{"id":38616,"date":"2016-05-23T13:03:57","date_gmt":"2016-05-23T17:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=38616"},"modified":"2016-05-23T13:03:57","modified_gmt":"2016-05-23T17:03:57","slug":"the-dreadful-kagan-clan-hillarys-warmongers-in-waiting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=38616","title":{"rendered":"The Dreadful Kagan Clan – Hillary’s Warmongers-In-Waiting"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David Stockman
\n<\/em><\/a>Contra Corner blog<\/p>\n

The U.S. is heading straight for a fiscal calamity in the next decade. <\/strong>Even if you believe the CBO\u2019s Rosy Scenario\u00a0projections – which assume that we will go 207<\/strong> <\/em>months thru 2026 without a recession or double the longest expansion on record and nearly 4X the normal cycle length – we will\u00a0still end up with\u00a0$28 trillion<\/strong> <\/em>of national debt and a$1.3 trillion<\/strong> annual deficit (5% of GDP) by 2026.<\/p>\n

\"Business<\/a><\/p>\n

But that\u2019s\u00a0the optimistic case!<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0As I demonstrated recently,\u00a0if you get\u00a0real about all the enormous headwinds down the road\u2014-including the virtual certainty that the Red Ponzi will have a crashing landing and take the global economy down with it\u2014- you end up with a truly dismal picture.<\/p>\n

To wit, just assume economic performance during the next ten years is no better or worse than the average of the last ten years, including the last decade\u2019s 2.5%<\/strong><\/em> growth rate of wage and salary income.<\/p>\n

The result is that by the out-years CBO has over-estimated taxable income by more than 20% or $2 trillion per year; and that means, in turn, that CBOs current forecast is built on massive phantom revenues, given that under current law\u00a0the payroll and income tax take from wages and salaries is just under 35%.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, with\u00a0sober economic assumptions and existing policy<\/strong>, the\u00a0annual deficit is heading for $2-3 trillion per year\u00a0by the middle of the next decade.\u00a0This means the nation will accumulate incremental debt of $15 trillion or more in the interim, and that by 2026 the national debt will reach\u00a0$34 trillion or 140% of GDP.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those are\u00a0Greek style fiscal ratios.<\/strong><\/u> And they would come at the very time that the 78 million strong baby-boom generation is at peak retirement levels.<\/p>\n

Yet, not only does Hillary Clinton insist that social security benefits are sacrosanct and actually need to be increased, along with lowering the Medicare age to 50 years, she also insists that Washington remain the world\u2019s policeman and imperial hegemon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a word, a Clinton presidency would mean Big Government on both sides of the Potomac – a combined Warfare State and Welfare State that would positively bankrupt the nation during the next decade.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact is, Washington is still spending upwards of $700 billion per year on defense, international security assistance, foreign aid and the rest of the surveillance state; and the total is\u00a0more than $850 billion if you count the cost of supporting veterans from all the misbegotten wars and interventions going back to the 1950s.<\/p>\n

More importantly, the iron law of Washington politics\u2014-demonstrated in spades during the Reagan era\u2014\u2014is thatentitlements and other domestic programs will never be cut or reformed so long as massive funding is being sluiced into the military-industry-security complex. Its always pork barrel uber alles.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And that brings us to the deplorable Kagan clan\u2014\u2013Washington\u2019s leading resident family of war-mongering neo-cons. <\/strong><\/u>The odds are that, if elected President, Hillary would likely choose one of them\u2014\u2014her prot\u00e9g\u00e9 during her stint in the Obama administration,\u00a0Victoria Nuland\u2014\u2013 as Secretary of State.<\/p>\n

Yet that would be lights out for any hope of caging Washington\u2019s imperial ambitions and reducing the massive and utterly unnecessary burden of current defense spending. The truth is,\u00a0there are fewer greater menaces in the Imperial City today than Victoria\u00a0Nuland.<\/p>\n

Not only does she happen to be\u00a0married to Bob Kagen, the leading neocon guru of global interventionism and regime change,\u00a0but she\u00a0earned her spurs as a key aid to Dick Cheney.<\/p>\n

