Trump the Man for Peace

Former CIA director Leon Panetta’s speech Wednesday night was actually drowned out by the thunderous sound of the Democratic grassroots supporters chanting “no more war.” The scene was repeated Thursday night when Ret. Marine Gen. John Allen’s speech was met with similar grassroots enthusiasm for peace.

But Democrats who wish desperately to see “no more war” would do well not to vote for Hillary Clinton, who is apparently desperate to see only “more war.” The same goes for war-weary Americans eager to see new investments of time and capital made in their own crumbling country.

Clinton has shown a willingness to acquiesce to the demands of her sponsors among the globalist Establishment … no reason to assume she would suddenly refuse them.

A poll taken by Rasmussen earlier in 2016 revealed just 34 percent of Americans would consider sending ground troops to combat ISIS, the lowest number of Americans favoring U.S. boots on the ground since August of 2014.

Clinton has a proven track recorded as a hawk. “Clinton’s foreign policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls ‘a textbook view of American exceptionalism,'” The New York Times reported in April.

That view “will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election,” The Times noted. “For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.”

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Hillary Clinton was vocally supportive of her husband’s many foreign excursions, from Bosnia to Somalia. As a senator she voted for the Iraq war. She supported Bush’s bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, and also voted in favor of the PATRIOT Act.

While serving as secretary of state, Clinton was clearly one of the most hawkish voices in the Obama administration. She eagerly supported arming and training Syrian rebels, and was a central architect of America’s disastrous engagement in Libya.

Since leaving her role in the State Department, she has indicated that the number of SpecOps troops Obama has approved for Syria may not be enough and has urged the few American troops left in Iraq as advisers be given greater “flexibility” to engage the enemy.

Having this war-hungry woman in the White House would be dangerous enough for the prospects of peace — but if elected, she will be handed a U.S. presence in Afghanistan ripe for escalation, as well as increasingly fraught tensions with Russia.

Indeed, it was in large part Clinton’s hawkishness that led to Julian Assange’s decision to go public with the Clinton documents on WikiLeaks. “She has a long history of being a liberal war hawk, and we presume she is going to proceed,” Assange said after telling an ITV journalist in June that he had the emails and would eventually release them.

For his part, President Obama is apparently so desperate to see Clinton in the White House that he is considering a bit of war-making himself. U.S. army officers stationed in Baghdad have reportedly expressed concerns that the Obama administration is orchestrating a premature — and dangerous — offensive in Mosul purely to shore up the party’s anti-terror image in time for November.

“There is tremendous concern that Washington is going to press for a Mosul operation to commence before the November election,” Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Barbero told The Washington Times on Sunday. “The concern is, will the conditions be set on the ground by then? And I don’t think so.”

Indeed, for someone who campaigned on a promise of peace, President Obama has been remarkably open to the use of force, even if he doesn’t favor the mass mobilization of the armed forces that characterized Bush’s Middle East adventurism.

“The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the military to the intelligence agencies,” said says Vali Nasr, a foreign policy strategist who advised Clinton on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department.

“Their position was, ‘All you need to deal with terrorism is NSA and CIA, drones and special ops.’ So the CIA gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously hawkish and shun using the military,” Nasr said.

The Obama administration has also continued the American tradition of rattling sabers in Russia’s direction. Indeed, after nearly eight years of Obama, the United States now stands closer to war with Russia than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Thanks to Obama, the country is set for a 30-year, $1 trillion upgrade of America’s nuclear capabilities. This represents the single biggest spending increase on nuclear weapons in our country’s history, including any time during the Cold War.

In May, the U.S. and Poland began constructing the new Aegis Ashore Missile Defense System, a landed version of the anti-ballistic defense system used on U.S. Navy destroyers. The system, which will be operational by 2018, will be the second system in Eastern Europe.

There are more foreign troops stationed along Russia’s western border now than any time since the Second World War. The U.S. specifically has significant numbers of troops and heavy military equipment in Poland and the Baltic states.

In June, the U.S. participated in a 10-day NATO military exercise in Poland which involved over 30,000 soldiers from 24 nations. In July, Obama announced he would send an extra 1,000 U.S. soldiers to Poland as part of a NATO initiative to increase forces in the country by 4,000 troops.

All of this is ostensibly to counter increasing Russian aggression against Eastern Europe. But this so-called aggression came only after the U.S. turned Ukraine into a carnival of clandestine activity, and an unholy alliance of Western intelligence services, NGOs, and Ukrainian neo-fascists overthrew the democratically elected, pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych.

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This will likely only continue. Clinton has shown a willingness to acquiesce to the demands of her sponsors among the globalist Establishment when it comes to free trade deals and immigration policy. There is no reason to assume she would suddenly refuse them when it comes to a lucrative escalation of tensions with Russia.

Indeed, the hysteria emanating from the Democrats regarding Russia’s involvement in the Democratic National Committee hack proves they have no problem in casting Russia has the great global big bad wolf — no matter how much they ridiculed Mitt Romney for doing the same in 2012.

“I’m proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia,” Clinton said during her nomination acceptance speech on Thursday night.

The Democrats see only the lobbyists from massive defense contractors eager to see the red flag of belligerence waving, rather than the Russia that shares U.S. interests in dismantling and destroying global terror networks and the same Russia that relies on an open energy market in Western Europe.

While Trump has criticized traditional hawkish and interventionist foreign policy, a Clinton presidency will clearly bring continued conflict in the Middle East — it could even lead to a major conflict with Russia. “Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign policy Establishment,” Nasr said. The traditional American foreign policy Establishment very much wants war.