At a gathering this past Sunday, it came to light that the young men present were concerned about being drafted to fight in an impending WWIII. Apparently a common worry after our Iran confrontation, a friend in the Midwest told me that a 13-year-old close to her had mentioned that fear of such a conflagration was voiced at his school.
With Iran having essentially “tapped out” after the killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani and President Trump chaining the dogs of war, these fears may be somewhat allayed. But what of a far scarier proposal: to create a no-fly zone in Syria that could involve shooting down Russian planes?
Never fear, Trump is not going to do it. Because this was actually Hillary Clinton’s proposal during the 2016 campaign, and it’s perhaps Exhibit A in why some observers warn of a “nightmare scenario if Hillary or Biden controlled foreign policy.”
Not surprisingly, though, many leftists were value-signaling in the Soleimani killing’s wake, claiming the war drums wouldn’t be beating had we heeded their sage counsel. “We voted for intelligence. We voted for experience,” reads one tweet, reports the Daily Wire. “We voted for respect. We voted for dignity. We voted for justice. We voted for love. #IvotedforHillaryClinton.”
Actually, they voted for war. For “Clinton’s attitude toward Iran has always been one of aggression,” the Wire continues. “While running for president in 2008 against then-Illinois senator Barack Obama, Clinton backed ‘massive retaliation’ against Iran if the Iranian regime attacked American interests abroad or launched a nuclear strike at Israel.”
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In fact, Clinton even said that if the Iranians attacked Israel, “we would be able to totally obliterate them.” Moreover, as senator she voted to “declare Iran’s 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization,” wrote the New York Times in 2007, a move “more hawkish than even most of the Bush administration has been willing to venture.”
Yet all this pales in comparison to Clinton’s aforementioned Syrian no-fly zone proposal, which alarmed “retired senior US military pilots,” reported the left-wing Guardian in 2016. Such an action “could lead to a military confrontation with Russia that could escalate to levels that were previously unthinkable in the post-cold war world,” the paper explained.
The Guardian pointed out that this scenario could involve the Russians shooting down American planes. “If she is not politically posturing, it’s going to be a disaster,” the paper related quoting John Kuehn, a retired navy officer who flew no-fly zone missions over Bosnia and Iraq.
American Thinker provides more details on hellacious Hillary, writing that she, “after all, was the Secretary of State who boasted after Muammar Qaddafi’s death, ‘We came, we saw, he died [and then giggled — video below].’ (This of course is the same woman who laughed when describing how her clever legal tactics protected a child rapist from getting convicted.) When it comes to spiking the football over people’s deaths, Hillary and dignity … well, let’s just say they’re not a matched set.”
Note that Clinton’s ex-boss, Barack Obama, is similarly disposed. It was reported in 2013 that he’d told aides in reference to his drone strikes, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people.”
In fact, with Libya now a haven for slave markets and terrorists and in a state of disarray — and having become a conduit for wave migration into Europe (which Gadhafi predicted would happen) — what was Clinton’s rationale for ousting the septuagenarian strongman? Some theorize that she simply wanted a foreign policy résumé-enhancer for the 2016 presidential campaign.
Of course, much of Clinton’s rhetoric might have been posturing; perhaps overcompensating, she could have wanted to allay concerns that a female candidate lacked the strength geopolitical battles demand.
Current Democrat frontrunner Joe Biden, however, showed no signs of worrying about appearing weak — at least not in 2001. As the New Republic wrote at the time on then-senator Biden’s unorthodox ideas about pacifying a post-9/11 Middle East:
At the Tuesday-morning meeting with committee staffers, Biden launches into a stream-of-consciousness monologue about what his committee should be doing, before he finally admits the obvious: “I’m groping here [curious terminology given what we now know!].” Then he hits on an idea: America needs to show the Arab world that we’re not bent on its destruction. “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” Biden declares. He surveys the table with raised eyebrows, a How do ya like that? look on his face.
Of course, the man Biden would later serve as vice president under, Obama, did ultimately send hundreds of millions to Iran in 2016.
In contrast, President Trump — while stereotyped as an orange bull in a china shop (and in China’s shop) — has thus far taken a more nuanced approach demonstrating that there’s a lot of real estate between the two leftist extremes of pandering and pulverizing. Moreover, whatever may come in the future, the past’s verdict seems clear: “If You Want to Get into a Really Big War, Elect a Liberal.”
The above is a 2014 headline that I read more than once, mainly because I wrote it. As I pointed out, every major 20th century conflict began under Democrats, with WWI under Woodrow Wilson, WWII under FDR, Korea under Harry Truman, and Vietnam under JFK and Lyndon Johnson.
In contrast, Republican initiated engagements tended to be short, well focused, and relatively successful. Grenada under Ronald Reagan; Panama under George H.W. Bush; and even the Persian Gulf War, which ousted Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait but left him in power and Iraq intact, are good examples. (Note: This isn’t a commentary on the wisdom of any of these actions, only on how they weren’t long-lasting or seemingly purposeless wars.)
An exception to this occurred in the 21st century, when GOP President George W. Bush initiated the Mideast nation-building fiascos, efforts that fruitlessly continue to this day. But the reason why he apparently fancied that Western-style republics could flower in Muslim lands is the same reason why leftists often bumble into wars. As I wrote in 2014:
Avoiding disastrous war is the stuff of foreign policy, and foreign policy involves dealing with other humans; as such, it can only be as good as your understanding of human nature. Thus, just as in the schoolyard or the street, your ability to avoid disastrous international fights will be commensurate with your understanding of human nature. Can you read people — some of whom are potential threats — well? Can you differentiate between a gathering storm that needs to be nipped in the bud and a situation exacerbated by meddling? Do you know what’s your business and what isn’t? Can you strike the balance between projecting the strength that deters aggression and seeming as a threat yourself? Complicating matters is that foreign policy is about dealing with foreign human beings, people sharing your basic nature but not your basic conception of the world.
The problem with the people we call “leftists” is that they’re greatly detached from reality. Their entire ideology is based on a misreading of man’s nature (which is why they continually fancy that they can change that nature).
The bottom line is that people confused about sex and who’d put boys in girls’ bathrooms probably shouldn’t be in charge of putting soldiers in harm’s way.
Photo: AP Images
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
