Thursday, July 17, 2014

Are war hawks using Hillary Clinton to divide and conquer the Democratic Party?

Neoconservatives, who had considerable influence on Former Republican President George W. Bush's foreign policy and were behind the costly wars in Iraq and Afghansitan, are now trying to influence Hillary Clinton, who is considering running for the Democratic presidential nomination:
After nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back, using the turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President Obama, not the movement’s interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush-era Washington, that bears responsibility for the current round of global crises.
Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.
[...] 
It’s not as outlandish as it may sound. Consider the historian Robert Kagan, the author of a recent, roundly praised article in The New Republic that amounted to a neo-neocon manifesto. He has not only avoided the vitriolic tone that has afflicted some of his intellectual brethren but also co-founded an influential bipartisan advisory group during Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department.
It's not just the brains of the neocon movement that are praising Hillary Clinton. Republican U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is one of the biggest war hawks in either house of Congress, praised Hillary Clinton a while back and is open to the idea of supporting Hillary's possible candidacy for president.

Many of the same war hawks who helped people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld lead this country into two long, costly wars that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and turned a federal budget surplus into a massive federal budget deficit are now promoting Hillary Clinton's possible presidential candidacy as part of an apparent plan to divide and conquer the Democratic Party, whose base is full of progressives who, like me, are opposed to the interventionist foreign policy that the neocons support and promote. I disagree with people like Hillary Clinton and John McCain on this, but I firmly believe that the U.S. shouldn't be the world's policeman and should stay out of the affairs of foreign countries except when U.S. interests are at stake.

Hillary Clinton is more interested in serving some of George W. Bush's former cronies than rebuilding the American middle class and other progressive goals.