A Clinton presidency

It is quite a certainty that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States of America. An America under the leadership of Hillary Clinton is perhaps scarier than an America led by Donald Trump.

Looking at Hillary’s past, it is clear that a Clinton presidency will be riddled by war, scandal, and corruption.

From her decision to support the war in Iraq in 2002 to her most recent push to arm Syrian rebels, most of whom eventually joined Daesh or other terrorist organisations, Clinton has proven herself to be a hawk, ready to take the US to war anywhere she wants.

In 2002, as a senator from New York, she voted in favour of military action in Iraq, stating that she believed in “coercive diplomacy”. She fought with President Barack Obama in 2008, wanting him to authorise more drone strikes, and military operations targeting Al-Qaeda groups operating inside Pakistan. In 2009, while a majority of policymakers recommended withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan, Hillary wanted to send an additional 33,000 soldiers.

In 2011, Hillary Clinton helped create space for terrorists in Libya by advocating regime change. Libya is a chaotic mess today, and Daesh controls much of the oil in the country, giving them access to billions of dollars in financial resources at their disposal.

Hillary also supported the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout inside Pakistan in 2011. And in 2012, she directly helped create Daesh, when she advocated arming Syrian rebel groups to fight against Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Hillary Clinton will be a president ready and willing to go to war from the day she takes over the Oval Office.

In 2009, Clinton voted to bail out the financial industry following the 2008 economic crisis. We now know that those she helped bail out of a crisis of their own making with American taxpayer money were the same people that paid her generously for making speeches at their company headquarters on Wall Street.

She has also supported the US-India civil-nuclear deal. This is an important international security issue that she compromised on in exchange for large financial contributions.

Hillary Clinton had been a proponent of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) for decades until 2005. She supported her husband achieve a great milestone in international nuclear non-proliferation diplomacy, when he successfully negotiated the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1998.

Later that year, when India conducted nuclear tests, she supported her husband’s decision to issue sanctions against the country until it signed the NPT and gave up its nuclear weapons, and was also in complete agreement with her husband when he said that India posed a great threat to international security and regional stability.

It all changed in 2005 when Amar Singh, an Indian member of parliament, known for having bribed politicians in the past, began donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and arranged for millions more to be paid to Bill Clinton for his speeches in India.

These donations resulted in a crusade, led by Hillary Clinton, to make sure that the sanctions following the 1998 tests were lifted, and that there was a civil-nuclear cooperation deal in place. Her lobbying efforts for India did not go unnoticed; many in Washington DC began to refer to her as the senator from Punjab (meaning Indian Punjab).

Another Indian man, named Sant Chatwal, a trustee of the Clinton Foundation, has also donated millions, and helped raise money for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He had also helped her raise money in 2000 for her Senate campaign. Spending all of this money on Hillary Clinton finally paid off; the sanctions on India were lifted, and a civil-nuclear cooperation deal was put in place.

Despite having delivered a speech at the UN, in which she said that she wanted a world without nuclear weapons, Hillary continues to support nuclear cooperation with India, a country that has an entire city dedicated to building thermonuclear bombs, and is actively proliferating.

It is important for all of us to know that Hillary Clinton, most likely America’s next president, is a corrupt war hawk. Let’s just hope we can survive her presidency.

The writer is an assistant professor at NUST in Islamabad. Twitter: @umarwrites