Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Hillary Wants War

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 22, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

31:20

Hillary Wants War

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	came, we saw, he died.
	Hillary Clinton is and always has been a warmonger.
	She has never been shy about supporting foreign wars, such as in Iraq, but she has also been instrumental in certain invasions, and takes credit for these things even today.
	Take for example Libya, and the key role that Hillary played in overthrowing Gaddafi.
	This is how Hillary Clinton spins the result of Western action in Libya.
	I'll say this for the people of Libya.
	I think President Obama made the right decision at the time, and the Libyan people had a free election for the first time since 1951.
	And you know what?
	They voted for moderates.
	They voted with the hope of democracy.
	Because the Arab Spring, because of a lot of things, there was turmoil to be followed.
	This is from an article in The Atlantic, and they say that that is about as misleading as summarizing the Iraq war by saying the Iraqis had a terrible leader, they had a free election after the war, and they voted for moderates.
	It aligns massive suffering and security threats that have occurred in post-war Libya.
	And this is due to the magnitude of the catastrophe that occurred amid the predictable power vacuum that followed Gaddafi's ouster.
	Quote, In Libya today, in spite of the expectations we had at the time of the revolution, it's much, much worse, says a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.
	Criminality is skyrocketing, insecurity is pervasive, there are no jobs, it's hard to get food and electricity.
	There's fighting, there's fear.
	I see very few bright spots.
	Nearly three and a half years after Libyan rebels and a NATO air campaign overthrew Gaddafi, the cohesive political entity known as Libya doesn't exist, says Libya expert Frederick Warey.
	There is no central government, but rather too complete in claims on legitimacy.
	He then describes the situation like this.
	On one side of the fight are the forces of Operation Dignity gathered around General Khalifa Hifla, a former Qaddafi-era officer who defected in the 80s and returned to the country in 2011.
	In May he launched Dignity as a military campaign to root out Islamist militias in the eastern city of Benghazi and exclude Islamists from political power.
	His allies included disaffected military units, security men from the old regime, prominent eastern tribes, federalists demanding greater autonomy for the east, and militias from Zintan and other western towns.
	On the opposing side is the Libya-Dawn coalition.
	It includes ex-jihadists from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, militias from the powerful port of Misrata, and fighters drawn from certain Tripoli neighbourhoods, the ethnic Berber population and some communities in the western mountains and coast.
	Dawn has forged a tactical alliance with a coalition of Benghazi-based Islamist militias that are battling Hifa's forces, one of which is the US-designated terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia.
	Each side claims its own parliament, prime minister and army.
	Michael Brendan Docherty says this, Death and civil war in Libya were unacceptable outcomes for America when Gaddafi was alive, but death and civil war continue unabated, the difference being the Islamic State is now one of the players, and somehow it's not in the American interest to stop it or help Libyans establish some kind of law and order.
	The lessons of Iraq have been internalized.
	Once you create a total power vacuum that will attract terror gangs and radical Islamic fundamentalists, it's best not have any boots on the ground to stop them.
	They finish by saying, Clinton is hardly alone in bearing blame for Libya.
	She was among the biggest champions of the intervention.
	As one of her closest advisors put it once in an email, Hillary has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations at NATO and in contact group meetings, as well as the public face of the US effort in Libya.
	She was instrumental in securing the authorisation, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Gaddafi and his regime.
	She stands behind her course of action even today.
	More than that, she calls it smart power at its best.
	And we can see from the Clinton email leaks from WikiLeaks that she has an extensive narrative surrounding her involvement in Libya to explain to people exactly just how much influence she had.
	I'm not the only one to notice this, as this email was picked up by a New York Times author, in which they say, This narrative was written by her top policy aide Jake Sullivan, who wanted to demonstrate Clinton's leadership, ownership, stewardship of this country's Libya policy from start to finish.
	As in, Clinton and her team wanted her to take full responsibility for what happened in Libya, in order to gain political capital to use for the future.
	They give a short summary of the plan.
	In short, the well-intentioned men who now normally ran Libya were relying on luck, tribal discipline, and the gentle character of the Libyan people for a peaceful future.
	We will continue to push on this, he wrote.
	Given that Hillary Clinton is one of the most well-informed people in the world, this seems remarkably naive.
	And Hillary definitely understood how hard this transition would be.
	In February before Allied bombing began, she noted that the political change in Egypt had proved tumultuous despite strong institutions.
	So imagine how difficult it will be in a country like Libya, she had said.
	Gaddafi ruled for 42 years by basically destroying all institutions and never even creating an army, so that it could not be used against him.
