Bill Clinton in Hopes and Prospects
On Foreign Policy:
OpEd: 1994: Installed Aristide in Haiti subject to US rules
By 1994 Aristide had been "civilized", and Clinton sent US forces to restore the elected president to a few more months in office. But on strict conditions: that he accept a harsh neoliberal regime, pretty much the program of the US-backed candidate he
had defeated handily in 1990 election. Aristide's efforts to disband the army, which had been the bitter enemy of Haitians since its institution, were barred. Haiti was also barred from providing any protection for the economy.There is nothing
surprising about what followed: a 1995 USAID report observed that the "export-driven trade and investment policy [that Washington mandated will] relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer," accelerating the flight to miserable slums that reached its
hideous denouement in the catastrophe caused by the January 2010 earthquake--a class-based catastrophe, like many others, striking primarily at the poor whose awful conditions of existence render them particularly vulnerable (the rich escaped lightly).
Source: Hopes and Prospects, by Noam Chomsky, p. 11-12
Jun 1, 2010
On Foreign Policy:
Pledged to Gorbachev to not extend NATO eastward
There is now justified concern about Russian reactions to US aggressive militarism. That includes the extension of NATO to the East by Clinton in violation of pledges to
Mikhail Gorbachev, but particularly the vast expansion of offensive military capacity under Bush, and more recently, the plans to place "missile defense" installations in Eastern Europe. Putin is ridiculed for claiming that they are a threat to Russia.
But US strategic analysts recognize that he has a point. The programs, they argue, are designed in a way that Russian planners would have to regard as a threat to the
Russian deterrent, hence calling for more advanced and lethal offensive military capacity to neutralize them. A new arms race is feared.
Source: Hopes and Prospects, by Noam Chomsky, p.136-137
Jun 1, 2010
On Homeland Security:
Clinton Doctrine: unilateral force for access to resources
Consider the first scholarly work on the roots of George W. Bush's preventive war doctrine, issued in September 2002 by the distinguished Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. The core principle of the Bush doctrine is that "expansion, we have assumed, is th
path to security." Gaddis traces this doctrine to the "lofty, idealistic tradition of John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson."The Clinton doctrine, presented to Congress, was that the United States is entitled to resort to "unilateral use of military
power" to ensure "uninhabited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources." Clinton too was echoing a familiar theme. In the early post-World War II years, the influential planner George Kennan explained that in Latin
America "the protection of our raw materials" must be a major concern--"our raw materials," which happen by accident to be somewhere else.
Source: Hopes and Prospects, by Noam Chomsky, p. 23-24
Jun 1, 2010
On War & Peace:
1994 North Korea Framework Agreement largely observed
In 1994. neither the US nor North Korea was fully in accord with its commitments, but the Framework Agreement was largely being observed. North Korea had stopped testing long-range missiles.
It had perhaps one or two bombs' worth of plutonium, and was verifiably not making more. After seven Bush years of confrontation, North Korea has 8 to 10 bombs and long-range missiles, and it is developing plutonium. The
Clinton administration had also worked out a plan to buy out, indirectly, the North's medium and long-range missiles; it was ready to be signed in 2000 but Bush let it fall by the wayside and today the North retains all its formidable missile capacity.
Source: Hopes and Prospects, by Noam Chomsky, p.138-139
Jun 1, 2010
Page last updated: Jul 19, 2011