by Dick Morris
Hillary went down the line supporting the war in Iraq and also voted for the Patriot Act and most of the appropriations to fund the war. She now says it was a mistake. In her 2014 book, Hard Choices, Hillary apologized. “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong,”21 she wrote. “Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn’t have been a vote. I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way.”22 When the Iraq War bogged down in 2007, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) pushed for a “surge” in American forces to drive back the dissidents and establish control over the country. President Bush adopted the idea, but the Left fiercely opposed it. Supporters of the surge were surprised to see Clinton vote against it, in view of her earlier support for the war. But observers came to understand her switch in positions after Bush’s and Obama’s Defense Secretary Bill Gates quoted in his book a conversation between Hillary and Obama in the Oval Office shortly after she became secretary of state.
Gates wrote: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”23 Once in office as secretary of state, she reverted to a warlike attitude as she aggressively pushed for US intervention in Libya and in Syria, involving us in one war and seeking to ensnare us in another. Hillary was determined to go to war over Libya. She fantasized that genocide was unfolding in the streets of Tripoli, with no evidence, and hyped demands for US intervention. Everyone agreed that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was a monster. He ordered the bombing of a night club frequented by US troops in Berlin and orchestrated the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in 1988.
Responding to the Berlin bombing, President Reagan ordered a devastating air strike against Gaddafi, killing his son. Chastened, the dictator began to pull in his horns and, when Saddam Hussein was toppled in Iraq by US forces, he saw the handwriting on the wall and gave up his ambitions to build weapons of mass destruction (WMD). He had been minding his manners ever since. But Hillary, fed by almost daily e-mails from her close aide Sydney Blumenthal warning about slaughter in the streets of Libya, was determined to have the United States intervene and depose Gaddafi. Blumenthal’s interests in hyping the situation may have been financial. The New Republic reported that Blumenthal was pushing for armed intervention while he was “both employed by the Clinton Foundation and advising businessmen angling for contracts from the country’s transitional government.”24
On Hillary’s part, she was worried about the political implications of ignoring genocide as she and Bill had done in Rwanda during the mass slaughter/genocide there in 1994. Widely criticized for their inactivity in the face of the death of millions, she was loath to risk being criticized for inaction again. Samantha Power, who served on the National Security staff as Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, had studied Rwanda and was obsessed with the possibility of another genocide. She warned Hillary that a human tragedy might be unfolding. When Hillary told the Joint Chiefs of Staff of her concern over events on the ground in Libya, they dispatched their own intelligence officer to check things out and he reported that there was no genocide in progress.
Nor did Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) dedicated to battling genocide, find evidence suggesting an impending slaughter by the time NATO intervened: “Our assessment was that up until that point, the casualty figures—around 350 protesters killed by indiscriminate fire of government security forces—didn’t rise to the level of indicating that a genocide or genocide-like mass atrocities were imminent.”25
Nevertheless, Hillary pounded away at Obama and the national security staff to push for armed intervention in Libya to topple Gaddafi. In March of 2011, she told an interviewer, “Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled. . . . The cries would be, ‘Why did the United States not do anything?’”26
Under unrelenting pressure from Hillary, Obama agreed to participate in the NATO no-fly zone over Libya that led to Gaddafi’s killing. The Washington Post called it “Hillary’s War” and, after the dictator fell, the former secretary of state proudly paraphrased Julius Caesar, “We came, we saw, he died.”27 Is Julius Caesar to be the role model for the new president?
The fact is that the Libya invasion opened the door to Islamist terrorists, the very ones who killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. Many of the weapons we supplied to the rebels in Libya ended up in ISIS hands during the ensuing years. The Libya invasion may yet lead to another ISIS-controlled state, all because Hillary wouldn’t let well enough alone and insisted on sending in the cavalry.
Fortunately, Donald Trump is calling Hillary to task for her role in advocating intervention in Libya. In an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, he said: “If you look at Libya, look at what we did there—it’s a mess—if you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look at what we did there—it’s a mess—it’s going to be the same thing.”
When Todd asked if the Middle East would be better if Gaddafi and Saddam were still in power, Trump answered “It’s not even a contest, Chuck. It’s not even a contest. Of course it would be [better]. You wouldn’t have had your Benghazi situation which is one thing which was just a terrible situation. But, of course, nobody even knows what’s going on over there. It’s not even a country anymore.”28
In Syria, Hillary clamored for American arming of the rebels against dictator Bashar al-Assad, but the White House resisted. Like much of the Arab Spring, the rebellion in Syria began as an effort by democratic forces to topple a horrific dictator who had slaughtered his own people by the hundreds of thousands. But the rebellion was soon co-opted by the extremist Islamist forces that ultimately formed the core of ISIS. Hillary was intent on finding “moderates” to arm, hoping that they would serve as a counterweight both to al-Assad and to the Islamists.
