slogan of neoliberalcons: Who needs democracy? What we need is more war.

“If, as I hope, Hillary Clinton is elected, she is going to immediately be confronting a country that is not where she is,” he said. “She is a believer in this [international order that we’ve been living in]. But a great section of the country is not and is going to require persuasion and education.”

Mostly persuasion.


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Most Transparent Administration Ever

The State Department acknowledged Wednesday that someone in its public affairs bureau made a “deliberate” request that several minutes of tape be cut from the video of a 2013 press briefing in which a reporter asked if the administration had lied about secret talks with Iran.

The embarrassing admission by State Department spokesman John Kirby came three weeks after another spokesperson insisted that a “glitch” had caused the gap, discovered only last month by the reporter whose questioning had mysteriously disappeared.

  WaPo

Yeah, yeah, the government is deceitful. We know that. But what I'm wondering is why the video was edited so badly. Surely it was digital, so why was there a white flash?

“The recipient of the call doesn’t remember anything other than the caller, the individual who called this technician, was passing on a request from someone else within the public affairs bureau,” Kirby said, explaining the faulty memory by adding, “This happened three years ago.”

Oh sure. The perfect excuse. I don't remember. It happens a lot.  Lots of people call me to fix tapes.  I do it on a regular basis.  Three years!  How could I possibly remember that?

At the first, in February, he asked then-spokesperson Victoria Nuland if bilateral talks with Iran, at the time still secret, were underway. She replied that “on a government-to-government level, no.”

Then in December, after the secret talks became public, [Fox News correspondent James] Rosen returned to the issue with Nuland’s successor, Jen Psaki.

“Is it the policy of the State Department, where the preservation or the secrecy of secret negotiations is concerned, to lie in order to achieve that goal?” Rosen asked.

Psaki seemed to concur, replying: “James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress. This is a good example of that.”

But when Rosen called up the video, he was surprised to find that the entire exchange with Psaki, several minutes long, was missing. He asked the State Department about it, and it said that it had found an intact video in a repository and restored it.

Okay, you got us. We'll put it back. WTF?   They knew better than to remove it from official docs, so they scrubbed public access.

“Genuinely, we think it was a glitch,” said Elizabeth Trudeau, director of the press office, in a May 10 briefing.

No you don't. Jesus, the ridiculous lies a person has to tell when they work for the government.

According to Kirby, who succeeded Psaki last year, the Rosen section was edited out the day Psaki made the statement, after a technician was called by someone within the press office.

Or, as it is more appropriately known, the department of propaganda.

Kirby said there were no rules specifically barring this type of scrubbing. He said new rules would prevent it from happening again.

“My focus is on the future and making sure we have the right rules in place,” he said.

For when Donald Trump takes office.

It occurs to me that the most transparent administration ever sure has changed State spokespersons a lot.  Take a look at this list.  Which administrations had how many different spokesperons?  What does that tell us?  Anything?  I hope Obama can make it through the rest of his term without having to get a new one.  Unless, of course, his goal is to outnumber Regan.

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile in Ukraine

Things have been fairly quiet on the Ukrainian front since the cease-fire was called. Surely we can’t have that?

General Philip Breedlove, top NATO commander in Europe doesn't think so. He went before the Washington press and told them that Russian combat forces were snarling like wolves. Again.

Breedlove has been crying wolf all along. While the Russians say what troops they have in the area are for defense and support of the separatists, Breedlove and his hawk chorus keep exaggerating numbers and equipment and telling us the Russians are hell-bent on invading Ukraine. Never mind NATO doesn’t even have its own intelligence agency.

"What is clear," Breedlove said, "is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day."

German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn't understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn't the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

  Der Spiegel

Saceur sounds like French for sucker. They should probably change the anagram somehow.

For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove's numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America's NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.

[...]

Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as "dangerous propaganda."

[...]

Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel?

Sounds about right to me.

Europeans have also begun to see others as hindrances in their search for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. First and foremost among them is Victoria Nuland, head of European affairs at the US State Department.

Good old Victoria Nuland.

Indeed, US President Barack Obama seems almost isolated. He has thrown his support behind Merkel's diplomatic efforts for the time being, but he has also done little to quiet those who would seek to increase tensions with Russia and deliver weapons to Ukraine.

The Weenie strikes again.

False claims and exaggerated accounts, warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATO -- and by extension, the entire West -- in danger of losing its credibility.

We still have some?

Breedlove sees no reason to revise his approach. "I stand by all the public statements I have made during the Ukraine crisis," he wrote to SPIEGEL in response to a request for a statement accompanied by a list of his controversial claims. He wrote that it was to be expected that assessments of NATO's intelligence center, which receives information from all 33 alliance members in addition to partner states, doesn't always match assessments made by individual nations.

Trust me. I know things that you don’t. No matter that even photographic evidence has disproven some of his claims.

He also wrote that: "As an alliance based on the fundamental values of freedom and democracy, our response to propaganda cannot be more propaganda. It can only be the truth."

