ERIC ZUESSE -- Hillary Clinton’s Achievements as Secretary of State

 Hillary Clinton’s Achievements as Secretary of State   

May 30, 2020 2 Comments

by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog

Some people say that Hillary Clinton had no achievements as the U.S. Secretary of State; but that view is factually false. She had a huge and enduring impact, on at least three countries, as will here be documented via the links:

HONDURAS:

When the dozen oligarchs who control Honduras overthrew Honduras’s popular democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya on 28 June 2009, and installed a military junta which set about exterminating its opposition, the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was able, alone of officials in the Western Hemisphere, to keep that regime in power (despite efforts by all other governments in the Hemisphere to restore the legal government), by arranging increased military and economic aid to the new government. Soon afterward, Honduras had the world’s highest murder-rate, and a surging outflow of poor people through Mexico into the United Sates as refugees from the exploding violence at home.

As Vice News reported on 9 September 2014: “Overall, illegal immigration from Central America has risen about 500% since late 2010. Families, single moms, and children, are a larger and larger share of people who make the long, and potentially dangerous trek through Mexico, to the United States. More child migrants are now coming from San Pedro Sula Honduras and surrounding areas [the Bajo Aguán Valley], than anyplace else in Central America; and, as ordinary Hondurans told us over and over again, the outflow is being fueled by an explosive mix of violence, poverty, and inequality.” The democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, whom Hillary Clinton’s Honduran friends had overthrown, had been trying to impose land reform and other measures which were addressed to meeting the needs of the millions of Honduras’s poor, but the new Honduran government viewed the Honduran masses as trash, and eliminated President Zelaya’s programs to help them.

The November 2013 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “Honduras Since the Coup,” reported that: “Economic growth has slowed since the coup. … Economic inequality, which decreased for four consecutive years starting in 2006 [Zelaya had ruled Honduras from 27 January 2006 through 28 June 2009], began trending upward in 2010. Honduras now has the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America.”

The September 2011 study by the International Federation for Human Rights and by the Association of World Council of Churches,  “Honduras Human Rioghts Violations,” reported that, “Since the coup d’etat, … several missions and reports by national and international human rights bodies and organisations have documented systematic and grave human rights violations in Honduras.”

The Los Angeles Times reported on 16 August 2014, that, “For many child migrants, traveling alone to U.S. is safer than staying put in Honduras.” Human Rights Watch issued a report, in February 2014, “’There Are No Investigations Here’: Impunity for Killings and Other Abuses in Bajo Aguán, Honduras.” (This report was anomalous: One of the two co-founders of HRW was a protégé of the Russia-hating George Soros, and the other was America’s leading book-publisher, who was a zionist neoconservative Democrat, and both were strong proponents of U.S. empire, not critics of it. HRW is a Democratic Party neoconservative organization, but in this extraordinary report it criticized a joint Democratic and Republican coup-regime. However, not once did that report so much as even mention either “Clinton” or “Obama.” It was basically protecting HRW’s top sponsors — heavy donors to the DNC — and hiding the U.S. regime’s guilt behind the atrocities that it was criticizing. On 7 September 2010, HRW headlined “George Soros to Give $100 million to Human Rights Watch”. HRW is practically prohibited from saying certain things: it is very much censored by its megadonors. The hypocrisy of their championship of ‘human rights’ is extreme. America’s aristocracy are protected. There is total impunity for them.) On 25 July 2014, Slate headlined: “Honduras’ Killing Fields: In these rural lands, poverty, murder, and injustice fuel a battle between farmers and rich landowners.” Secretary of State Clinton had clearly been on the side of the rich landowners.

On 6 January 2014, Britain’s Guardian reported on: “a dirty war in Honduras, where US-backed security forces are implicated in the murder, disappearance and intimidation of peasant farmers involved in land disputes with local palm oil magnates. More than 100 people have been killed in the past four years, many assassinated by death squads operating with near impunity in the heavily militarised Bajo Aguán region, where 8,000 Honduran troops are deployed, according to activists.” Then, right-wing U.S. taxpayers, faced with the resulting influx of south-of-the-border refugees, shout “Send them back!” (That’s back to die.)

However, the Obama Administration’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (of which Hillary Clinton was the Chairperson) produced a “resettlement program” so that “Honduras was able to move … to compensate affected parties, clear the right of way, and complete construction” that the U.S. oligarchy and their Honduran oligarch-friends want. MCC has programs whose objective is nominally to determine “which investments are most likely to lead to economic growth and poverty reduction.” The poor pouring into the U.S. don’t know anything about it, but only have other ideas about their own “economic growth.”

