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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Monday that, if reelected, he will build thousands of settler homes in occupied East Jerusalem to prevent future concessions to Palestinians. Speaking ahead of Tuesday’s general election on a whistle-stop tour of Har Homa, a contentious settlement neighborhood of annexed East Jerusalem, the PM vowed that he would never allow Palestinians to establish a capital in the city’s eastern sector.

“I won’t let that happen. My friends and I in Likud will preserve the unity of Jerusalem,” he said of his ruling right-wing party, according to AFP, vowing to prevent any future division of the city by building thousands of new settler homes. “We will continue to build in Jerusalem, we will add thousands of housing units, and in the face of all the (international) pressure, we will persist and continue to develop our eternal capital,” he added. During the 2013 negotiations, Israeli officials announced, and, eventually, carried out in full force, plans to build thousands of additional homes in illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank, while continuing to further seize lands, demolish homes and agricultural resources and, thus, leaving scores of Palestinian families severely disenfranchised and without so much as a roof over their heads to shelter them from inclement weather. Gazans were already surviving on a mere 8 hours per day of electricity when the Palestinian negotiating team finally resigned in protest, in mid-November. Israel, soon after, made quite clear its position on securing peace with Palestinians when Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, during a meeting with young Likud Party supporters, boasted: “I was threatened in Washington: ‘not one brick’ [of settlement construction] … after five years, we built a little more than one brick…”

Asked about “peace talks with the Palestinians”, the PM reportedly replied, according to +972 online Israeli magazine: “about the – what?” to which his audience responded with a round of chuckling. Critics of Israel’s aggressively right-wing regime assert that such peace negotiations are simply used as a front for continued settlement expansion and military occupation, noting that settlement activity clearly increases during negotiations, while daily acts of violence against Palestinians, by both Israeli civilians and soldiers alike, remains as of yet unchallenged by the powers that be. Israel seized East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community. Israel refers to both halves of the city as its “united, undivided capital” and does not see construction in the eastern sector as settlement building. Successive Israeli leaders have vowed that Jerusalem will never again be divided — in war or peace.

“All of the investment banks, up in New York and D.C., they should have gone to jail.” That isn’t a quote from an Occupy Wall Street protester or Senator Elizabeth Warren. That’s a common campaign slogan repeated by Dave Brat, the Virginia college professor who scored one of the biggest political upsets in over a century by defeating Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary last night. The national media is buzzing about Brat’s victory, but for all of the wrong reasons.

Did the Tea Party swoop in and help Brat, as many in the Democratic Party are suggesting? Actually, the Wall Street Journal reports no major Tea Party or anti-establishment GOP group spent funds to defeat Cantor. Did Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, lose because of his religion, as some have suggested? There’s no evidence so far of anti-Semitism during the campaign. Was Cantor caught flatfooted? Nope; Cantor’s campaign spent close to $1 million on the race and several outside advocacy groups, including the National Rifle Association, the National Realtors Association and the American Chemistry Council (a chemical industry lobbying association) came in and poured money into the district to defeat Brat. The New York Times claims that Brat focused his campaign primarily on immigration reform. Brat certainly made immigration a visible topic in his race, but Republic Report listened to several hours of Brat stump speeches and radio appearances, and that issue came up far less than what Brat called the main problem in government: corruption and cronyism. Brat told Internet radio host Flint Engelman that the “number one plank” in his campaign is “free markets.” Brat went on to explain, “Eric Cantor and the Republican leadership do not know what a free market is at all, and the clearest evidence of that is the financial crisis … When I say free markets, I mean no favoritism to K Street lobbyists.” Banks like Goldman Sachs were not fined for their role in the financial crisis — rather, they were rewarded with bailouts, Brat has said.