In her memoir, Hard Choices, Hillary writes that “wicked problems rarely have a right answer; in fact, part of what makes them wicked is that every option appears worse than the next. Increasingly that’s how Syria appeared.” Returning from an overseas trip, Hillary recounts how she became convinced that arming and training the rebels might strengthen their hand against al-Assad: “The risks of both action and inaction were high, [but] the president [Obama]’s inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels. . . . No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the president’s call and I respected his deliberations and decision.”29 But eventually, Obama did decide to try to arm and train the Syrian “moderates” on a limited and secret basis. That proved to be a disastrous decision.
The International Business Times reported that “by the reckoning of experts and members of Congress from both parties, that strategy [of arming the moderates] appears in tatters. The moderates the United States bet on as the means of pressuring al-Assad have been routed by . . . ISIS.”30 The US-led strategy of airstrikes and arming Syrian moderates may have “actually hurt the moderate opposition,” reported Robert S. Ford, former Obama administration ambassador to Syria. He said US intervention had led to retaliation by ISIS “against the moderate rebels, who were largely unprepared to deal with such attacks and fled.”31
Leslie Gelb, an assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the moderates in Syria “are not a viable fighting force. They couldn’t win no matter how many arms we gave them. That has been the story war after war, I don’t know why we have to learn this one lesson administration after administration. We learned this in Iraq.”32 Indeed,
since many of the so-called moderates we armed in Syria ended up fighting for ISIS, we may well have armed our enemy by following Hillary’s recommendations. But the question lingers: Why is Hillary so hawkish, voting for wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria?
One theory is that she perceives it as a political need for a woman in politics to be a hawk. She may worry that people don’t trust a woman to be commander in chief, and that her strong defense record is a reassurance. She may also be casting herself, consciously, in the mold of Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, two highly successful wartime leaders of their countries. Or it could be an offshoot of her own personality. Everyone who knows Hillary describes her as combative, stubborn, and fixedly determined to defend her views. She values courage above all and places great store in standing up for herself. She constantly repeats her mother’s advice, given when she was four after a playmate hit her, to never back down. But in either case, one thing is most likely: if Hillary is elected, we will probably get into at least one war.
Donald Trump has understood from Day One that Hillary Clinton’s vote on the war in Iraq and her hawkish record is a big negative. We can count on him to remind the voters about it over and over again.
Donald Trump is under no compulsion to show his macho qualities by wading into wars. He has been reluctant to back a no-fly zone in Syria and is demonstrating a maturity in restraint in the use of force we know will be absent in Hillary Clinton.
Reason Four: Hillary and the Muslim Brotherhood Are Perfect Together
Hillary’s closest aide and current vice chairwoman of her 2016 campaign is Huma Abedin, who has strong connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Abedin, who Vanity Fair called “Hillary’s Second Daughter,”33 was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Pakistani and Indian immigrants and moved with her family to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she spent her entire childhood until she entered George Washington University in the United States.
Huma and Hillary are joined at the hip. They began their relationship in 1996 while Huma was serving as a White House intern assigned to Hillary. In Mrs. Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign and during her subsequent tenure, Huma was Hillary’s traveling chief of staff and body aide. But apart from Hillary, Huma Abedin and her family have a long history of involvement with Palestinian causes. In 1998, Huma served as assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Five Republican congressmen charged that Huma’s late father, and her mother and brother are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Her mother, Saleha, “is a sociologist known for her strong advocacy of Sharia Law,” according to FrontPage Magazine, and a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, the Brotherhood’s sibling. Saleha is also a board member of the International Islamic Council for Da’wah and Relief. This pro-Hamas entity is part of the Union of Good, which the US government has formally designated as an “international terrorist organization.”34 FrontPage Magazine notes that “from 1996–2008, Huma worked at the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs as the assistant editor of its in-house publication, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA).” For seven years of her tenure, she worked with “al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Omar Naseef” at the JMMA.35
Trump has excoriated Huma, focusing particularly on her marriage to former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner who was involved in a sexting scandal. The candidate said “so now, think of it, Huma is getting classified secrets. She is married to Anthony Weiner, who is a perv. Now these are confidential documents and guess what happens to Anthony Weiner. A month ago he went to work for a public relations firm.”36
Huma’s presence has been quite influential in Hillary’s and Obama’s treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization labeled as terrorist by most Middle Eastern countries. The Brotherhood is considered a terrorist organization by the governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Brotherhood’s stated goal is to instill the Qur’an and Sunnah as the “sole reference point for . . . ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community . . . and state.” Its mottos include, “Believers are but Brothers,” “Islam is the Solution,” and “Allah is our objective; the Qur’an is the Constitution; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”37
The National Review lists the ways since Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department began that “the United States has aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood. . . . Our government
• reversed the policy against formal contacts with the Brotherhood;
• funded Hamas;
• continued funding Egypt even after the Brotherhood won the elections;
• dropped an investigation of Brotherhood organizations in the United States that were previously identified as co-conspirators in the case of the Holy Land Foundation financing Hamas;
• hosted Brotherhood delegations in the United States;
• issued a visa to a member of the Islamic Group (a designated terrorist organization) and hosted him in Washington because he is part of the Brotherhood’s parliamentary coalition in Egypt;
• announced that Israel should go back to its indefensible 1967 borders;
• excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from a counterterrorism forum in which the State Department sought to ‘partner’ with Islamist governments that do not regard attacks on Israel as terrorism; and
• pressured Egypt’s pro-American military government to surrender power to the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood parliament and president just elected by Egypt’s predominantly anti-American population.”38
While Hillary was pushing Israel to stop building settlements on the West Bank and bought into Obama’s line that their failure to do so was torpedoing the peace process, she worked hard to help the Muslim Brotherhood take over in neighboring Egypt.