No matter.\u00a0When the American public naively thought it elected the \u201cpeace\u201d candidate in 2008, Nuland just changed her Jersey, joined Hillary\u2019s team at State, and by 2013 was assistant secretary for European Affairs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s when Nuland\u2019s rampage of everlasting shame began. She was the main\u00a0architect of the coup in Kiev in February 2014 that overthrow the constitutionally elected government of the Ukraine, thereby commencing the whole sequence of confrontations with Russia and the full-throated demonization of Vladimir Putin that has followed.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, overthrowing an elected government on Russia\u2019s front doorstep had\u00a0nothing to do with the safety and security of the American people. But it did\u00a0rekindle\u00a0ancient tensions between the\u00a0nationalistic Ukrainians\u00a0and neo-Nazis who seized power\u00a0with Washington\u2019s help and the\u00a0Russian speaking populations in the Donbas and Crimea, who felt suddenly imperiled and turned to Moscow for protection.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the Kiev uprising would never have happened without huge amounts of covert aid and\u00a0instigation from\u00a0Washington. Nuland\u2019s appearance at the Maidan Square demonstrations amounted to what would be an unthinkable violation of sovereignty anywhere else in the world.\u00a0Accordingly, the coup was a straight out<\/strong>\u00a0imperial\u00a0grab designed to bring the Ukraine into NATO and to extend Washington\u2019s hegemony to the entirely of the old Warsaw bloc geography.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hillary\u2019s favorite candidate for Secretary of State, therefore, almost single-handedly restarted the cold war and\u00a0pulled the US and Europe into what has become a\u00a0dragnet\u00a0of costly\u00a0economic sanctions that are completely pointless and unnecessary.<\/p>\n

And Hillary Clinton has been onboard for this misbegotten campaign from the get-go. At one point she actually likened Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n

C\u2019mon.\u00a0The man\u2019s a monumental\u00a0crook and no model citizen of the world, but he is no threat to American security whatsoever.<\/p>\n

He presides over a third rate economy no larger than the GDP of the New York SMSA that essentially consists of\u00a0a complex of petroleum fields, grain farms\u00a0and metal mines and a lethargic\u00a0work force with a fondness for Vodka.<\/p>\n

At the time the constitutionally elected government of Ukraine was being\u00a0overthrown by Victoria Nuland\u2019s mob of\u00a0 economically deprived citizens, disgruntled nationalists\u00a0and crypto-Nazi agitators in February 2014,\u00a0Putin was basking in the glory of the Sochi Olympics. And before that he had spent his time\u00a0having petty quarrels with the crook who took-over the tiny state of\u00a0Georgia\u00a0after the Soviet Union\u00a0disappeared and similar no-count machinations along his historic\u00a0borders.<\/p>\n

The world disdained\u00a0his oafish character, but no one claimed\u00a0that he was fixing to\u00a0invade Europe. There was not a shred of evidence for it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the same time,\u00a0any one who knew\u00a0the slightest thing about Ukraine\u2019s history and its long co-existence in the shadow of Mother Russia understood that bringing it into NATO was a decidedly stupid idea; that for 200 years Crimea had been a integral part of Russia that was\u00a0only \u201cgifted\u201d to Ukraine by Kruschev during his post-Stalin consolidation of power in the Kremlin;\u00a0and that\u00a0now\u00a0threatening Russia\u2019s rented naval homeport in Sevastopol, Crimea was sheer folly.<\/p>\n

Not\u00a0Hillary.\u00a0She was soon figuratively\u00a0at the barricades right alongside Nuland\u00a0justifying the folly of the NATO confrontation with Russia and the self-defeating economic\u00a0sanctions against Putin.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even though she was out of office and in a position to recognize that the very same \u201cpartition\u201d solution that had led to the severance of Kosovo from Serbia during the 1990s could have solved the Donbas and Crimea issues, she was having none of it.<\/p>\n

Instead, by her lights NATO, which should have been disbanded after 1991, needs to go to the brink with Putin over essentially a Ukrainian civil war.<\/p>\n

It is no wonder, therefore, that Imperial Washington is lining up behind Hillary, <\/strong>and that the deplorable Kagan Clan\u00a0is fixing to retain its\u00a0insidious influence for another Presidential term.<\/p>\n

The fact is, Hillary Clinton\u00a0has spent a lifetime serving the Warfare state and absorbing its pretensions and ideologies. <\/strong>She\u00a0allegedly protested the Vietnam War before becoming a Republican summer intern in 1967, but to my knowledge that was\u00a0the last war she didn\u2019t embrace.<\/p>\n

She was an enthusiastic backer of Bill Clinton\u2019s feckless military interventions in the Balkans during the 1990s and a signed-up hawk\u00a0for George Bush\u2019s catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

As Donald Trump rightly says, her time as Secretary of State was an unmitigated disaster. The \u201cpeace candidate\u201d actually won the 2008 election, but Secretary Clinton along with lifetime CIA operative and unabashed war-monger, Robert Gates, saw to it that peace never got a chance.<\/p>\n