rat, who has identified with maverick GOP lawmakers like Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, spent much of the campaign slamming both parties for being in the pocket of “Wall Street crooks” and D.C. insiders. The folks who caused the financial crisis, Brat says, “went onto Obama’s rolodex, the Republican leadership, Eric’s rolodex.” During several campaign appearances, Brat says what upset him the most about Cantor was his role in gutting the last attempt at congressional ethics reform. “If you want to find out the smoking gun in this campaign,” Brat told Engelman, “just go Google and type the STOCK Act and CNN and Eric Cantor.” (On Twitter, Brat has praised the conservative author Peter Schweizer, whose work on congressional corruption forced lawmakers into action on the STOCK Act.) The STOCK Act, a bill to crack down on insider trading, was significantly watered down by Cantor in early 2012. The lawmaker took out provisions that would have forced Wall Street “political intelligence” firms to register as traditional lobbyists would, and removed a section of the bill to empower prosecutors to go after public officials who illegally trade on insider knowledge. And Brat may be right to charge that Cantor’s moves on the STOCK Act were motivated by self interest. Cantor played a leading role in blocking legislation to fix the foreclosure crisis while his wife and his stock portfolio were deeply invested in mortgage banks.

According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, Barack Obama now ranks among the least popular presidents in the last century. In fact, his approval rating is lower than Bush’s was in his fifth year in office. Obama’s overall approval rating stands at a dismal 43 percent, with a full 55 percent of the public “disapproving of the way he is handling the economy”. The same percentage  of people “disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president”.  Thus, on the two main issues, leadership and the economy, Obama gets failing grades. An even higher percentage of people are upset at the way the president is implementing his signature health care system dubbed “Obamacare”.  When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling “implementation of the new health care law?” A full 62% said they disapprove, although I suspect that the anger has less to do with the plan’s “implementation” than it does with the fact that Obamacare is widely seen as a profit-delivery system for the voracious insurance industry.  Notwithstanding the administration’s impressive public relations campaign, a clear majority of people have seen through Obama’s health care ruse and given the program a big thumb’s down.

Of course, Obamacare is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The list of policy disasters that preceded this latest fiasco is nearly endless,  including everything from blanket pardons for the Wall Street big-wigs who took down the global financial system, to re-upping the Bush tax cuts, to appointing a commission of deficit hawks to slash Social Security and Medicare (Bowles-Simpson), to breaking his word on Gitmo, to reneging on his promise to pass Card Check, to expanding to wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, to droning 4-times as many civilians as the homicidal maniac he replaced as president in 2008.

All told, Obama has been bad for the economy, bad for civil liberties, bad for minorities,  bad for foreign wars, and bad for health care. He has, however, been a very effective lackey-sock puppet for Wall Street, Big Pharma, the oil magnates, and the other 1% -vermin Kleptocrats who run the country and who will undoubtedly attend his $100,000-per-plate speaking engagements when he finally retires in comfort to some gated community where he’ll work on his memoirs and cash in on his 8 years of faithful service to the racketeer class.

With revelations that the federal government has been collecting data on phone calls and Internet usage, some have questioned whether President Barack Obama has broken promises he made in the 2008 campaign. YouTube videos have popped up, juxtaposing speeches Obama made as a candidate in 2008 with his more recent argument that trade-offs must be made to protect the American people. Some see this as a reversal in his positions. So we went back and looked at promises tracked in our Obameter and other coverage of the 2008 election to see where Obama stood on the spectrum of security and privacy.

In the years leading up to the 2008 campaign and in the early stages of the campaign itself, Obama regularly emphasized the importance of civil liberties and the sanctity of the Constitution.

New York Post columnist John Crudele obliterates the despicable word-parsing. “Clinton was so careless when using her BlackBerry that the Russians stole her password,” he writes. “All Russian President Vladimir Putin’s gang had to do was log into Clinton’s account and read whatever they wanted.” When it comes to the DNC hack, “The Russians did it” is the theme-du-jour. Clinton campaign manager, Robby Mook stated Sunday that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and are] releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” The campaign itself echoed that assertion. “This is further evidence the Russian government is trying to influence the outcome of the election.”