	When you overthrow a Middle Eastern dictator with a ragtag tribal army of jihadists and various other assaulted Islamists, once the dictator is overthrown, there is going to be no common cause within the people who overthrew him.
	It should have been clear to anyone, said Mohammed Ali Abdallah, an opposition member who now heads a leading political party, that there were clear contradictions in the make-up of the opposition and that unity could not last.
	This is why Libya now is a failed state, and is actually exporting its problems elsewhere.
	The failure of last year's election to achieve political unity in Libya was most evident when Libya Dawn, a diverse coalition of armed groups that includes an array of Islamist militias, rejected the election's outcome and seized control of Tripoli.
	The internationally recognised government relocated to Tobruk, situated in eastern Libya along the Mediterranean coast near the Egyptian border, while Libya Dawn set up a rival government known as the new General National Congress in the capital.
	The forces aligned with the Tobruk government have fought Libyadawn, and the conflict has gradually become internationalised.
	Egypt and the UAE have launched airstrikes targeting Libya Dawn, while Turkey, Qatar and Sudan are believed to have provided the Islamist-dominated coalition with varying degrees of support.
	Gaddafi's regime harshly oppressed the Islamist groups that went on to form Libya Dawn, which views its rise to power in Tripoli as hard-fought and a long time in coming.
	They view Haftar as a war criminal from the ancient regime, committed to their elimination, which will certainly undermine the potential for Libya's two governments to reach a meaningful power-sharing agreement.
	With no peace in sight, the continuation of the bloody stalemate between Tobruk and the Tripoli-based governments seems most likely.
	The number of weak or failing states across Africa suggests that such international networks will continue to take advantage of frail central authorities and lawlessness throughout the extremely underdeveloped Sahel and other areas of the continent to spread their influence.
	In the absence of any political resolution to its civil war, Libya in particular, as a failed state with mountainous oil reserves, will remain vulnerable to extremist forces hoping to seize power amidst the ongoing morass.
	And of course, all of this chaos is the perfect playground for ISIS, who have of course infiltrated Libya, taken control of various areas, and now the US has to spend its time, effort and money conducting hundreds of airstrikes against ISIS in Libya.
	Something they never had to do while Gaddafi was in power to repress the militants.
	And this brings us to the cycle of Western intervention in the Middle East.
	Secular Middle Eastern dictators suppressed Islamists and various other assaulted jihadis because they are a threat to the dictator's power.
	The West invades to support a native, usually Islamist uprising, to oust the dictator, for our own reasons, I'm sure.
	The lack of unity in the Islamist forces prevents a stable government from forming.
	The power vacuum caused by the loss of the dictator causes a persistent civil war between the rebels.
	The chaos and Islamist links facilitate the Islamic State entering the country and gaining territory.
	This opens a new front on the global jihad currently being waged by these radical Islamists, and the West has to spend time and money in a futile attempt to contain the Islamic State in perpetuity, even though it was the West's own actions that help facilitate the spread of the Islamic State.
	This is what has happened in Libya, and broadly speaking, it's what happened in Iraq, and it's what will happen in Syria if Hillary is successful and manages to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
	And make no mistake, Hillary wants to overthrow Assad.
	This is from the Hillary emails from Wikileaks.
	The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
	Negotiations to limit Iran's nuclear program will not solve Israel's security dilemma, nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program, the capability to enrich uranium.
	At best, the talks between the world's major powers in Iran that began in Istanbul this April will continue in Baghdad in May and will enable Israel to postpone by a few months the decision of whether to launch an attack on Iran that could provoke a major Middle East war.
	They go on to say that Iran's nuclear program and Syria civil war may seem unconnected, but they are.
	For Israeli leaders, the threat isn't that they're worried about Iran having nukes, it's that they're worried about losing their nuclear monopoly.
	An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that nuclear monopoly, but also prompt other adversaries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to go nuclear as well.
	The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to the provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon as it can today.
	I just want to stress what a terrible thing this is.
	It's okay for the Islamic State to take over Syria, as long as Iran and Egypt and Saudi Arabia do not challenge the nuclear hegemony that Israel has in order that Israel can conduct conventional strikes with impunity and not worry about any kind of retaliation.
	In service of the aim of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, Hillary Clinton has said many times that she wishes to arm the Kurds.
	I would also consider arming the Kurds.
	The Kurds have been our best partners in Syria as well as Iraq.
	And I know there's a lot of concern about that in some circles, but I think they should have the equipment they need so that Kurdish and Arab fighters on the ground are the principal way that we take Raqqa after pushing ISIS out of Iraq.
	And just so you know that I'm not being unfair about this, Donald Trump has advocated for this as well.
	You said Kurdish?
	The Kurdish people?
	We should be using the Kurdish.
	We should be arming the Kurdish.
	They've proven to be the best fighters.
	They've really proven to be the most loyal to us.
	And as far as I'm concerned, I didn't know that Nashville had a large Kurdish population.
	But I will tell you that we should be using and utilizing those people.
	They have great heart, they're great fighters, and we should be working with them much more so than we're working.
	So who are the Kurds?
	Well, the Kurds are a politically diverse ethnic group with about 30 million people spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, with some in Armenia and Azerbaijan as well.
	Politically speaking, their major parties are either communists or nationalists, and these political parties are usually branded as terrorist groups in places like Turkey and Iran, where they have been fighting the government for decades.
	The United States has been funneling small arms to the Kurds for a long time, but that's not what they're asking for this time.
	This time they're asking for heavy arms, so they can destroy things like tanks and shoot down aircraft and whatnot.
	Now, I'm sure that anyone looking at this map can explain exactly why giving the Kurds heavy weapons is going to cause further destabilization of the Middle East.
	But I'll let Dick Cheney from 1994 explain it for me.
	Do you think that the US or UN forces should have moved into Baghdad?
	No.
	Why not?
	Because if we'd gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone.
	There wouldn't have been anybody else with us.
	It would have been a US occupation of Iraq.
	None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
	Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?
	That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off.
	Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim fought over for eight years.
	In the north, you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you've threatened the territorial integrity of Turkey.
	It's a quagmire.
	The Kurds have long wanted a homeland of their own, a sovereign Kurdistan, and one can hardly blame them for that, given the way that they've been treated by various Middle Eastern dictators.
	But arming them and allowing them to destabilize NATO members and Russian allies in pursuit of that homeland is probably not a wise move, which is why until now the US has not given them the heavy arms they've been asking for.
	This opinion seems to have changed though, as you can see from this email from John Podesta to Hillary Clinton.
	In it, he says, In the past, the US government, in an agreement with the Turkish general staff, did not provide such heavy weapons to the Peshmerga, which are the Kurdish fighting forces.
	As of concern, they would end up in the hands of Kurdish rebels inside of Turkey.
	The current situation in Iraq, not to mention the political environment in Turkey, makes this policy obsolete.
	Also, this equipment can now be airlifted directly into the Kurdish regional government's zone.
	One might think it reckless to destabilize a NATO ally, but after the attempted coup in Turkey and Erdogan's return to power and purge and courting of populist Islamism, it seems that they simply don't care.
	This appears to be a concern that is now obsolete.
	And of course, the main purpose of this is to make sure that Bashar al-Assad does not gain an advantage from these operations.
	Erdogan himself, of course, is not really very fond of Hillary's proposal to arm the Kurds, calling it politically inept.
	Unsurprisingly, this is straining the relations between the two NATO allies.
	Turkey sees both the Kurdish Democratic Union Party and the People's Protection Unit's militia as terror groups linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party.
	The PKK has waged a bloody campaign against the Turkish state since 1984, which has left over 40,000 people dead.
	Washington, however, sees Kurdish groups as the most effective forces in the anti-Islamic state fight in Syria and Iraq.
	On Tuesday, Turkish Prime Minister Benali Yildrim also criticized Clinton's comments.
	Isn't the United States our ally in NATO and in the region?
	What does it mean providing armed support?
	It seems that Hillary Clinton's motivations in the Middle East are less about opposing Islamic terrorism and more about overthrowing secular dictatorships that are opposed to the United States.
	This was a plan that appears to have been created under the Bush administration.
	About 10 days after 9-11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
	I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me.
	And one of the generals called me in.
	He said, sir, you got to come in.
	You've got to come in and talk to me a second.
	I said, well, you're too busy.
	He said, no, no.
	He says, we've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.
	This was on or about the 20th of September.
	I said, we're going to war with Iraq.
	Why?
	He said, I don't know.
	He said, I guess they don't know what else to do.
	So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?
	He said, no, no.
	He says, there's nothing new that way.
	They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
	He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
	And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
	So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
	I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
	And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
	He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meaning the Secretary of Defense's office today.
	And he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
	The truth is about the Middle East is had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa.
	Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa.
	The problem is the opposite.
	We keep asking for people to intervene and stop it.
	And there's no question that the presence of petroleum throughout the region has sparked great power involvement.
	Whether that was the specific motivation for the coup or not, I can't tell you.
	But there was definitely, there's always been this attitude that somehow we could intervene and use force in the region.
	As every fool and their dog now knows, the West's involvement in the Middle East is a proxy war against Russia for control of the region's oil.
	The powers that be do not care about Islamic terrorism.
	They do not care about civilian casualties.
	They do not care about democracy or justice or any of the things that you personally might care about.
	They care about control.
	And as Hillary is part of the powers that be, let's have a look at her involvement in Syria.
	There is a shockingly blunt article on the Huffington Post called Hillary Clinton and the Syrian Bloodbath.
	This article is a damning indictment from start to finish.
	They say, in the Milwaukee debate, Hillary Clinton took pride in her role in a recent UN Security Council resolution on a Syrian ceasefire.
	She says, I would add this, you know, the Security Council finally got around to adopting a resolution.
	At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June 2012 in Geneva, which set forth a ceasefire and moving towards a political resolution trying to bring the parties at stake in Syria together.
	This is such a brazen lie, it honestly beggars belief that someone would say it in public and expect other people to believe it if they know anything about the situation.
	As they say here, Clinton's role in Syria has been to help instigate and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not bring it to a close.
	In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN envoy Kofi Annan.
	It was US intransigence, Clinton's intransigence, that led to the failure of Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known amongst diplomats.
	Despite Clinton's insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was, of course, no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage.
	Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.
	At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva, which set forth a ceasefire.
	Hillary Clinton, for example, said that she negotiated the 2012 ceasefire.
	There was no ceasefire in Syria.
	She was the reason why the ceasefire never took place then, because she has backed a CIA-led attempt at regime change that has led to a bloodbath.
	Let's be clear here.
	Hillary's foreign policy operations are a complete and utter failure.
	The Huffington Post does a great job of summarizing it here.
	Assad did not go and was not defeated.
	Russia came to his support.
	Iran came to his support.
	The mercenaries sent in to overthrow him were themselves radical jihadists with their own agendas.
	The chaos opened the way for the Islamic State, building on the disfected Iraqi army leaders, on captured US weaponry, and on the considerable backing of Saudi funds, which she knew about.
	Hillary Clinton has been instrumental in the destabilization of North Africa.
	She seems to want the destabilization of the Middle East, and she seems to want it in order to fight Russia.
	In fact, she seems to want a hot war with Russia instead of the proxy war that the US is currently fighting.
	And I say this because she has been repeatedly calling for a no-fly zone over Syria.
	So I, when I was Secretary of State, advocated, and I advocate today, a no-fly zone and safe zones.
	We need some leverage with the Russians because they're not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution unless there is some leverage over them.
	So let's talk about Hillary Clinton's proposal for a no-fly zone over, and I'm sure she means, a no-fly zone over northern Syria.
	This is of course where Aleppo is, Gary Johnson, and it is the place where the Russians have been dropping their barrel bombs.
	Unsurprisingly, dropping barrel bombs on cities is not a precise science, and people are getting quite distressed that, for example, an Aleppo hospital was hit by barrel bombs and cluster bombs.
	You may think that implementing a no-fly zone over Aleppo is the humanitarian thing to do, as it's going to save lives, isn't it?
	Well, maybe.
	But Hillary also knows it's going to cost lives to put in place.
	Again, thanks to Wikileaks, we know that Hillary had a secret Goldman Sachs speech in which she said that no-fly zones would kill a lot of Syrians.
	In her remarks to Goldman Sachs, Clinton pointed to the Syrian government's air defense systems and noted that destroying them would take the lives of many Syrians.
	They're getting more sophisticated thanks to Russian imports.
	To have a no-fly zone, you have to take out all the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas.
	So our missiles even, if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our pilots at risk, you're going to kill a lot of Syrians, she said.
	So all of a sudden, this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.
	And she goes on to point out the differences between Syria and Libya and how in Libya it was possible to do this without mass civilian casualties, however in Syria it's not going to be.
	And I don't mean to sound callous when I say this, but implementing a no-fly zone over Aleppo means war with Russia.
	What about the option of controlling the airspace so that barrel bombs cannot be dropped?
	All options.
	What do you think of that option, sir?
	Right now, Senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia.
	That's a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I'm not going to make.
	Preventing the Russians from supporting Assad by bombing Aleppo means destroying the anti-aircraft defenses they have in civilian areas.
	This means that the US will be free to shoot down any Russian craft that goes over the area.
	This will put the United States in a state of war with Russia.
	Now, this is not, as the general goes on to say, to say that there cannot be a no-fly zone in Syria set up by the United States that doesn't cause a war with Russia.
	There potentially could be.
	To impose a no-fly zone.
	Chairman, could I, for a second, say, just answer.
	No, Senator Gillibrand.
	That's not what I said, Chairman.
	Go ahead.
	Well, yeah, I do think that's a good question.
	Senator asked me was to control all of the airspace.
	No, what he asked was, should we have a no-fly zone so we can protect these people from being slaughtered?
	That's what he started.
	I answered that first.
	That's what we're all talking about.
	So that would not require going to war full scale, would it?
	Not necessarily, Senator.
	I'm sorry, but I tried to answer the first question first, and then I was responding to the second part of your question.
	But I did not mean to say that imposing a no-fly zone would require us to go to war.
	That's not the question I was answering.
	The question he was answering is, would being able to stop the Russians from barrel bombing Aleppo cause war?
	Which is why he said to control all of Syrian airspace would require war with Russia.
	The United States, of course, could set up no-fly zones over the United States and Allied control of Syria.
	They can't set up a no-fly zone over Aleppo, where they need it, without war with Russia.
	This is Hillary's policy.
	This is what she wants.
	We have a history of her meddling and warmongering all across the Middle East, and she wants to continue it.
	What happens if Assad falls?
	We know.
	We know precisely what happens.
	Islamists take over, Syria becomes a failed state, and it exports terror and arms across other countries across the Middle East and likely across the entire world.
	This is Hillary's plan for the Middle East.
	Trump's plan is to work with Russia.
	And this is what Vladimir Putin thinks of that.
	Во всяком случае, в деле борьбы с терроризмом.
	Конечно, мы приветствуем всех тех, кто хочет с нами работать вместе и считаем ошибочным положение о том, что нам нужно ссориться постоянно с кем-то и таким образом создавать угрозы для себя самих и для всего мира и нести ещё, не добиваться нужных, во всяком случае, результатов в борьбе с терроризмом.
	Но как это будет после выборов?
	Мы точно ведь не с вами не знаем.
	Мы не знаем, будет ли реализовывать свои намерения кандидат в президенты Трамп, как далеко он пойдёт в направлении сотрудничества с нами, будет реализовывать свои угрозы и будет реализована риторика жёсткая в отношении России со стороны госпожи Клинтон, если она станет президентом.
	Потому что она тоже скорректирует свою позицию.
	Это всё нам пока неведомо.
	Но, повторю ещё раз, приносить в жертву российско-американские отношения в ходе внутриполитических событий в США считаю вредным, контрпродуктивным.
	Это происходит не первый раз.
	Hillary Clinton is a warmonger.
	Her intention does not appear to be stopping ISIS, you know, the font of international jihadi terrorism that is currently causing so much consternation around the world.
	Her intention appears to be to overthrow the governments of the Russian allies in the area, creating a vacuum for ISIS to fill, and then proceed, for some reason, to start a hot war against Russia, a major nuclear power.
	Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok A vote for Hillary is a vote for war.
	Mrs. Clinton, what has she done for us except be the self-pitying, robotic defendant of someone who is a pathological liar, almost certainly a rapist, and as I show in the book, a minor war criminal?
	All she's done is say that it's always someone else's fault.
	There's no question, in anybody's mind, the healthcare situation in the United States is much worse than when the Clintons were elected.
	Probably one of the greatest legal social disasters of the century.
	If there was some foreign policy experience or brilliance Hillary Clinton had ever shown, maybe we overlook the fact that she and her husband have never met a foreign political donor they don't like and haven't taken from the Riyadhi family in Indonesia to numerous Chinese donors who left this country rather than show up for the hearings on it.
	But I don't know of any such expertise on her part, except her pretense to have been under fire in Bosnia when she had not.
	This woman doesn't really have any foreign policy experience worth mentioning.
	Well, what is memorable about it is pretty bad.
	We all remember, or we should, that when Les Aspin had then got the Clinton administration very nearly to do something about the horror in the Balkans that belatedly the Clinton administration did decide to stop, they delayed it because Hillary said, no, no, don't do it.
	It will take away attention from my brilliant, wonderful healthcare programme that we all remember so well.
	At least on healthcare, she knows enough about the subject to have really changed American healthcare for the worse in her time.
	About foreign policy, she doesn't even know that much.
	That's what the Secretary of State is for and what you want this president to know.
	Your Secretary of State spends all her time working to make sure that your policies stick.
	With this woman, that can't be said.

▲