HELEN KENNEDY
NY Daily News
Sunday October 07, 2007
This article from the UK Times is worth a read. Here are the most significant (read: scary) parts:
BUSH administration officials are paving the way for a smooth transition to a possible Democratic presidency as Hillary Clinton consolidates her position as the overwhelming favourite to win her party’s nomination for the 2008 election.
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In the clearest sign of a shift in gear, [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates is to appoint John Hamre, a former official in President Bill Clinton’s administration, to chair the Defense Policy Board once led by Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative advocate of the invasion of Iraq. The board’s job will be to prepare for the transition to a new administration in 2008, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
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Hamre, who was Bill Clinton’s deputy defence secretary in the 1990s, has been highly critical of the conduct of the war on terror. In The Washington Post last year he wrote: “The policies that led to Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, secret renditions and warrantless wiretaps have undermined America’s towering moral authority.”
n common with Gates, Hamre is sceptical about the value of the Iraq troop surge.
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However, Hamre, who heads the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, also argued that America “will be hurt if we crawl out or run out of Iraq." He believes the next president should maintain a vital but scaled-down presence in the country in order to oversee the training of Iraqi security forces and to “direct operations against known bad guys”.
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Clinton has been sidestepping calls to pull US troops out of Iraq if she wins, sticking to a broader promise to begin a phased withdrawal. In a recent television interview, the New York senator refused to state that all US combat troops would leave Iraq by the end of her first term in office. She voted in the Senate last month to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation.
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[Richard "Prince of Darkness"] Perle believes that Clinton might be prepared to order military strikes against Iran if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes Tehran’s nuclear programme to the brink. "If President Clinton is informed in March 2009 that we’ve got ironclad intelligence that if we don’t act within the next 30 days it’s going to be too late, I wouldn’t begin to predict what she would do,” Perle said. “Nobody wants to act before it is absolutely essential . . . but things can change very quickly.”
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Bush believes Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and has privately advised her not to voice antiwar rhetoric on Iraq that she may come to regret.
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The Treasury, under Henry “Hank” Paulson, has also been appointing Democrat supporters to senior positions. Robert Novak, the conservative columnist, reported that Paulson last week named Eric Mindich, a leading Democratic fundraiser, for a key role as an adviser on financial markets. One Republican in the Bush administration wrote disapprovingly in an e-mail: “This leads some to wonder whether this Treasury has become the preplaced Hillary Clinton team.”
Got that? It seems like even the Bush people are resigned to the fact that we will probably have a Hillary Clinton presidency on our hands come 1/20/09. But the scary part is they don't really seem too worried about it.
Even Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle thinks it's likely that Hillary would bomb Iran given the chance. Of course, after he predicted Iraq would be a great success, we may want to stop twice before we crown him Nostradamus, but the fact that he's putting this idea out there should certainly give even the most ardent Hillary supporters pause.
Shouldn't her supporters be at least slightly worried by the fact that even Bush's most loyal henchmen don't really seem to give two shits if she becomes president? Shouldn't we be aiming to elect a Democratic president who will give the Bush people nightmares? Someone who would roll back every single one of their disastrous policies?
Why are Democrats still so fond of Hillary? Are they just not paying attention to this stuff? Her full blown hawkishness on the war, her defense of lobbyists, her multiple corporate ties, her vote to declare the Iranian National Guard "terrorists," her recently discovered link to Blackwater?
What is it with you Hillary supporters?
4 more years! 4 more year--I mean, Time for a Change! Time for a Change!