The joint Russian – Syrian air campaign that is coordinated via a joint Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian and Russian intelligence center in the Iraqi capital Baghdad has dislodged large numbers of insurgents who have been and continue to flee to their strategic “Hinterland” in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan, as well as to Iraq. Meanwhile, several statements from top-Russian and Iraqi diplomats suggest that the Russian air campaign may be extended to also target ISIL troops in Iraq. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi told the press that his government would not hesitate to grant Russia access to Iraqi territory if Moscow wanted to expand its campaign in cooperation with Iraqi forces. Other developments suggest that Egypt shows interest in joining the intelligence center in Baghdad. While little has been reported about it, the Russian air campaign has, according to Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Minister Walid Al-Muallem been planned for months.

With primary voting set to start next month, one of Hillary Clinton’s remaining hurdles is convincing Democratic voters that she is not beholden to Wall Street and other wealthy interests that have fattened her family’s bank account with tens of millions of dollars for paid speeches, writes Chelsea Gilmour.

I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump’s fortunes skyrocketed by the minute. As Clinton’s future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and drone strikes she’d preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into the ether. With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state.  So, too, went her continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant “gray-zone” conflicts — marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone strikes, and bombing campaigns — and all those munitions she would ship to Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen. As the life drained from Clinton’s candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin’s rickety Russian petro-state to Stalin’s Soviet Union begin to die.  I saw the end, too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017. As Clinton’s political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine policy — rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests overlap — and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable “peace process.”  Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President Obama’s trillion-dollarpath to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal.  All that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.

Clinton’s foreign policy future had been a certainty.  Trump’s was another story entirely.  He had, for instance, called for a raft of military spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to wage cyber war.  All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending unspecified “federal programs,” or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither and yon.  But was any of it serious?  Was any of it true?  Would President Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump?  Or would he simply bark “Wrong!” when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships. Would Trump actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS — that is, “bomb the shit out of them” and then “take the oil” of Iraq?  Or was that just the bellicose bluster of the campaign trail?  Would he be the reckless hawk Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan intervention?  Or would he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said, “The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists.” Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the president elect would employ “an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council… Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”

Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama’s plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0.  According to some Pentagon-watchers, a potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a national security team in a timely fashion. While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump’s win, it’s unclear whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more bloated military spending. Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on at least eight nations — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly more, of the same — an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”  Trump advisor Senator Jeff Sessions said, “Trump does not believe in war. He sees war as bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction.”  Of course, Trump himself said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder.  He’s also suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations — like Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels — that are currently met with nothing graver than warning shots. So there’s good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even worse, but some reason to believe — due to his propensity for lies, bluster, and backing down — that he could also turn out to be less bellicose.

The massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government. Today I am publishing a comprehensive and important guest essay, The Purchase of Our Republic, by longtime correspondent Y. Falkson.

The Iraqi military launched a major campaign to take back a key city from the self-proclaimed Islamic State over the weekend—a move that caught the U.S. “by surprise,” in the words of one American government official.The U.S.-led coalition forces that have conducted seven months of airstrikes on Iraq’s behalf did not participate in the attack, defense officials told The Daily Beast, and the American military has no plans to chip in.Instead, embedded Iranian advisers and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are taking part in the offensive on the largely Sunni town, raising the prospect that the fight to beat back ISIS could become a sectarian war. The news is the latest indication that not all is well with the American effort against the terror group. On Friday, U.S. defense officials told The Daily Beast that a planned offensive against the ISIS stronghold of Mosul had been indefinitely postponed. Over the weekend, an American-backed rebel group in Syria announced that it was dissolving, and joining an Islamist faction.