The richest man in Honduras, and alleged to be the chief planner of the coup there, Miguel Facusse, controls Dinant Corporation, which is developing Palm oil plantations in the Bajo Aguán region. Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, he said with apparent pride, “My name is mud all over the world. … I’m the bad guy in the world.” But his money is good everywhere. Thus, on 10 January 2014, Huffington Post bannered, “World Bank’s Lending Arm Linked to Deadly Honduras Conflict,” and reported that the World Bank’s Office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman noted that Dinant’s problems keeping up with its loan-payments were “caused in large part by the July 2009 overthrow of Manuel Zelaya, the left-leaning president who visited the Aguan Valley promising land reforms just days before his ouster. Subsistence farmers, without a political ally, took … land owned by Facusse that they say was wrongfully taken from them.” In other words: if only Zelaya hadn’t spoken to poor people and then become overthrown by the landowners, perhaps these problem-loans on the World Bank’s books wouldn’t be problem-loans at all. The problem-loans were caused by Zelaya’s having spoken to poor people. Thus, the World Bank “called Facusse a ‘very respected businessman’ and later approved a $70 million investment in one of Dinant’s biggest lenders, Banco Financiera Comercial Hondurena.” After all, the refugees who are pouring into the United States aren’t any of the World Bank’s business or worry.

On 30 December 2019, Mongabay bannered “Palm oil, fire pushing protected areas in Honduras to the ‘point of no return’”. This is bipartisan (Democratic billionaires, and Republican billionaires) U.S.-backed ‘progress’.

Consequently, among Secretary of State Clinton’s achievements was her major contribution to the surge in recent years of Honduras’s poor coming into the United States. These are people that her Honduran friends (such as Facusse) want to clear off of their land, or at least off of land that they want, and claim, to be theirs. If those excess (in the view of the oligarchs) Hondurans come to the United States, it helps relieve these friends of Hillary of a nasty problem. They can then credit her with having helped them a lot, first by securing their coup, and then by providing an outlet (i.e., the U.S.) for some of the excess Hondurans that Honduras’s oligarchs might otherwise need to be simply gunned down (as many already have been and are). Doing it this way saves them money on bullets.

LIBYA:

According to the often unreliable right-wing Washington Times, reporting on 28 January 2015: “Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli. The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns.”

That report links to what are said to be excerpts from the recorded conversations. The report has been ignored by all but Republican ‘news’ media.

The next day, Fox News interviewed the progressive Democrat and former Congressman, Dennis Kucinich, who back in 2011 was in Congress and was trying to stop the Obama Administration’s plan to overthrow Gaddafi, and who was the involved in the discussions with the Gaddafis. He was that “senior Democrat in Congress.” And he confirmed the Washington Times account. A clip from Gaddafi’s son in those phone conversations was played, presumedly supplied now, four years after the event, by Kucinich. Though Kucinich didn’t note that Hillary and the Administration had fabricated the reason for invading, Fox’s interviewer did. Obama was just another George W. Bush.

Furthermore, in a CBS News interview on 20 October 2011, Secretary of State Clinton was asked about the slaughter of Muammar Gaddafi, and she said, with joyous laughter, “We came, we saw, he died!” (It’s also on youtube.) Her callousness came through with stark clarity there, irrespective of what one thinks of Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein or any other tyrant. Her intention in that interview was obviously to take credit for this conquest.

What has happened to Libya since the United States led the bombing and destruction of the Gaddafi regime is something that the U.S. should feel profoundly ashamed of, like our invasion of Iraq in 2003 was. And the resulting destruction of the Libyan people has likewise been comparable to our destruction of the Iraqi people.

Hillary Clinton, in that video clip taking credit for the slaughter of Gaddafi, was more than accepting responsibility for what she and Barack Obama did to Libya; she was even reveling in it. She was proud of it.

Subsequently the Obama Administration worked with the European Union to block the exodus of refugees from Libya and other nations that have been destroyed by the U.S. and its allies, such as in Yemen.

In any case, Libya was also an achievement for Hillary.

UKRAINE:

When Ms. Clinton started at the State Department in 2009, she brought in with her Victoria Nuland, whose husband, Robert Kagan, was a personal friend of Hillary’s. The Nuland-Kagans were far-right-wing Republicans, and Nuland had previously been a foreign-affairs advisor to, first, Vice President Dick Cheney, and, then, Presidential candidate John McCain, the man who was famous for saying “Bomb Iran!” Nuland was installed as the State Department’s spokesperson; and, then, after Clinton resigned to prepare her Presidential campaign, Nuland was selected by Obama to become, nominally under Secretary of State John Kerry, the top State Department official for Europe and Asia, including Ukraine, where Nuland oversaw the February 2014 coup that overthrew the democratically elected but corrupt Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and replaced him with Nuland’s corrupt friend, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, in a new government, which would be run by Ukraine’s Prime Minister instead of by its President (this change was made in order to confuse the ‘news’ media into thinking that ultimately democracy was going to be restored to Ukraine in new elections; Obama’s ultimate aim was to install as President Yulia Tymoshenko, a rabid anti-Russian, who had led Yatsenyuk’s party, to become elected, but a less extreme supporter of the coup, Petro Poroshenko, won the May 2014 election, and he continued the Yatsenyuk-Tymoshenko policies.

