Jeffrey St Clair on Hillary Clinton and the other mainstream candidates

BASED ON the Clinton presidency, do Sen. Clinton or the other mainstream candidates represent a genuine alternative foreign policy?

ST. CLAIR: I THINK that they want a more competent management of the empire. In other words, they're imperialists.

Will they have a different approach? Yes. I think they can go back to finding intermediaries for imperial management, rather than committing U.S. troops--a lot of bombing campaigns, and then have NATO or the UN be the face of imperial management on the ground. That would be the major change, and that's right back to Clinton Time.

And it was very successful for them. What is the percentage of people in this country who understand that Iraq was being starved to death for the eight years of the Clinton presidency, or that it was being bombed once every three days? People don't know. Their war on Serbia was conducted essentially the same way. It was an air war. They weren't going to commit ground troops, even when it might have prevented ethnic slaughters on the ground in Kosovo.

So pull out, and put in UN and NATO troops instead--that's going to be their strategy. Really, in a lot of ways, that was the strategy of the Reagan years, too. You create your contra armies, you fund the mujahadeen, you have them do the dirty work for you, and you try and minimize the blowback.

From CounterPunch.