Hillary Cracks the Whip
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was at it again last week. She was in Turkey attending a NATO gathering dealing with what to do about the succession in Libya, based on the perhaps erroneous assumption that Muammar Gadhafi is on his way out. Clinton and NATO decided, based on their own admittedly partial view of the situation, that the Gadhafi regime is no longer legitimate and that the rebels who are trying to topple him are now to be regarded as the legal government. The “international recognition” will enable them to use the roughly $30 billion in frozen Libyan government assets, mostly located in American and European banks. Hopefully, things will go better than they did in Iraq back in 2003. Washington sent in a proconsul supported by a host of neocon Myrmidons to make sure things would run smoothly. More than $20 billion of Iraqi state “reconstruction” funds were unfrozen and then went missing after liberation took place. The Iraqi people are still waiting for the electricity to come back on.
Clinton also took some heavy-handed swipes at Syria, making clear that both she and her boss want to see regime change. Three hundred fifty representatives of Syrian dissident groups were perhaps not coincidentally present in Istanbul for a “National Salvation Conference,” so Clinton took the opportunity to denounce President Bashar al-Assad’s government as having “lost legitimacy.” The White House backed up Clinton’s possibly impromptu comment, and over at Foggy Bottom, Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s neoconnish press spokeswoman, made the case more explicitly, denouncing “a Syrian government that continues to beat, imprison, torture, slaughter its own people.”
If Syria sounds like any number of regimes that the United States has quite comfortable relationships with, it should. While it would seem that international conferencing and seeking to overthrow two regimes would make for a busy weekend for even the most peripatetic secretary of state, Hillary also decided to take on her host, Turkey.