Here is Nuland telling the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (youtubed on 4 February 2014 but recorded probably on 27 January 2014), whom to appoint to be the nation’s new leader after the coup, who became officially appointed as the Prime Minister at the end of the coup, on 26 February. It was “Yats,” just as Nuland had said. The transcript and explanation of Nuland’s instructions to the Ambassador can be seen here.

Until that time, Ukraine was not a country at war; especially it wasn’t engaged in any civil war; but, after the overthrow, it was at war, and is now profoundly bankrupt too. This is an achievement not only of Nuland, and of John Kerry, and of Barack Obama, but also, of Hillary Clinton. (Joe Biden brags about his role, and claims to have been second only to Obama in it; he was actually only a bit player in it, definitely less influential in it than was Nuland.) This, after all, had been Secretary Clinton’s intention, too, and the planning for it had started by no later than 2011, in her State Department, by people — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt and his and Hillary’s underling Jared Cohen — who reported directly to her and her aides. In fact, when Nuland, nominally under Kerry, advocated policies that were more aggressive than her (at that time) nominal boss Kerry allowed, Obama backed Nuland, and her policy became imposed. Obama chose the more extreme anti-Russian policy; Kerry’s hostility toward Russia was too moderate to suit Obama’s aims and intentions. Obama was closer to Hillary than to Kerry.

In a moment of extraordinary candor, George Friedman, the founder and CEO of the ‘private CIA’ consulting firm Stratfor, once called the overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, which occurred in February 2014, “the most blatant coup in history”, and this was because it was the first coup ever to have been captured live on cellphone videos and uploaded to the internet as it happened, and afterward documented by interviewing some of the participants, in detailed accounts which fit perfectly with similar confessions from other participants (such as this, from one of the snipers who didn’t even know about those other participants, but they all were carrying out the same plan, which they didn’t know about and which came from above — the U.S. regime — they all were only following orders that they had been given by agents of the U.S.). These realities were able to be reported outside the United States but not inside the United States. The top EU officials didn’t become so much as even aware that it had been a coup instead of an authentic revolution, until it was already finished, on 26 February 2014. By now, there is no longer any reasonable doubt that it had been led by the U.S. regime, and that Barack Obama’s Administration had started planning the operation by no later than 2011, and the implementation-phase started by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine — well before the fairy-tale ‘explanation’ of the coup (‘the Maidan Revolution’) started on 21 November 2013. Famously, after that ‘democratic revolution’ (which was instead a fascist coup that was hidden behind popular anti-corruption demonstrations), came the breakaway of Crimea (which had voted over 75% for Yanukovych) and of Donbass (which had voted over 90% for him). And then came the Obama-installed regime’s ethnic cleansing ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ to eliminate as many of the voters in Donbass as possible, because if they stayed in Ukraine, then the newly installed regime in Kiev would soon be elected out-of-office. Hatred was needed in order for that ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ or ‘ATO’ (the ethnic-cleansing operation) to be able to achieve its purpose, and this hatred was funded and promoted by American billionaires and the American Government.

The big ‘justification’ for economic sanctions against Russia was Putin’s ‘seizure’ of Crimea, which was anything but a seizure and was actually protection not only of a part of Ukraine which had been part of Russia from 1783 to 1954 when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine, but Putin’s action regarding Crimea was also protection of the residents there who were clamoring for Crimea to rejoin Russia when Obama’s Ukrainian fascists made clear their hatred of Crimeans and their aim to destroy Crimeans. As became ultimately revealed, the Obama Administration had a plan in place by no later than June of 2013 not only to expel from Crimea Russia’s largest naval base, which was located there, but to replace it by a U.S. naval base on Crimea. So, there can be no reasonable doubt that the actual aggressor regarding Crimea was Obama and his regime, who seized Ukraine, and not really Putin and his government. However, the anti-Russian sanctions nonetheless remain in place to this day, and the actual history regarding the matter of Crimea, Donbass, and Ukraine, remains covered-up by the U.S. regime and its allied regimes and the propaganda or ‘news’ media.