From the pointless, bloody \u201csurge\u201d in Afghanistan to the destructive intervention in Libya to the arming and aiding of jihadist radicals in Syria, Hillary has\u00a0proved herself to be a shrill harpy of military mayhem. Indeed, she brought a fillip to the neocon playbook that has made Imperial Washington even more trigger happy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To wit,\u00a0Clinton has been a tireless proponent of the\u00a0insidious doctrine of R2P or \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d. No one in their right mind could have concluded that the aging, pacified, tent-bound Moammar\u00a0Khadafy was a threat to the safety and security\u00a0of the American people. Even\u00a0the community organizer from South Chicago wanted to keep the American bombers\u00a0parked on their runways.<\/p>\n

But Hillary\u2019s\u00a0infamous\u00a0emails leave\u00a0no\u00a0doubt that it was she who\u00a0induced\u00a0Obama to embrace the folly that quickly\u00a0created yet another failed state, hotbed of\u00a0jihadism and barbaric hellhole in the middle east.\u00a0Indeed,\u00a0her hands are doubly bloody.<\/p>\n

When\u00a0Hillary bragged that \u201cWe came, we saw, he died\u201d,\u00a0it turns out that not just Khadafy but thousands of\u00a0innocents\u00a0have died,\u00a0and not just from the chaos\u00a0unleashed in Libya itself. The former dictator\u2019s arsenals and mercenaries\u00a0have now been dispersed all over North Africa and the middle east, spreading\u00a0desolation in their wake.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But a Hillary Clinton presidency would only guarantee more of the same. And as the attached excellent piece from Phil Giraldi at the American Conservative explains,<\/a> it would also keep the nation\u2019s leading clan of warmongers firmly ensconced in the corridors of power.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The other day, a question popped up on a Facebook thread I was commenting on: \u201cWhere is Victoria Nuland?\u201d The short answer, of course, is that she is still holding down her position as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But a related question begs for a more expansive response: Where will Victoria Nuland be after January? Nuland is one of Hillary Clinton\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9s at the State Department, and she is also greatly admired by hardline Republicans. This suggests she would be easily approved by Congress as secretary of state or maybe even national-security adviser\u2014which in turn suggests that her foreign-policy views deserve a closer look.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nuland comes from what might be called the First Family of Military Interventionists.<\/strong><\/u> Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a leading neoconservative who co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1998 around a demand for\u00a0\u201cregime change\u201d in Iraq. He is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an author, and a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of a number of national newspapers. He has already declared that he will be voting for Hillary Clinton in November, a shift away from the GOP that many have seen as a clever career-enhancing move for both him and his wife.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert\u2019s brother, Fred, is with the hawkish American Enterprise Institute, and his sister-in-law, Kimberly, is the head of the Institute for the Study of War, which is largely funded by defense contractors. The Kagans work to encourage military action, both through their positions in government and by influencing the public debate through think-tank reports and op-eds. It is a family enterprise that mirrors the military-industrial complex as a whole, with think tanks coming up with reasons to increase military spending and providing \u201cexpert\u201d support for the government officials who actually promote and implement the policies. Defense contractors, meanwhile, benefit from the largesse and kick back some money to the think tanks, which then develop new reasons to spend still more on military procurement.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Kagans\u2019 underlying belief is that the United States has both the power and the obligation to replace governments that are considered either uncooperative with Washington (the \u201cLeader of the Free World\u201d) or hostile to American interests. American interests are, of course, mutable, and they include values like democracy and the rule of law as well as practical considerations such as economic and political competition. Given the elasticity of the interests, many countries can be and are considered potential targets for Washington\u2019s tender ministrations.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, President Obama is reportedly an admirer<\/a> of Robert Kagan\u2019s books, which argue that the U.S. must maintain its military power to accommodate its \u201cglobal responsibilities.\u201d The persistence of neoconservative foreign-policy views in the Obama administration has often been remarked upon, though Democrats and Republicans embrace military interventionism for different reasons. The GOP sees it as an international leadership imperative driven by American \u201cexceptionalism,\u201d while the Dems romanticize \u201cliberal intervention\u201d as a sometimes-necessary evil undertaken most often for humanitarian reasons. But the result is the same, as no administration wants to be seen as weak when dealing with the outside world. George W. Bush\u2019s catastrophic failures in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to bear fruit under a Democratic administration, while Obama has added a string of additional \u201cboots on the ground\u201d interventions in Libya, Syria, Yemen, the Philippines, and Somalia.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And Nuland herself<\/a>,\u00a0many will recall, was the driving force behind efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013-14.