The Good Invader

By 8:22 PM

Ever since Hillary broke with Barack over the virtues of doing stupid stuff, the editorial columnists have been pretending that she has some new and exciting foreign policy. She doesn't. The left has been denouncing her as an interventionist, the second coming of George W. Bush. They just can't explain how Hillary is any more of an interventionist than her old boss who bombed Libya, is bombing Iraq and wanted to bomb Syria.

Other places he's bombing include Yemen and Pakistan.

And all that is without taking account of his attempt to implement the Arab Spring's regime changes across the region with tragic and disastrous results. The closest thing to a disagreement between them was over Syria and considering that Obama was days away from getting into Syria, that's not much of a firewall. Hillary took a cheap shot at Obama.

The media spent so much time discussing the cheap shot and their hugging summit that it completely ignored the fact that it was a cheap shot with no substance to it. Hillary and Obama have the same ideological DNA and get their ideas from the same narrow circles. Hillary doesn't have a better or worse foreign policy. They both have the same foreign policy.

 Underneath the manufactured political reality show drama that happens when a candidate of the same party as a lame duck administration tries to explain why she's so different than the miserable failure now holding down the job is the sober reality that they're both reading from the same scripts. How could they not? Hillary Clinton is trying to distance herself from the foreign policy of an administration in which she served as Secretary of State.

Hillary is trying to distance herself from her own approach to international relations That's a level of schizophrenia that is a bit extreme even for a woman who sheds accents, identities and sports team affinities the way that a snake sheds its skin. Hillary isn't disavowing Obama. She's disavowing Hillary.

The newly reinvented Hillary is suddenly pro-Israel after spending years berating the Jewish State. She suddenly realized the importance of having a coherent foreign policy after having the same confused position on Iraq as John Kerry. She is suddenly full of the wisdom that was missing until last year. And she's somehow more of an interventionist than Obama even though they were both intervening in the exact same places.

Hillary is an interventionist. But so is Obama. The non-interventionist, like the pacifist, is a mythical woodland creature who appears in the fables of many cultures. He isn't however to be found in the vicinity of Washington D.C. Break down the arguments of the non-interventionist and you will find a set of conspiracy theories explaining why every previous intervention was motivated by bad faith, secret agendas and racism.

The non-interventionist doesn't reject intervention; instead he contends that every previous intervention failed because it was carried out at the behest of the banks, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the Jews, American arrogance and the oil industry. But the non-interventionist who makes it into the White House is free to intervene as much as he likes because his motives are pure. He isn't trying to secretly build oil pipelines or put money into Haliburton.

He won't be a unilateral cowboy launching new crusades for no good reason. And so he becomes the non-interventionist interventionist, the multilateral unilateralist, the good invader.

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