August 10, 2016
Page 7
O PINION
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Sacrifice Muslim Soldier Shouldn’t Have Had to Make
Clinton’s
record is much
bloodier
P eter C erto
It was impos-
sible not to be
moved as Kh-
izr and Ghazala
Khan, two Muslim immigrants
from Pakistan, stood before
the Democratic National Con-
vention and mourned their son
Humayun, a U.S. soldier who’d
been killed in Iraq.
Humayun, his grieving father
recalled, was “the best of Amer-
ica.” Yet if it were up to Donald
Trump, Khan said, the slain sol-
dier “never would have been in
America.” It was a compelling
rebuke to the GOP nominee’s
unrepentant calls to banish
Muslims and immigrants alike.
Trump, in his fashion, re-
sponded poorly. The billionaire
insisted that, like the Khans,
he’s “made a lot of sacrifices.”
He sneered that perhaps the be-
reaved Ghazala had remained
silent on stage because “she
wasn’t allowed” to talk.
by
It was sad and ugly. But amid
the word salad was a kernel of
truth: “Hillary voted for the Iraq
war,” Trump cried, “not me!”
There at least, he wasn’t
wrong.
As a senator from New York,
Clinton not only voted for the
war, but was among its most
vocal supporters in either party,
eagerly rehashing the Bush ad-
ministration’s claims that Sadd-
am Hussein was developing
weapons of mass destruction.
“I stand by the vote,” Clinton
told the Council on Foreign Re-
lations in late 2003, when those
weapons had failed to material-
ize. Six months later, Humayun
Khan was killed by a car bomb
in Iraq. He was one of 4,424
U.S. soldiers to die in that war
— along with perhaps up to a
million Iraqi civilians.
The war in which Khan gave
his life has been a political foot-
ball for so long that it’s become
hard to appreciate just what an
enormous catastrophe it was —
and remains. The invasion ex-
ploded sectarian tensions across
the Middle East and led directly
to the rise of ISIS.
As the worst refugee cri-
sis since World War II unfolds
across the Middle East and Eu-
rope — and as ISIS terrorists
murder innocents from Bagh-
dad to Belgium to San Ber-
nardino — the gaping wound
we opened in Iraq sits beneath
it all like a black hole, eviscer-
ating human lives at a ferocious
speed even 13 years later.
Yet as late as her first pres-
idential bid, Clinton refused to
apologize for supporting the
invasion. If you’re looking for
“someone who did not cast that
vote or has said his vote was a
mistake,” she told Democratic
voters in 2007, “there are others
to choose from.”
As her polling numbers
soured, Clinton eventually did
cop to making a “mistake” on
Iraq. But that didn’t stop her,
once she joined Obama’s ad-
ministration, from supporting
escalation in Afghanistan, deep-
er involvement in Syria, and in-
tervention in Libya’s civil war,
which also ended disastrously.
As a presidential candidate
this year, Clinton remains com-
mitted to launching a “no-fly
zone” in Syria. What could go
wrong?
Well, in Iraq, a no-fly zone
gave way to a full-scale inva-
sion. In Libya, it gave way to
regime change and a civil war.
Both countries became basket
cases and ISIS strongholds,
leading the Obama administra-
tion to launch new wars in each
afterward — most recently with
a huge U.S. bombing raid on
Sirte, Libya.
Is there any reason to expect
Syria to turn out better?
Clinton’s rhetoric on the
Muslim world might be friend-
lier than Trump’s, but her re-
cord is much bloodier. Even
while she condemns Trump’s
erratic statements on foreign
policy, there’s no evidence she
sees any need to redraw her
own hawkish playbook.
The Humayun Khans of
America, who freely offer their
lives to protect their country, de-
serve a better approach — one
based on diplomacy and human
rights. And so do the millions
of people of the Middle East,
Muslim and otherwise.
OtherWords.org editor Peter
Certo writes about foreign pol-
icy for the Institute for Policy
Studies.
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