Then there was the unexpected battle for Tikrit. Over the weekend, a reported 30,000 troops and militiamen—mostly Shiites —stormed the Sunni dominated city of Tikrit, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s hometown and the symbolic birthplace of his three decades of repressive practices against the majority Shiite population.U.S. officials were largely left in the dark of the planning and timing of the operation, defense officials said. The Pentagon said Monday it was not conducting airstrikes in support of the Tikrit offensive because the Iraqi government did not ask for such help.The U.S. had seen the prospect of strikes in Tikrit for a while but the timing and nature of the attack “caught us by surprise,” one government official explained to The Daily Beast.

The depth of Iranian involvement and the dearth of U.S. engagement in the battle for Tikrit suggested the coalition-led campaign did little to weaken Iranian influence on Iraqi security. Two U.S. defense officials told The Daily Beast that Iranian troops were firing Iranian artillery  “in the vicinity of” the Iraqi military campaign. And there were several reports that Major General Qassem Soleimani, the shadowy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s overseas operation arm, is also on the ground near Tikrit. The Iraqi decision to cut out the U.S.-led coalition turned the war against ISIS in Iraq into a dual track approach—one carried out by the U.S.-led coalition another directed by the Iranians. Each has its own military strategy.

The administration of President Barack Obama aims to keep around 10 000 US troops in Afghanistan after formal combat operations in that country end in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported late on Sunday. Citing unnamed senior US officials, the newspaper said the plan was in line with recommendations presented by General John Allen, commander of US and international forces in Afghanistan, who has proposed a force between 6 000 and 15 000 US troops. This force will conduct training and counterterrorism operations after the NATO mission in Afghanistan formally concludes at the end of 2014, the report said.

How much money does Donald Trump actually have? Trump’s image as a savvy, deal-making, and, most importantly, fabulously wealthy businessman isn’t just about his personal brand. He’s made it a key selling point for his presidential campaign as he’s run to be the Republican Party’s nominee. “I’m really rich,” he assured voters as he launched his run for president. That message was intended to convey not only that he doesn’t “need anybody’s money” to fuel his campaign but also that he will help create wealth for everyone. “We’re going to make America wealthy again,” he’s promised his supporters. “I will give you everything.” He pledges to Make America Great Again, but also explained that “you have to be wealthy in order to be great, I’m sorry to say.” Yet the nominee has also refused to release his tax returns, which would tell the public exactly how much money he has. He’s maintained that he’s worth more than $10 billion. But he’s also become known for a slippery relationship with the truth, and there’s a pile of evidence to indicate that he may be worth a lot less than that. (Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment on this evidence or on whether he will be releasing his tax returns.)

It’s difficult to get a handle on the more than 500 businesses Trump owns, plus other potential investments and sources of wealth, without him disclosing them himself. Even then, much of the valuation rests on what import one gives to the Trump brand itself and how to adequately assess the worth of his various real estate holdings. Financial media outlets have estimated what they think the mogul is worth, but none have ever come close to backing Trump’s claim of $10 billion. When Bloomberg ran a tally this week of all of his major assets, including stock holdings and the value of properties like golf courses and luxury towers, it came up with $3 billion. Forbes, after interviews with 80 sources and a piece by piece look at Trump’s empire, concluded $4.5 billion. The Bloomberg analysis, however, relies at least in part on statements Trump himself made in financial disclosure forms, while Forbes has always had to rely on information given by the Trump Organization — and Forbes has admitted that Trump consistently pushes for a higher valuation. Fortune also caught him conflating revenue and income in his campaign filing reports and thereby significantly inflating how much income he says he has. In other places, Trump has submitted information on forms that would revise his wealth significantly downward. As Crain’s reported in March, Trump got a break in his latest property tax bill for Trump Tower in New York City that is only available to married couples who have an annual income of $500,000 or less.

