WhatReallyHappened linked to this eye opening article by John Pilger,
http://antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=2089 2004: Choose Your Favorite Pro-War Candidate
by John Pilger
On Clinton
"The truth is that Clinton was little different from Bush, a crypto-fascist. During the Clinton years, the principal welfare safety nets were taken away and poverty in America increased sharply; a multibillion-dollar missile "defense" system known as Star Wars II was instigated; the biggest war and arms budget in history was approved; biological weapons verification was rejected, along with a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, the establishment of an international criminal court and a worldwide ban on landmines. Contrary to a myth that places the blame on Bush, the Clinton administration in effect destroyed the movement to combat global warming.
In addition, Haiti and Afghanistan were invaded, the illegal blockade of Cuba was reinforced and Iraq was subjected to a medieval siege that claimed up to a million lives while the country was being attacked, on average, every third day: the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign in history. In the 1999 Clinton-led attack on Serbia, a "moral crusade," public transport, nonmilitary factories, food processing plants, hospitals, schools, museums, churches, heritage-listed monasteries and farms were bombed. "They ran out of military targets in the first couple of weeks," said James Bissett, the Canadian former ambassador to Yugoslavia. "It was common knowledge that NATO went to stage three: civilian targets." In their cruise missile attack on Sudan, Clinton's generals targeted and destroyed a factory producing most of sub-Saharan Africa's pharmaceutical supplies. The German ambassador to Sudan reported: "It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor country died as a consequence . . . but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess."
Covered in euphemisms, such as "democracy-building" and "peacekeeping," "humanitarian intervention" and "liberal intervention," the Clintonites can boast a far more successful imperial record than Bush's neocons, largely because Washington granted the Europeans a ceremonial role, and because NATO was "onside." In a league table of death and destruction, Clinton beats Bush hands down."
On the What if Gore was elected would we have gone to war,
"A question that New Democrats like to ask is: "What would Al Gore have done if he had not been cheated of the presidency by Bush?" Gore's top adviser was the arch-hawk Leon Fuerth, who said the US should "destroy the Iraqi regime, root and branch." Joseph Lieberman, Gore's running mate in 2000, helped to get Bush's war resolution on Iraq through Congress. In 2002, Gore himself declared that an invasion of Iraq "was not essential in the short term" but "nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat." Like Blair, what Gore wanted was an "international coalition" to cover long-laid plans for the takeover of the Middle East. His complaint against Bush was that, by going it alone, Washington could "weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century."
Collusion between the Bush and Gore camps was common. During the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke, who probably would have become Gore's secretary of state, conspired with Paul Wolfowitz to ensure their respective candidates said nothing about US policy towards Indonesia's blood-soaked role in southeast Asia. "Paul and I have been in frequent touch," said Holbrooke, "to make sure we keep
out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests." The same can be said of Israel's ruthless, illegal expansion, of which not a word was and is said: it is a crime with the full support of both Republicans and Democrats."
Quite a bit about Kerry, but this is an eye opener
"What is the difference from the vainglorious claptrap of Bush? Apart from euphemisms, there is none. All the Democratic presidential candidates supported the invasion of Iraq, bar one: Howard Dean. Kerry not only voted for the invasion, but expressed his disappointment that it had not gone according to plan. He told Rolling Stone magazine: "Did I expect George Bush to f*** it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did." Neither Kerry nor any of the other candidates has called for an end to the bloody and illegal occupation; on the contrary, all of them have demanded more troops for Iraq. Kerry has called for another "40,000 active service troops." He has supported Bush's continuing bloody assault on Afghanistan, and the administration's plans to "return Latin America to American leadership" by subverting democracy in Venezuela."
....
"Like the Blairites, John Kerry and his fellow New Democrats come from a tradition of liberalism that has built and defended empires as "moral" enterprises. That the Democratic Party has left a longer trail of blood, theft and subjugation than the Republicans is heresy to the liberal crusaders, whose murderous history always requires, it seems, a noble mantle.
As the New Democrats' manifesto rightly points out, the Democrats' "tough-minded internationalism" began with Woodrow Wilson, a Christian megalomaniac who believed that America had been chosen by God "to show the way to the nations of this world, how they shall walk in the paths of liberty." In his wonderful new book, The Sorrows of Empire (Verso), Chalmers Johnson writes:
With Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual foundations of American imperialism were set in place. Theodore Roosevelt . . . had represented a European-driven, militaristic vision of imperialism backed by nothing more substantial than the notion that the manifest destiny of the United States was to govern racially inferior Latin Americans and east Asians. Wilson laid over that his own hyper-idealistic, sentimental and ahistorical idea . It was a political project no less ambitious and no less passionately held than the vision of world communism launched at almost the same time by the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution."
Well that article should scare the crap out of everyone.
Meet the new boss same as the old boss.
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