<\/strong> Yanukovych, admittedly a corrupt autocrat, nevertheless assumed office after a free election. In spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev ostensibly had friendly relations, Nuland provided open support for the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych\u2019s government, passing out cookies<\/a> to protesters on the square and holding photo ops with a beaming Sen. John McCain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nuland started her rapid rise\u00a0as an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Subsequently, she was serially promoted by secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, attaining her current position in September 2013. But it was her behavior in Ukraine that made her a media figure. It is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget<\/a>, but Washington has long adhered to a double standard when evaluating its own behavior.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nuland is most famous for using foul language<\/a> when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest in Ukraine that she and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) had helped create. <\/strong>She even discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the new leader of Ukraine ought to be. \u201cYats is the guy\u201d she said (referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk), while pondering how she would \u201cglue this thing\u201d as Pyatt simultaneously considered how to \u201cmidwife\u201d it. Their insecure phone call was\u00a0intercepted and leaked<\/a>, possibly by the Russian intelligence service, though anyone equipped with a scanner could have done the job.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The inevitable replacement of the government in Kiev, actually a coup but sold to the media as a triumph for \u201cdemocracy,\u201d was only the prelude to a sharp break\u2014and escalating conflict\u2014with Moscow over Russia\u2019s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine. The new regime in Kiev, as corrupt as its predecessor and supported by neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists, was consistently whitewashed in the Western media, and the conflict was depicted as \u201cpro-democracy\u201d forces resisting unprovoked \u201cRussian aggression.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Indeed, the real objective of interfering in Ukraine was, right from the start, to install a regime hostile to Moscow. <\/strong>Carl Gershman, the head of the taxpayer-funded NED, called Ukraine<\/a> \u201cthe biggest prize\u201d in the effort to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin, who \u201cmay find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.\u201d But Gershman and Nuland were playing with fire in their assessment, as Russia had vital interests at stake and is the only nation with the military capability to destroy the U.S.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And make no mistake about Nuland\u2019s clear intention to expand the conflict and directly confront Moscow.In Senate testimony in May of 2014, she noted<\/a> how the Obama administration was \u201cproviding support to other frontline states like Moldova and Georgia.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nuland and her neoconservative allies celebrated their \u201cregime change\u201d in Kiev oblivious to the fact that Putin would recognize the strategic threat to his own country and would react, particularly to protect the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. Barack Obama responded predictably, initiating what soon became something like a new Cold War against Russia, risking escalation into a possible nuclear confrontation. It was a crisis that would not have existed but for Nuland and her allies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Though there was no evidence that Putin had initiated the Ukraine crisis and much evidence to the contrary, the U.S. government propaganda machine rolled into action, claiming that Russia\u2019s measures in Ukraine would be the first step in an invasion of Eastern Europe. Former Secretary of State Clinton dutifullycompared Putin<\/a> to Adolf Hitler. And Robert Kagan provided the argument for more intervention, producing a lengthy essay in\u00a0The New Republic<\/em>\u00a0entitled \u201cSuperpowers Don\u2019t Get to Retire<\/a>,\u201d in which he criticized President Obama for failing to maintain American dominance in the world. The New York Times<\/em>revealed<\/a>that the essay was apparently part of a joint project in which Nuland regularly edited her husband\u2019s articles, even though this particular piece attacked the administration she worked for.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As the situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate in 2014, Nuland exerted herself to scuttle several European attempts to arrange a ceasefire. When NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was cited as being in favor of sending more weapons\u00a0to the Ukrainian government to \u201craise the battlefield cost for Putin,\u201d Nuland commented<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019d strongly urge you to use the phrase \u2018defensive systems\u2019 that we would deliver to oppose Putin\u2019s \u2018offensive systems.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To return to the initial question of where Victoria Nuland is, the long answer would be that while she is not much in the news, she is continuing to provide support for policies that the White House apparently approves of. Late last month, she was again in Kiev. She criticized Russia for its lack of press freedom and its \u201cpuppets\u201d in the Donbas region while telling<\/a> a Ukrainian audience about a \u201cstrong U.S. commitment to stand with Ukraine as it stays on the path of a clean, democratic, European future. \u2026 We remain committed to retaining sanctions that apply to the situation in Crimea until Crimea is returned to Ukraine.\u201d Before that, she was in Cyprus and France<\/a> discussing \u201ca range of regional and global issues with senior government officials.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But one has to suspect that, at this point, she is mainly waiting to see what happens in November. And wondering where she might be going in January.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

___
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