Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s self-promoting and amateurish review of Henry Kissinger’s “World Order” in the Sept. 7 Outlook section of The Washington Post brings to mind philosopher Samuel Johnson’s quip that “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Mrs. Clinton sermonizes about “the indispensability of continued American [world] leadership in service of a just and liberal order.” She blithely asserts, “There really is no viable alternative.”
But Mrs. Clinton’s dreadful performance as secretary of state discredits her own sermon. She championed an unconstitutional, criminal presidential war of aggression against Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. The war predictably culminated in murderous chaos throughout Libya in service of an unjust and oppressive order. Gaddafi was murdered by rebels who received assistance from the United States triggered by Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy. Libya quickly splintered into hundreds of ethnic or tribal militias armed with weapons stolen from Gaddafi’s arsenal. Libya’s degeneration into a state of nature predictably created the dynamic which eventuated in the murder of our Libyan ambassador and the evacuation of our embassy personnel.
Mrs. Clinton should not have been surprised at the calamitous results of her handiwork. She was first lady when an indistinguishable descent into hell occurred in Somalia after multiple rebel groups ousted dictator Siad Barre. During the presidency of her husband in 1993, American military intervention to kill warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid occasioned the shooting down of two Black Hawk helicopters and the deaths of 18 American soldiers.
Mrs. Clinton’s war to overthrow Gaddafi was additionally obtuse because it was initiated after he had abandoned his weapons of mass destruction and was seeking to normalize his relations with the United States. Her war sent a message to Iran and North Korea to retain their nuclear weapons as a safeguard against a U.S. invasion, and to all other non-nuclear nations to acquire nuclear arsenals to forestall a U.S. invasion. In so doing, she probably did more to undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and make the world a more dangerous place than any other person on the planet.
Having learned nothing from her destruction of Libya and moral complicity in the countless deaths that followed, Mrs. Clinton audaciously clamored for a second edition in Syria to be engineered by United States military intervention and the overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Even Gen. George Custer had the decency to refrain from asking for a promotion after the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
Mrs. Clinton pressed the reset button for relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin. She got the Russian annexation of Crimea, a Russian war against the remainder of Ukraine and a more repressive Mr. Putin.
In sum, Mrs. Clinton was singularly inept as secretary of state in making for a safer, gentler universe.
Just as the divine right of kings was concocted by kings to justify their own absolutism, Mrs. Clinton, in her review of Mr. Kissinger’s book, has manufactured a moral imperative of the United States to exercise world leadership to justify empire and global domination. The Founding Fathers would be horrified. In contrast to the French Revolution, the American Revolution resisted exportation of the U.S. Constitution and democracy abroad except by example. They understood, as Mrs. Clinton does not, that far better for the cause of liberty and a republican form of government that we keep the lamp burning here than to hazard their utter extinction in objectless, quixotic foreign wars or interventions which invariably concentrate power in the executive, subordinate transparency to secrecy, and cripple due process and the right to be let alone.
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