The trend of publicly boasting about his money and then privately swearing that his assets are worth less goes pretty far back. In 1988, Trump a told Forbes that his personal residences were worth $50 million, but he said in sworn statements that they were in fact a net liability because the debt load was more than they were worth. In 1989, while Trump insisted that he was worth between $4 and $5 billion, Forbes obtained records he had submitted to a government body that his assets were only worth $1.5 billion. In 2005, a bank evaluated his net worth to be $788 million when underwriting a construction loan for some of his real estate projects — a time when Trump claimed his worth was more like $3.6 billion. lost the lawsuit.)

Analogies with apartheid regime in the wake of Mandela’s death could accelerate efforts to ostracize Israel. This has happened in recent days: The Dutch water company Vitens severed its ties with Israeli counterpart Mekorot; Canada’s largest Protestant church decided to boycott three Israeli companies; the Romanian government refused to send any more construction workers; and American Studies Association academics are voting on a measure to sever links with Israeli universities. Coming so shortly after the Israeli government effectively succumbed to a boycott of settlements in order to be eligible for the EU’s Horizon 2020 scientific cooperation agreement, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement is picking up speed. And the writing on the wall, if anyone missed it, only got clearer and sharper in the wake of the death of Nelson Mandela.

When the United Nations passed its first non-binding resolution calling for a boycott of South Africa in 1962, it was staunchly opposed by a bloc of Western countries, led by Britain and the United States. But the grassroots campaign that had started with academic boycotts in the late 1950s gradually moved on to sports and entertainment and went on from there to institutional boycotts and divestment. Along the way, the anti-apartheid movement swept up larger and larger swaths of Western public opinion, eventually forcing even the most reluctant of governments, including Israel and the U.S., to join the international sanctions regime. 

We’re really great at knowing where thresholds are after we fall off the cliff, but that’s not very helpful,” as lake ecologist and “tipping point” researcher Stephen Carpenter told USA today in 2009.  Israel could very well be approaching such a threshold. Among the many developments that could be creating the required critical mass one can cite the passage of time since the Twin Towers attacks in September 2001, which placed Israel in the same camp as the U.S. and the West in the War on Terror; Israel’s isolation in the campaign against Iran’s nuclear programs; the disappearance of repelling archenemies such as Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gadhafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, to a lesser degree, Yasser Arafat; the relative security and lack of terror inside Israel coupled with its own persistent settlement drive; and the negative publicity generated by revelations of racism in Israeli society, the image of its rulers as increasingly rigid and right wing and the government’s own confrontations with illegal African immigrants and Israeli Bedouin, widely perceived as being tinged with bias and prejudice.  In recent days, American statesmen seem to be more alarmed about the looming danger of delegitimization than Israelis are. In remarks to both the Saban Forum and the American Joint Distribution Committee this week, Secretary of State John Kerry described delegitimization as “an existential danger." Vice President Joe Biden, speaking to the same JDC forum, went one step further: “The wholesale effort to delegitimize Israel is the most concentrated that I have seen in the 40 years I have served. It is the most serious threat in my view to Israel’s long-term security and viability.” 

By M.K. Bhadrakumar October 5, 2016 9:54 AM (UTC+8) Share 0 Tweet Print Email Comment 0 Asia Times is not responsible for the opinions, facts or any media content presented by contributors. In case of abuse, click here to report. On Monday, the Barack Obama administration fulfilled its week-old threat to suspend bilateral talks with Russia over the Syrian crisis. Does this signal that the dogs of war are about to be unleashed? The thought may seem preposterous but tensions are palpable. US spy planes are spotted ever more frequently in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea over Russian bases, especially Tartus and Hmeimim in Syria.

Russia has deployed SA-23 Gladiator anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems in Syria, the first-ever such deployments outside Russia. Western analysts see it as a pre-emptive step to counter any American cruise missile attack. Russia is not taking any chances.