In Egypt, the so-called Arab Spring erupted early in 2012, fanned by pro-democracy protests in Tunisia. Demonstrators took to the streets of Cairo demanding the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose vicious but pro-Western regime had evoked howls of protest, forcibly put down for years.
The West was thrilled. Some alarmists worried that if Mubarak fell, the pro-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood might take over. But the Obama administration dismissed their concern and welcomed the end of Mubarak. As this former US ally struggled for traction in the streets, Hillary urged “a peaceful, orderly transition to a democratic regime” and called on Mubarak to respond to “the legitimate needs and grievances expressed by the Egyptian people and chart a new path.”39
After Mubarak fell, the hopes and dreams of the Egyptian people for democracy were again crushed as the Muslim Brotherhood and its leader, Islamist Mohamed Morsi, took power. Domestically, Morsi cracked down on the secular elements who had tried to oust Mubarak and moved to restore Sharia Law. He was particularly vicious in his persecution of Egypt’s Coptic Christians, the minority that comprises between a tenth and a quarter of Egypt’s population.
Shortly after Morsi took office, a wave of violence gripped the Coptic community and their leader accused Morsi’s government of “delinquency” and “misjudgments” for failing to prevent sectarian street-fighting. He noted that “this is the first time the main Coptic Orthodox Cathedral has been attacked in Egypt’s history.”40 In foreign affairs, Morsi steered a course of cooperation with the Palestinian terrorists and appeared to all but junk the 1979 Camp David accords that brought peace to the Egyptian-Israeli relationship.
But Hillary was Morsi’s biggest fan. On July 14, 2013, as millions of anti-Islamists demonstrated in Cairo against his regime, Hillary flew to see the embattled leader and lend him support. But the Egyptian Army, long a key force in their politics, wanted Morsi to go. As the threat of military intervention to unseat Morsi hovered over his presidency, Hillary declared that the United States “supports the full transition to civilian rule with all that entails.” She demanded “the military’s return to a purely national security role.”41
Breitbart News reported t
hat “the meeting itself sent a historic message. Seated in an ornate room in the presidential palace, Mrs. Clinton smiled for cameras and traded pleasantries with President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist jailed more than once by the American-backed autocracy overthrown 18 months ago. She became the highest ranking United States official to meet Mr. Morsi since he was sworn in.”42
Hillary’s visit cemented what Morsi’s wife called a “special relationship” between her husband and the secretary of state.43 Of Mrs. Clinton, she said, “We have a long friendship of many years. We lived in the U.S. and my children learned there. This friendship increased further when my husband became the legitimate president of the country.”44
Hillary’s backing for Morsi was very significant. The United States gives Egypt almost $3 billion of foreign aid each year, the bulk of it aimed at subsidizing the country’s military—a payoff given for their entry into the Camp David Accords which guaranteed peace between Egypt and Israel.
Huma Abedin was not the only hook the Muslim Brotherhood had into the secretary of state. She had another Islamic radical in her midst. As noted, Gehad el-Haddad, the son of Morsi’s foreign affairs advisor, served as the Muslim Brotherhood’s top English language communications official in Egypt. At the same time, he was employed by the Clinton Foundation, heading the Cairo office of the Clinton Climate Initiative. In April 2015, el-Haddad was sentenced to life in prison in Egypt for his work with the Muslim Brotherhood. With her top aide, Huma Abedin, an open sympathizer with the Muslim Brotherhood, and el-Haddad working for her foundation as he advised Egyptian president Morsi, we are right to ask Hillary, Which side are you on?
