No one would ever accuse liberals of being consistent or of lacking in hypocrisy. One of the best examples of their duplicity and two-facedness, of course, is with respect to their support for the horrific mistreatment of illegal immigrants through immigration controls, even while they tell everyone how much they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged with their support of the welfare state.
But even their decades-long abuse of illegal immigrants doesn’t come close to matching their most recent hypocrisy over Donald Trump’s abuse of women. Liberals are shocked — shocked! — over Trump’s supposed sexual assaults on women and his braggadocio about his sexual exploits with women. Liberals and the mainstream press are voting for Hillary Clinton because, they say, no man who mistreats women in that way is qualified to be president of the United States.
Well, except for one big thing that seems to escape the liberal eye, including all those mainstream press pundits who, week after week, publish their editorials and op-eds denouncing Trump for his abuse of women.
What is that one big thing? All the women that Clinton has abused in the Middle East with the undeclared wars of aggression that she, President Obama, President Bush, and other liberals and conservatives have waged in the Middle East for the past 25 years.
Yes, there is no doubt about it — sex abuse and demeaning treatment of women (and anyone) is a bad thing. But so is killing women. In fact, one might even argue that killing women is worse than groping them without their consent.
Of course, it’s impossible to know how many women have been killed by the U.S. government in the Middle East since the end of the First Cold War in 1989. As a matter of policy, the Pentagon and the CIA decided early on not to keep track of the number of people, including civilians, they killed with their interventions and wars of aggression in that part of the world. It just didn’t matter. All that mattered was the number of U.S. troops killed. Thus, it’s impossible to know exactly how many women have been killed by U.S. forces in the Middle East during the past 25 years, but it has to be substantial.
According to Paul Walker, director of the Institute for Peace and International Security, U.S. Air Force Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak estimated that during the Gulf War in 1990-1991, 85,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq. At 59,000 tons a month, that was more than the 34,000 tons per month that the Pentagon dropped on the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.
One of those bombs hit the Amiriyah bomb shelter in Bagdad, where hundreds of civilians were taking cover. More than 400 people were killed. How many were women? I’m not sure but it has to be considerable. One woman lost 8 children in the bombing, which, it would seem, would constitute a special form of abuse.
Of course, U.S. interventionists, including liberals, would argue that war is hell and that mistakes are made in the heat of battle. Except for one thing: The Gulf War was none of the U.S. government’s business. And it initiated its massive bombing campaign without the congressional declaration of war mandated by the U.S. Constitution, which made the killing of those people in that shelter and the rest of Iraq illegal under our form of constitutional government.
Has Hillary Clinton ever denounced U.S. interventionism in the Persian Gulf War? Are you kidding? She continues to be one of the most committed interventionists on the planet, so long as it is the U.S. national-security state that is doing the intervening. When it’s Russia doing the intervening, as in Syria, she goes ballistic and even intends to prohibit Russia from flying its planes over Syria once she is elected president. I wonder how many women would die in a U.S. war with Russia, including those thousands of young American women who would be drafted to fight in such a war.
Don’t forget the brutal sanctions that the U.S. government imposed on the Iraqi people after the Gulf War in the hopes of squeezing Iraqis into ousting their ruler Saddam Hussein from power. It contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that was not only an abuse of those children, it was also an abuse of the mothers who had to bury them.
Has Hillary Clinton ever denounced those sanctions, which her husband brutally enforced for the entire eight years of his presidency? Are you kidding? During her presidential campaign, Clinton has proudly embraced her husband’s UN Ambassador, Madeleine Albright, who infamously declared that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the U.S. sanctions were “worth it.”
Then came George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, an undeclared war of aggression based on bogus WMD claims, a war that Hillary Clinton proudly supported and endorsed. Oh sure, today she acknowledges it was a “mistake,” but has she ever expressed any genuine remorse for the thousands of Iraqis, including women, killed in that war? Has she ever personally apologized to the Iraqi people for supporting an illegal invasion against people who never attacked the United States? Has she ever acknowledged that the war was illegal under our form of constitutional government? Has she ever even intimated that interventionism is morally wrong and reprehensible?
Are you kidding? Even while prudentially calling her support of the U.S. war on Iraq a “mistake,” she has always been one of those who have thanked the troops for their service in Iraq. Even worse, she (and Obama) proceeded to double down with interventionism with a violent U.S.-led regime change in operation in Libya, a country that has now been thrown into a vicious civil war that continues to kill countless people. How many women have died as a result of Clinton’s regime-change operation in Libya? Again, we don’t know the precise number but it has to be substantial. All we know is that Clinton exclaimed in the finest Roman Empire tradition after her regime-change operation resulted in the horrific murder of Libya’s ruler, “We came, we saw, he died.”
And look at Syria, another U.S. regime-change operation that Clinton supports, one in which countless women have been killed, either directly or in the process of escaping the massive violence unleashed by U.S. bombs and missiles. Is Clinton acknowledging that that regime-change attempt was a “mistake,” as she has done with the U.S. undeclared war of aggression on Iraq? Are you kidding? She’s in favor of dropping whatever amount of bombs will be necessary to finally oust Assad from power in Syria. As Albright would perhaps put it, whatever death toll comes from U.S. bombs in Syria will definitely be “worth it.”
Notice that the liberal community (with the exception of a few of them), the presidential debate moderators, and the mainstream press, while expressing unrestrained outrage over Trump’s misconduct, have expressed no outrage or indignation whatsoever over the fact that Clinton is unequivocally committed to continuing the U.S. killing of people in the Middle East, including women.
Let’s also not forge the U.S. war on Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of innocent people, including women, have been killed by the U.S. invasion and 13-year-long invasion of that country. That includes the several wedding parties (at least eight) that have been bombed by U.S. forces. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, wedding parties usually include brides, bridesmaids, and mothers and aunts of the bride and groom. Clinton continues to support that intervention as well, a position that is met with silence by liberals and the mainstream press.
Liberals and Clinton’s mainstream press supporters might respond, “We don’t have a real choice. We can’t vote for Trump because he’s a man who abuses and mistreats women.”
Okay, fair enough. But that doesn’t mean that they have to remain silent about Clinton’s plans to continue the 25-year-old intervention in the Middle East and the 13-year-long intervention in Afghanistan. The fact is that ISIS is not coming to get us. The Taliban is not coming to get us. The Muslims are not coming to get us. And the only reason the terrorists are striking Americans is because Obama, Bush, Clinton, Trump, and others of the interventionist ilk continue to kill people over there.
There is no reason why the left and the mainstream press can’t demand that Hillary Clinton bring all U.S. troops home immediately even if they choose to vote for her. Their silence in the face of Clinton’s massive abuse of women in the Middle East is either because they think the killing of women over there is no big deal or because their obsession with defeating Trump is blinding them to their own hypocrisy and two-facedness.