It is fair to blame Hillary for the Clinton administration’s human rights failings. When Hillary criticized Samantha Power for the “monster” appraisal, did she not in turn defend Bill Clinton’s indifference toward genocide in Korsova and Rwanda?
Marc Cooper (Huffington Post, via Alternet by permission) would say so. In his brief critique, Hillary Clinton, Not So Good on Genocide, he does. Samantha Power, by exposing the Clinton administration’s indifference to genocide, got the boot for stating it on the campaign trail. So thus is the “monster” comment understood: the 3 AM calls that went unanswered.
The Barack Obama campaign is about to pay a very high price for the inopportune words of one of its most distinguished foreign policy advisors. The dazzlingly brilliant journalist, Pulitzer-prize winning author, and Harvard professor, Samantha Power, has been forced to resign from the campaign after she recklessly told a reporter that Hillary Clinton is a “monster.”
In the pungently hypocritical game of American politics, this is just something outside the rules. Whether it’s true, or not, matters little. Nor does it matter that the object of Power’s derision has just finished spending millions on TV ads implying that Obama would be responsible for the countless deaths of millions of American children sleeping at 3 a.m. Tut, tut. Nothing monstrous about that.
Power was rightfully awarded the Pulitzer for her finely written and downright horrifying book A Problem From Hell which, in macabre detail, describes the calculated indifference of the Clinton administration when 800,000 Rwandans were being systematically butchered. The red phone rang and rang and rang again. I don’t know where Hillary was then. But her husband and his entire experienced foreign policy team — from the brass in the Pentagon to the congenitally feckless Secretary of State Warren Christopher — just let it ring.
And as more than one researcher has amply documented the case, the bloody paralysis of the Clinton administration in the face of the Rwandan genocide owed not at all to a lack of information, but rather to a lack of will. A reviewer of Power’s book for The New York Times, perhaps summed it up best, saying that the picture of Clinton that emerges from this reading is that of an “amoral narcissist.”
Former Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the UN forces in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, tells us a similar story in his own memoir. General Dallaire recounts how, at the height of the Rwandan holocaust, he got a phone call from a Clinton administration staffer who wanted to know how many Rwandans had already died, how many were refugees and how many were internally displaced. Writes Dallaire: “He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier.” Eventually, ten times that many would die. And our response? A handful of years later, at a photo-op stopover in Kigali airport, Bill Clinton bit his lip and said he was sorry.
Therein resides the richest and saddest irony of all. Samantha Power has actually lived the sort of life that Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff has, for public consumption, invented for its candidate. Though not quite 40 years old, Power has spent no time on any Wal-Mart boards but has rather dedicated her entire adult life rather tirelessly to championing humanitarian causes. She has spoken up when others were silent. She took great personal risks during the Balkan wars to witness and record and denounce the carnage (She reported that Bill Clinton intervened against the Serbs only when he felt he was losing personal credibility as a result of his inaction. “I’m getting creamed,” Power quoted the then-President saying as he fretted over global consternation over his own hesitation to act).
We gave Power the Pulitzer for exposing the, well, monstrous indifference of the Clinton administration as it stared unblinkingly and immobile into the face of massive horror. But we give her a kick in the backside and throw her out the door when she has the temerity to publicly restate all that in one impolite word. Monstrous, indeed.
Obama: if Hillary takes credit for the Clinton administration successes, she must also take responsibility for its failings, and in the human rights arena, they are monstrous, indeed.
But there is no need to go back in history to appreciate Hillary’s indifference to human rights as a US senator. Her indifference toward the killing of over 1200 civilians in Lebanon and over 600 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, both of which included hundreds of children, in 2006, the ongoing daily ethnic cleansing and killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, the starvation and death among an entire people under seige in Gaza, her votes against the prohibition of sale of land mines and cluster bombs to foreign countries like Israel, and her disparagement of the UN and the World Court speaks for itself.
UPDATE: A few weeks ago, I posted the dairy, Hillary’s foreign policy nightmare to come…
In a Daily Kos diary, Ten Reasons Not to Vote for Hillary Clinton (Mon Feb 04, 2008), fromtheleft listed several foreign policy reasons not to elect Hillary, most of them having to do with the human rights failings of Hillary’s Senate career.
fromtheleft’s foreign policy points were:
Hillary Clinton voted for Bush’s Iraq war
Hillary Clinton voted for Bush’s Patriot Act to spy on Americans and to reauthorize the Act when it came up for renewal
Hillary Clinton opposed the international treaty to ban land mines
Hillary Clinton is one of the Senate’s most outspoken critics of the United Nations
Hillary Clinton voted against the Feinstein-Leahy amendment restricting U.S. exports of cluster bombs to countries that use them against civilian-populated areas (like Israel during its invasion of Lebanon)
Hillary Clinton is one of the most prominent critics of the International Court of Justice for its landmark 2004 advisory ruling that the Fourth Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War is legally binding on all signatory nations
Hillary Clinton supported Israel’s massive military assault on the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, which took the lives of over 1,000 civilians, half of whom were children
Indeed, these positions are right out of the Israel Lobby playbook and mimics Cheney-Bush foreign policy initiatives and past and current leanings of Neocon’s in the United Nations, like John Bolton, AIPAC’s favorite stooge. It indicates that Hillary is willing to sell out democratic principles for political expediency.
In December 2007. Stephen Zunes wrote about Hillary Clinton on International Law:
Perhaps the most terrible legacy of the administration of President George W. Bush has been its utter disregard for such basic international legal norms as the ban against aggressive war, respect for the UN Charter, and acceptance of international judicial review. Furthermore, under Bush’s leadership, the United States has cultivated a disrespect for basic human rights, a disdain for reputable international human rights monitoring groups, and a lack of concern for international humanitarian law.
Ironically, the current front-runner (Hillary) for the Democratic nomination for president shares much of President Bush’s dangerous attitudes toward international law and human rights.
(link for specifics)
In short, Hillary is a monster.
