Reply #158: Hillary is an agent of Israel's rightwing, and she will continue the war in Iraq [View All]

[IndianaGreen]

Israel's foreign agents that comprise AIPAC are bragging that they got the Democratic leadership in Congress to drop a provision that would have required Bush to come to Congress for authority to take military action against Iran.

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the daily Haaretz this week that US must keep troops in Iraq in order to protect Israel.

Hillary Clinton has a long track record of kow-towing to the most rightwing elements in Israel, going as far as referring to Ariel Sharon as "great man."

There is no disputing the fact that if elected President, Hillary will continue the war in Iraq perhaps with John Negroponte's El Salvador option that the Pentagon is now discussing as an option if the "surge" fails, as it seems to be doing.

Published on Thursday, March 15, 2007 by the New York Times

If Elected... Clinton Says Some G.I.’s in Iraq Would Remain

by Michael R. Gordon and Patrick Healy

WASHINGTON — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.

In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”

She said in the interview that there were “remaining vital national security interests in Iraq” that would require a continuing deployment of American troops.

The United States’ security would be undermined if parts of Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda,” she said. “It is right in the heart of the oil region,” she said. “It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests.”

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0315-02.htm

Published on Friday, March 16, 2007 by The Progressive

Salvador Option Surfaces Again

by Elizabeth DiNovella

During Bush’s “social justice” tour of Latin America, he didn’t stop in El Salvador, a nation sorely needing some social justice. His military planners, though, had the small Central American country on their minds.

The same day Bush talked about the U.S. being “generous and compassionate” on his Latin American tour, Pentagon officials and military consultants discussed a fallback strategy for Iraq based on counterinsurgency tactics used in El Salvador.

The U.S. government spent millions of dollars to support the Salvadoran military throughout the 1980s as part of its Cold War strategy of propping up anti-Communist forces. Reagan also sent fifty-five Green Berets to train Salvadoran troops, led for several years by James Steele.

<snip>

And James Steele is back prosecuting another counterinsurgency conflict, this time in Iraq.

But the similarities between U.S. military involvement in Iraq and El Salvador don’t end there. In order to circumvent Congressionally mandated limits on the number of U.S. military personnel on the ground, the Pentagon outsourced the work to private contractors. Some of the same private military contractors, such as DynCorp, now hold contracts for security work in Iraq.

The use of paramilitaries and mercenaries led to the deaths of thousands of people in El Salvador. This is not a decent option for the people of Iraq.

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0316-29.htm