But the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime, subsequently under Poroshenko’s rule, finally might have gotten elected out-of-office on 21 April 2019 and replaced by the new President Volodmyr Zelenskiy, despite the billions of dollars that the U.S. regime had spent on this operation. Zelenskiy won by the largest margin of any Ukrainian President ever, and the reason for this is that his opponent, Poroshenko, had spectacularly failed to fulfill his electoral promises — he couldn’t follow through on everything that Obama had wanted him to do. Because so much of Obama’s agenda conflicted with what the Ukrainian public wanted him to do (especially they wanted the war to end), Poroshenko was leaving office as being extremely unpopular.

Whether or not Zelenskiy decides to be yet another U.S. stooge isn’t yet clear, but maybe he’ll be able to lift the American yoke from his country, a yoke which destroyed Ukraine’s economy. In 2013, Ukraine’s average annual household income was $2,601.40, and then it fell off a cliff and became $1,109.63 by 2015 and briefly stabilized at that low level before rising to $1,693,56 in 2018. Also, in 2013, Ukraine’s GDP was $183.31 billion, and by 2015 that had become $91.03 billion and stabilized at that level and started rising in 2017. More information about the decline in Ukraine’s economic rankings can be seen here. Ukraine was avoiding bankruptcy only because the U.S.-controlled IMF kept lending it money so as to continue the war.

However, despite Zelenskiy’s promise to end the war against Donbass by means of negotiations and of building the trust of Donbass residents, Ollie Richardson posted to youtube on 31 May 2019 (11 days after Zelenskiy’s inauguration) “Ukraine continues to shell the LPR despite Zelensky’s promises of peace”, and clearly this military attack against Donbass showed that Zelenskiy was continuing the Obama-started Ukrainian regime (unless Zelenskiy publicly condemned that attack, which he did not). This attack “on May 29th carried out by the UAF [Ukrainian Air Force] on the settlement of Golubovsky, which is a part of front-line Kirovsk,” produced no public response from President Zelenskiy — no condemnation, no replacement of any official, nothing at all. It was thus making less possible each and every day, Donbassers’ support for any negotiations with his regime.

The U.S. regime has been toxic to the Ukrainian people, no matter how one looks at the matter. Whether and how Ukraine can ever recover isn’t yet clear. U.S. corporations (and agents such as the IMF) have by now moved into Ukraine so deeply that maybe Zelenskiy will either fulfill Obama’s plan or else be assassinated for resisting it. On 24 May 2019, the Irish independent investigative journalist Danielle Ryan headlined at RT “West-backed think tanks threaten new Ukrainian president with disturbing list of ‘RED LINES’”, and apparently the U.S. regime was having its way, yet again. All of this success is achieved by selecting only billionaire-approved candidates as the final contenders in ‘elections’ (actually mere s‘elections’), and all of them deceive the public in order to become (s)‘elected’ by billionaires and then by the public. The U.S. regime is relentless. Zelenskiy is apparently trapped by it. And Trump is just another Obama, who was just another Bush, etc.

The ultimate objective of this particular plan is to make Ukraine a NATO member in order to place U.S. missiles only five-minutes flight-time away from Moscow. But in order to achieve that, America’s IMF must continue lending Ukraine’s Government more and more money and thereby drive it deeper and deeper into debt, so that when Ukraine goes bankrupt, the Ukrainian people will be stripped of everything, and America’s international corporations will get most of what they did have.

CONCLUSION:

Hillary Clinton isn’t, as some of her critics have charged, entirely lacking in any achievement as the U.S. Secretary of State. She will instead be remembered by historians as having been one of the worst Secretaries of State in U.S. history, if not the very worst. The three countries that have been featured here (Honduras, Libya, and Ukraine) are only examples; others, such as Haiti, Afghanistan, and Syria, likewise were severely victimized by her. She actually did a great deal of damage, not only to the American people, but also, and especially, to peoples around the world. In her only U.S. Executive branch role, as Secretary of State, she spread a spell of hell that the nation’s news-media did not tell — but it was huge. People who think favorably of President Obama are either evil or else misinformed and deceived about him and about the extent of his evil, and she was leading a significant portion of that. She wasn’t a non-entity, as some think. A lot of people owe their deaths, dismemberments, traumas, and refugee-conditions, to Hillary Clinton, even without her having become President. Secretary of State was bad enough. Of course, Joe Biden’s background is consistent with his being just like she. And Donald Trump likewise is an atrocity, quite amply displayed (and thus not requiring documentation here). Hillary Clinton was simply the norm for the type of candidates that America’s billionaires have picked to become nominees to contest in the general election for federal office in the United States. Realistically, this is America’s future, regardless of what the American public want.

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of  Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.