Can we save a seat for this guy on the shuttle to colonize a different planet?

Even his own agency is worried about him.

On Tuesday of last week, Breedlove's public appearances were an official item on the agenda of [NATO’s] North Atlantic Council's weekly lunch meeting. Several ambassadors present criticized Breedlove and expressed their incredulity at some of the commander's statements.

[...]

Berlin sources also say that it has become conspicuous that Breedlove's controversial statements are often made just as a step forward has been made in the difficult negotiations aimed at a political resolution. Berlin sources say that Germany should be able to depend on its allies to support its efforts at peace.

Does Berlin really think that America wants peace in the world? Surely they are not that naïve.

Although President Obama has decided for the time being to give European diplomacy a chance, hawks like Breedlove or Victoria Nuland are doing what they can to pave the way for weapons deliveries.

[...]

[T]he German tabloid Bild reported that Nuland referred to the [German] chancellor's early February trip to Moscow for talks with Putin as "Merkel's Moscow stuff."

Does Victoria have stock in arms manufacturers?

Nuland has also been open -- at least internally -- about her contempt for European weakness and is famous for having said "Fuck the EU" during the initial days of the Ukraine crisis in February of 2014. Her husband, the neo-conservative Robert Kagan, is, after all, the originator of the idea that Americans are from Mars and Europeans, unwilling as they are to realize that true security depends on military power, are from Venus.

[...]

Whereas the aim of the Franco-German initiative is to stabilize the situation in Ukraine, it is Russia that concerns hawks within the US administration. They want to drive back Moscow's influence in the region and destabilize Putin's power. For them, the dream outcome would be regime change in Moscow.

Wouldn’t that be a feather in an American president’s cap? Never mind we can’t keep a handle on the puppets we own now. Let’s go for the big one. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Interfering - I Mean, Spreading Freedom - in Ukraine

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a rabid Russophobe and neoconservative warmonger, told the National Press Club last December that the US has “invested” $5 billion in organizing a network to achieve US goals in Ukraine in order to give “Ukraine the future it deserves.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37599.htm

Nuland is the Obama regime official who was caught red-handed naming the members of the Ukrainian government Washington intends to impose on the Ukrainian people once the paid protesters have unseated the current elected and independent government.

What Nuland means by Ukraine’s future under EU overlordship is for Ukraine to be looted like Latvia and Greece and to be used by Washington as a staging ground for US missile bases against Russia.

  Paul Craig Roberts (former Reagan treasury official)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The US Does Not Interfere in the Affairs of Sovereign Governments

A conversation between a State Department official and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine posted on YouTube revealed a frank exchange on U.S. strategy for a political transition in that country, including a crude swipe at the European Union.

In the audio posted Tuesday, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt she doesn't think Vitaly Klitschko, the boxer-turned-politician who is a main opposition leader, should be in a new government.

"So I don't think Klitsch (Klitschko) should go into the government," she said in the recording, which appeared to describe events that occurred in late January. "I don't think it's necessary. I don't think it's a good idea."

[...]

The leaked conversation appeared designed to embarrass the United States and fuel charges that the Ukrainian opposition is being manipulated by Washington.

In the YouTube audio, Nuland and Pyatt are heard discussing strategies to work with the three main opposition figures: Klitschko, Arseny Yatseniuk, former Ukrainian economy minister, and Oleh Tyahnybok, far-right nationalist opposition leader.

[...]

Pyatt suggested Nuland contact Klitschko personally to play to his "top dog" sensibilities.

"I think you reaching out directly to him helps with the personality management among the three and it gives you also a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it before they all sit down and he explains why he doesn't like it," he said.

[...]

Nuland referred to getting the United Nations involved in a political solution in Kiev.

"So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the U.N. help glue it and you know ... fuck the EU," she said in the recording, which was accompanied by still pictures of people mentioned in the call.

[...]

There was no immediate comment from Moscow but the video clearly plays into Russian accusations that the West is meddling in Ukraine. Russia sees Ukraine as its sphere of influence and has offered the cash-strapped Kiev a $15bn bailout to keep it in its orbit.

  alJazeera

A U.S. diplomat, Victoria Nuland, whose controversial telephone conversation about the political crisis in Ukraine was leaked on the Internet earlier this week, said on Friday that the recording was “pretty impressive tradecraft” but suggested it would not harm her ties with the Ukrainian opposition.

Nuland, assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, also denied a Russian claim that Ukraine’s anti-government protesters are trained on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Kiev, calling it “pure fantasy.”

  alJazeera

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Because It Is ALWAYS About Us

The United States called Friday on both Russian authorities and protesters to remain peaceful as opponents of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin prepared major weekend demonstrations against his rule.

  Raw Story

Because we have so very much credibility in that department.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the United States supported the right to peaceful protest in Russia as it does “anywhere in the world.”

What she really meant was “anywhere ELSE in the world.” Other than here.

Victoria Nuland, famous for quipping: “Texas justice is Texas justice.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.