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 JANUARY 11 WOMEN’S MIDWINTER RETREAT 1:30 - 5 pm - Presented by: The Center Within Sisters of Charity Motherhouse, Mt. St. Joseph, situated on the hillside overlooking the Ohio River, offers us the beauty of winter. Winter is a time when the tree roots are growing in quiet hibernation, encouraging us as well to take time for prayer and inner reflection on the goodness and beauty of life within us. Come, join the circle of women on the journey of life during this midwinter season. We will together create sacred space, which includes: Song and Guided Prayer/ Reflection - Quiet Reflective time for Listening Within - Sharing our Stories (if you wish) - Celebrating our Lives Together in Ritual Led by: Kathleen Hartman Blackburn, Donna Steffen, SC, Mary Ann Humbert Held at: Rose Room at Sisters of Charity Motherhouse, 5900 Delhi Road, Mt. St. Joseph, OH 45051 - From River Road (50 West), turn Right onto Fairbanks, which becomes Delhi. Stay on Delhi until it deadends at the entrance to the Sisters of Charity Motherhouse. A parking lot is found just past the buildings. Use main entrance! Fee: $25. ($30. after Jan.3 (Mail Registration Below. Keep time, info, and directions. ) Checks/ Registration to: The Center Within, PO Box 6027, Cincinnati, OH 45206 Information: 513-751-3358, 513-681-8881, , http://www.TheCenterWithin.org |
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Monday, February 25, 2008
Bush v. Clinton: Taking a closer look at Clinton’s foreign policy
Posted by Justin Jeffre
As Kosovo declares its independence, this debate between two journalists that have closely followed the situation in the Balkans gives some perspective about U.S. actions in the Balkans, the independence of Kosovo, the Iraq sanctions and humanitarian intervention. According to Jeremy Scahill, it was Bill Clinton who initiated the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against Iraq under the guise of humanitarian intervention in the north and south of that country with the sanctions killing hundreds of thousands of people. He asks, “where is the label of genocide for the US policy toward Iraq?”
“I mean, we have had one of the greatest mass slaughters in history, in modern history, in Iraq, going from 1990 to the present, and yet everyone talks about this as though it’s not genocide, as though it’s not part of that bigger picture. Clinton selling weapons to the Turks to slaughter the Kurds—I mean, there were all sorts of horrific things happening in the world. And it’s the selectivity of US foreign policy that I think is really outrageous. It’s not that no one should do anything about it; it’s that the Iraqis—it’s sort of, you know, good victims, bad victims.”
Scahill points out the Irony of the Bush administration talking about international law and how international law needs to be upheld for the protection of the US embassy. He says, “this is an administration that refuses to support any kind of an effective and independent international criminal court, preferring to support these sort of ad hoc tribunals, which have been used against Yugoslavia and certainly with Rwanda.”
Here’s an excerpt from the debate.
In the case of Hillary Clinton, what’s particularly interesting is that she and her advisers, which include many of the key figures involved with the original bombing of Yugoslavia and, in fact, the architects of much of US policy in the 1990s toward Yugoslavia, people like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, that Clinton holds this up as a sort of successful US foreign policy or international action.
And I think it’s important to remember that this declaration of independence from Kosovo was immediately supported by the Bush administration and many powerful countries in the world. I was recalling during the 2000 elections in the United States, being in Serbia and people joking that the worst thing that could happen to us is that Al Gore would be president, because then we’ll have the Democrats continuing to focus on us, and if Bush is president, he’ll ignore us. And, well, of course, Bush immediately recognized Kosovo, and that sort of seals the deal, in a sense.
But it’s important to remember how we got to this point. I mean, Samantha was talking a little bit about the broader context here. The fact is that this was sort of Clinton’s Iraq, in a way. He bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days with no United Nations mandate. I was at the UN the night that it began, and Kofi Annan was sort of beside himself that the action had been taken so swiftly, this military action, seventy-eight days of bombing of Yugoslavia under the auspices of NATO.
Wesley Clark was the commander of those operations, the Supreme Allied Commander. They bombed a Serbian television station, killing sixteen media workers; some of them were media workers, some of them were makeup artists, others were engineers. They directly targeted passenger trains and then fabricated a video afterwards to make it seem as though it was a split-second decision. They killed thousands of civilians.
And the fact was that the exaggerations of what was happening in Kosovo by William Cohen, the Defense Secretary at the time, who talked about a million missing people—then it was scaled back to 100,000, then 50,000, then 10,000, and now the official number is that there were 2,700 people that were killed, and there’s been no determination of their ethnicity. Now, I can tell you from being on the ground in Kosovo that some of the worst violence that occurred, slaughtering of Albanians, happened after the NATO bombing began. And the fact was that the US sabotaged the work of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the weeks leading up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
According to Scahill, we have to understand that this is where the sort of “liberals”, like Hillary Clinton, come together with the neocons, because there are a lot of similarities between what happened in Yugoslavia and what happened in Iraq, with the lead-up to the war, the disregard for international law or international consensus, and then the outright killing of civilians under the auspices of a humanitarian intervention.
Jeremy Scahill is an independent journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent. He covered the NATO bombings of Kosovo and Yugoslavia for Democracy Now! in 1999. Samantha Power wrote extensively about Bosnia and Kosovo in her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize.
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26 Feb 2008 at 04:43 pm | #
As much as I would like to see a progressive female in the White House, and I would; I still have serious doubts about Hillary Clinton. First because she is the wife of Bill Clinton, who gave us NAFTA and the so called, “Welfare Reform” bill; and secondly, because she is in no hurry to bring our sons and daughters home from Iraq. She also is in favor of forcing everybody to buy health insurance even though there are millions of Americans who are not working and do not have the money to pay for it. I also believe she has sold out to the corporate neocons. Vera Z
07 Mar 2008 at 03:12 pm | #
Let me clear that up for you Vera; She is Neo-con.
Remember the spector of the Russian tanks firing on the Russian Parliament?
What was it that Bill told us about that? Oh yes, he told us that Yeltsin was having to “take extrordinary measures” to ensure the smooth transition to democracy, while handing this drunken fool a check for 2.1 billion of our dollars to accomplish this with.
The reality was that the tanks were firing on the duly and democratically elected members of Parliament who had just impeached Yeltsin as the Russian Supreme Court had found Yeltsin’s actions in giving away the state assets of Russia to ex-partymembers and the multinationals in criminal violation of the new Russian Constitution.
You have to remember that Bill was a Rhodes Scholar, as in Cecil Rhodes, the man who created what would eventually be the CFR. Hillary was right there with Bill, right thruogh the Arkansas-cide days right through all the support for and furtherance of the Neo-con agendas of his administration. There is no respect for the rule of law there, there is no respect for the Constitutional limits of government, there is no respect for the authority of Congress there and make no mistake about it, there will be no change in our foriegn policy ( and the resultant disapproval of that policy that will be evidenced in terrorist activities against the US and the resulting further diminuation of our rights)or in the voo-doo economics we have been subjected to since the Reagan days.
It is irrelavant which democrat is elected, nothing is going to change.
In the near future, as we are standing there in the super-market check-out lane waiting to spend our Amero’s (those of us who have any and who’s dissident attitudes haven’t resulted in having our Chip turned off), reading the latest headlines from any number of Rupert Murdoch’s non-newspapers about the latest terrorist fabrications or about how the corporations need more of our money (err, excuse me the Federal Reserve lowering or raising the interest rate)will we remember that in 2008 we had a chance and we blew it?