Psyche, Science, and Society

Boston Globe takes on Hillary Clinton, Obliterator-in-Chief

April 27th, 2008

One of the most ridiculous and yet terrifying statements yet during this campaign came this week from Hillary Clinton, who has given up her race for the President and has announced a campaign for Obliterator-in-Chief. She told ABC News that, in response to being asked her response if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran…. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
[See complete editorial below.]

Thus, Clinton has announced her willingness, if elected, to incinerate 60 million innocents. Such a staetment makes her defeat a necessity for anyone concerned with human decency.

The Boston Globe has responded appropriately in an editorial to that campaign. To cut to the chase, the Globe states, echoing my horrified reaction:

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.

Remember that during the rest of the campaign.

Sandy Levinson at Balkinization also has two excellent posts on Clinton’s disgusting comments: As we prepare to elect our next constitutional dictator and Torture and “obliteration”.

In the first, Levinson points out:

This is the statement of someone running for constitutional dictatorship, not for a “republican form of government” presidency who might have said, for example, “as President, I will certainly urge the Congress to declare war on Iran should Iran attack Israel”–though one might wonder exactly why, since the brutal truth is that an attack on Israel, however egregious, would not constitute a serious security threat to the United States (which is why Israel very wisely has constructed its own nuclear deterrent instead of relying on the US and the vagaries of American domestic politics)–”though I recognize that that decision is ultimately for Congress to make.”

In the second post Levinson relates our insistence that candidates renounce torture with our ability to accept their willingness to support obliterating millions:

There is a widespread consensus, shared, at least rhetorically, by the Bush Administration itself, that “torture” is forbidden and indefensible. That is precisely why so much of the debate concerns what, precisely, counts as torture. (For the record, let me state that I regard waterboarding, as well as extended sleep deprivation and much else, as torture.) But, of course, there is also the additional debate, sparked by the Yoo memorandum, as to whether the President, under extreme conditions, has the authority to order torture.

But why isn’t there more debate, not only among academics but among the general public, about a) the morality of any military strategy that depends on “obliterating” millions of innocent people simply because they have the bad luck to be living in a country run by terrible leaders and b) the propriety of a view of presidential power that makes it possible for an ostensibly serious candidate for our nation’s highest office so casually to threaten such obliteration should another country engage in behavior that, though no immediate threat to American security, we deem sufficiently awful? As awful as torture is, it really isn’t the most awful thing that regularly occurs in the world, starting with “collateral damage” to innocent civilians as the result of “justified” military attacks, and going onward to the “destruction” that is at the basis of nuclear deterrence strategy (under the rubric “Mutually Assured Destruction”).

Here is the complete Globe editorial:

Hillary Strangelove

AMERICANS have learned to take with a grain of salt much of the rhetoric in a campaign like the current Democratic donnybrook between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Still, there are some red lines that should never be crossed. Clinton did so Tuesday morning, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, when she told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that, if she were president, she would “totally obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel.

This foolish and dangerous threat was muted in domestic media coverage. But it reverberated in headlines around the world.

Responding with understatement to a question in the British House of Lords, the foreign minister responsible for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, said of Clinton’s implication of a mushroom cloud over Iran: “While it is reasonable to warn Iran of the consequences of it continuing to develop nuclear weapons and what those real consequences bring to its security, it is probably not prudent in today’s world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country.”

A less restrained reaction came from an editorial in the Saudi-based paper Arab News. Being neighbors of Iran, the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs have the most to fear from Iran’s nuclear program and its drive to become the dominant power in the Gulf.

But precisely because they are most at risk from Iran’s regional ambitions, the Saudis want a carefully considered American approach to Iran, one that balances firmness and diplomatic engagement.

The Saudi paper called Clinton’s nuclear threat “the foreign politics of the madhouse,” saying, “it demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush’s foreign relations.”

The Saudis are not always sound advisers on American foreign policy. But they understand that Rambo rhetoric like Clinton’s only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.

While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.

Entry Filed under: Electoral Politics, Iran, Politics, Torture, Uncategorized, War and Peace