Moscow factors in that the US may use some rebel groups to ensure that Russian “body bags” are sent to Moscow, as threatened explicitly by US state department spokesman John Kirby last week. Moscow suspects American involvement in the missile attack on the Russian embassy in Damascus — “Brits and Ukrainians clumsily helped the Americans”, a Russian statement in New York said on Tuesday. Indeed, passions are running high. There could be several dozen western intelligence operatives trapped with the rebel groups in east Aleppo. Clearly, the turning point was reached when the US and western allies undertook a fierce air attack on the Syrian army base at Deir Ezzor lasting an hour and killing 62 government troops. The US explanation of that being an accident lost credibility, since within an hour of the airstrike, extremist groups of al-Qaida followed up with ground attack as if acting in tandem.

President-elect Donald Trump has backed off of one of the most controversial pledges of his campaign today, his promise to bring back torture of detainees, saying following a talk with retired Gen. James Mattis that he was told torture doesn’t work as well as building a rapport with prisoners. During the primaries, Trump emphasized his belief that the US needed to bring back waterboarding and “worse” tactics to better compete with ISIS’ own brutality. At the time, he dismissed arguments torture didn’t work on the grounds that the people being tortured “deserve it.” He also called the US ban on torture a “sign of weakness.” Though it did not figure prominently in the general election campaign, Trump was still seen to be favoring torture as part of his war plan, to the extent that Human Rights Watch was expressing concern about Trump’s intentions after the election. Gen. Mattis, who is seen as a front-runner for Secretary of Defense, told Trump that in his experience torture and abuse didn’t work well, and that he’d do better with “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers.” Trump cited this conversation in his statement today backing away from torture.

Assuming Trump remains swayed on the matter, this is extremely good news for America’s future human rights record, and also may bolster Mattis’ candidacy for the Defense Secretary post. Sen. John McCain (R – AZ) and others have expressed opposition to a return to torture, and being the man who talked Trump out of such a return would likely make Mattis’ nomination hearings go smoothly.

Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing. Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars — Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon — spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and subsequent occupation were going really well (in April 2003, O’Hanlon debated with himself over whether the strategy that led to the “victory” in his beloved war should be deemed “brilliant” or just extremely “clever,” while in June 2003, Pollack assured New York Times readers that Saddam’s WMD would be found).

Since then, O’Hanlon in particular has advocated for increased military force in more countries than one can count. That’s not surprising: Brookings is funded in part by one of the Democratic Party’s favorite billionaires, Haim Saban, who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel and once said of himself: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Pollack advocated for the attack on Iraq while he was “Director of Research of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.” Saban became the Democratic Party’s largest fundraiser — even paying $7 million for the new DNC building — and is now a very substantial funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In exchange, she’s written a personal letter to him publicly “expressing her strong and unequivocal support for Israel in the face of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement.” So the hawkish Brookings is the prism through which Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy worldview can be best understood. The think tank is filled with former advisers to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and would certainly provide numerous top-level foreign policy officials in any Hillary Clinton administration. As she put it today at the start: “There are a lot of long-time friends and colleagues who perch here at Brookings.” And she proceeded to deliver exactly the speech one would expect, reminding everyone of just how militaristic and hawkish she is.

Clinton proclaimed that she “too [is] deeply concerned about Iranian aggression and the need to confront it. It’s a ruthless, brutal regime that has the blood of Americans, many others and including its own people on its hands.” Even worse, she said, “Its political rallies resound with cries of ‘Death to America.’ Its leaders talk about wiping Israel off the face of the map, most recently just yesterday, and foment terror against it. There is absolutely no reason to trust Iran.” She repeated that claim several times for emphasis: “They vow to destroy Israel. And that’s worth saying again. They vow to destroy Israel.” She vowed that in dealing with Iran, she will be tougher and more aggressive than Reagan was with the Soviet Union: “You remember President Reagan’s line about the Soviets: Trust but verify? My approach will be distrust and verify.” She also explicitly threatened Iran with war if they fail to comply: “I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon, and I will set up my successor to be able to credibly make the same pledge.” She even depicted the Iran Deal as making a future war with Iran easier and more powerful: