The Hawk

Something utterly unexpected happened during last week's debate between Clinton and Obama: after about an hour, a serious policy issue came up for discussion. Apparently, the moderators thought they could sneak it in after an hour of "who loves America more?" and "at what age do you tell your children Santa is a lie?" and nobody would notice.

Even more bizarre than policy being debated at a policy debate, however, was Madame Clinton's prescription for the issue in question, namely Iran. She proposed NATO-like security assurances to our "allies" in the Middle East to thwart Iran's perennial aggression in the region. Which doesn't exist. But, one thing at a time.

Firstly, the idea of NATO, in which the United States cedes its sovereignty by promising to go to war on behalf of any one of a number of countries who finds itself attacked by a third party, has obvious constitutional and strategic flaws. NATO, as enacted in 1949 was the first permanent military alliance in the history of our country.

It could be argued that it made sense in the context of the Cold War desire to protect our most consistent European allies, but...how to put it?....Saudi Arabia ain't England. And, thankfully, Iran ain't the Soviet Union. But don't tell that to our leaders, who are more worried about who to blame for Iraq than trivialities such as history or common sense.

Madame Clinton's proposal is flawed on both ends. First, for the parties that she theorizes would be attacked by Iran. Saudi Arabia? Would Saudi Arabia come to our defense if we were attacked? Let's just say that a Saudi citizen commissioned fifteen other Saudi citizens to slaughter 3,000 American civilians? In such a scenario, would Saudi Arabia come to our defense and do all it could to uproot such an insidious network? Seems we already know the answer to that hypothetical, don't we?

Since our "moderate" Arab "allies" can not be expected to defend the United States in any real way, why is Madame Clinton pre-emtively signing off America's blood and treasure in the event that they get into trouble in their own neighborhood? Is the House of Saud worth dying for? I respectfully argue no.

And what of the Iranian "threat"? Iran has not attacked a neighboring nation since the birth of Thomas Jefferson. Quite a inconsistent appetite for aggression, no? Basically, Iran attacks foreign countries about 4 times per millennium. The United States is more of a 4 times per decade type of warrior, but that's neither here nor there.

The 20th century's four major Revolutions, Russian, Cuban, Chinese / Vietnamese, and Iranian, all met with swift and violent American intervention. These interventions involved varying degrees of overtness by the Americans. To destroy the Iranian Revolution, America employed Saddam Hussein who, to his credit, managed to destroy quite a bit, even if the original target still stands.

Despite Iran's utter lack of foreign aggression since men wore wigs, Madame Clinton proposes planning America's Middle East policy around the assumption that the true nature of the beast cannot be deduced by the last 250 years of Iranian history. Rather, it will be deduced by her. She, and others like her, just know that Shi'ite Persians aim to violently dominate the Sunni Arab world, and that only visionaries like her can stop them.

How will she deter Iran's designs? By lashing our nation more firmly to the decrepit mast of Arab tyranny and vowing to "obliterate" entire nations. Much has been made of the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad aims to "wipe the Zionist regime from the map." Not to defend this man, but his was a political threat.

He did not threaten to "obliterate Israel"; he threatened the "Zionist regime" in the same manner as every Muslim leader in the last sixty years. They do it for public consumption. Israel is to Ahmedinejad as Iran is to Bush. And Clinton. The source of all the nation's ills, the insidious orchestrators of invisible conspiracies.

Madam Clinton, however, brooks no such ambiguity. She pointed out that the United States "could obliterate Iran." Obama is held to be naive for offering to talk to the Iranians. Madame Clinton refuses to talk to the Iranian president, but obliterating a nation of 70 million people? That's on the table.

How civilized. A woman's touch, perhaps. If threatening to talk makes Obama naive, what does threatening genocide make Clinton? Other than some Hindu god, whose job description reads "the destroyer of worlds"?

I have the sneaking suspicion that Hillary would feel an undue and dangerous desire to "prove" her toughness as prospective commander in chief. She has taken certain steps, such as voting to authorize a war of aggression that has thus far killed and displaced several million people. That wasn't tough enough, apparently; we've now moved to publicly threatening an entire nation with "obliteration".

This astonishingly amoral posture, especially when exuded by a woman, a mother, should frankly scare the shit out of us all. But all it really is is the logical extension of her style of politics: what can not be understood, controlled, or co-opted, must be destroyed.