The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result

To pitch her book, Hillary Clinton is sitting down this week for a series of media interviews, mostly with supportive TV personalities, such as Rachel Maddow, to discuss her views of “What Happened,” the book’s title. Calls for Clinton to be quiet and disappear are misguided for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that she is a very smart, informed, and articulate politician, which means her interviews — especially when she’s liberated from programmed campaign mode — are illuminating about how she, and her fellow establishment Democrats who have driven the party into a ditch, really think.

An hourlong interview she sat for with Vox’s Ezra Klein is particularly worthwhile. Clinton, for good reason, harbors a great deal of affection for Klein, which she expressed on multiple occasions during their chat. But Klein nonetheless pressed her on a series of criticisms that have been voiced about her and the Democrats’ stunted political approach, banal policies, status-quo-perpetuating worldview, and cramped aspirations that seem far more plausible as authors of her defeat than the familiar array of villains — Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein, Jim Comey, the New York Times — that she and her most ardent supporters are eager to blame.

Despite being illuminating, Klein’s discussion with Clinton contains a glaring though quite common omission: There is not a word about the role of foreign policy and endless war during the entire hour. While some of this may be attributable to Klein’s perfectly valid journalistic focus on domestic policies, such as health care, a huge factor in Clinton’s political career and how she is perceived — as a senator and especially as secretary of state — is her advocacy of multiple wars and other military actions, many, if not all, of which were rather disastrous, rendering it quite strange to spend an hour discussing why she lost without so much as mentioning any of that.

This is not so much a critique of Klein’s specific interview (which, again, is worthwhile) as it is reflective of the broader Democratic Party desire to pretend that the foreign wars it has repeatedly prosecuted, and the endless killing of innocent people for which it is responsible, do not exist. Part of that is the discomfort of cognitive dissonance: the Democratic branding and self-glorification as enemies of privilege, racism, and violence are directly in conflict with the party’s long-standing eagerness to ignore, or even actively support, policies which kill large numbers of innocent people from Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia to Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza, but which receive scant attention because of the nationality, ethnicity, poverty, distance, and general invisibility of their victims.

But a major part of this minimization is a misperception of the domestic political importance of these policies. From the beginning of his candidacy through the general election, Donald Trump rhetorically positioned himself as a vehement opponent of endless war, inveighing against both parties when doing so.

Though there is now a revisionist effort underway to falsely depict those who pointed this out as being gullible believers in Trump’s dovish and antiwar credentials, the reality is that most of us who warned of the efficacy of Trump’s antiwar campaign theme made explicitly clear that there was no reason to believe Trump would actually be dovish if he were elected. Indeed, from Trump’s history of endorsing the wars he was denouncing to his calls for greater and more savage bombing to his desire to nullify the Iran deal, there was ample reasons to doubt that he would usher in dovishness of any kind. But the point was that Trump’s antiwar posturing was a politically potent approach because of how unpopular endless war and militarism have become:

These warnings — about the efficacy of Trump’s attacks on America’s bipartisan posture of Endless War — largely fell on deaf ears. Clinton continued to defend the virtues of her record of militarism, and even now, those topics are excluded almost completely from discussions of why Clinton lost.

What makes this exclusion particularly notable is that empirical data suggests that questions of endless war and militarism played a big, if not decisive, role in the outcome of the 2016 election. A study published earlier this year by Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner and Minnesota Law School’s Francis Shen makes the case quite compellingly.

Titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?,” the paper rests on the premise that these wars have exclusively burdened a small but politically important group of voters — military families — and that “in the 2016 election Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America.” Particularly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three states that Clinton lost — “there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” Examining the data, the paper concludes that “inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election.”

The paper notes that Trump did not run as any kind of pacifist but rather as someone who “promised a foreign policy that would be both simultaneously more muscular and more restrained,” yet “promised to be much more reticent” in committing the U.S. to new, foreign military adventures. The scholars argue that not only military families but Americans generally have grown increasingly hostile to these policies:

In one sense, all Americans have been affected by fifteen years of nearly continuous war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans of all stripes have watched each conflict’s developments unfold through extensive media coverage, movies, and personal stories from veterans returning from combat. Indeed, so great are its posited effects on American society that some analysts have proclaimed the emergence of an “Iraq Syndrome,” echoing the public skepticism about the efficacy of the use of force and the growing popular reluctance to employ it that emerged after Vietnam.

Clinton was uniquely ill-suited to channel this widespread sentiment given that she has vocally supported almost every proposed U.S. war and military intervention over the last 20 years (including ones Obama rejected in places such as Syria and Ukraine and, of course, Iraq). For that reason, she was one of the leading symbols of war and militarism, perhaps its most potent one, and Trump — however deceitful and cynical it might have been — positioned himself as her opposite.

From these premises, the authors argue that had the U.S. fought fewer wars, or at least experienced fewer casualties, Clinton would have won those three states and thus won the election:

One need not uncritically accept this maximalist conclusion to acknowledge the vital point: Clinton specifically and Democrats generally are perceived, with good reason, to be proponents of endless war policies that critical constituencies now despise. From a policy perspective, endless war and militarism shape virtually every key issue, from budgetary priorities and tax policy to corporatism and lobbyist power, making it inexcusable on the merits to ignore or downplay them. But also as a political matter, any discussion of why Clinton lost, or what the Democrats must reform, is woefully incomplete if it excludes these questions.

Clinton committed crimes in Libya.

Why would she want to talk about that?

This whole tour is just part of her negotiations to try and stay out of prison.

“If you try to put me in prison, my loyal flying monkeys will riot!”

Lock her up.

....a huge factor in Clinton’s political career and how she is perceived — as a senator and especially as secretary of state — is her advocacy of multiple wars and other military actions, many, if not all, of which were rather disastrous, rendering it quite strange to spend an hour discussing why she lost without so much as mentioning any of that.

Benghazi is NEVER mentioned by the liberal elite press either... Maybe Donna Brazille is still working on the correct answers...

“to acknowledge the vital point: Clinton specifically and Democrats generally are perceived, with good reason, to be proponents of endless war policies that critical constituencies now despise.”

Close, but one mistake. The GOP is just as thrilled about every single one of the endless wars. Outside of Trump and Rand Paul, the entire GOP field was fully on board for all the neocon wars, regime changes, etc. Many in the debates advocated that we start shooting at Russian jets too.

If you dislike America in the constant state of war that the chattering class tells us is no big deal, and that we should expect for 50+ years more, Trump was the only alternative.
And when he won, the GOP swarmed in to kill off Mike Flynn and surround him with Generals and advisors who pushed for all the wars to keep chugging on.

The article is in the ballpark, but laying all the wars at the feet of democrats implies that the GOP wanted to stop them.

“Benghazi is NEVER mentioned by the liberal elite press either”

No it isn’t. And it’s only mentioned by our side as a heroic shootout where Obama failed to rescue them.

But nobody talks about it being a CIA/State weapons running operation to supply Al Qeida and other rebels in Syria. That Benghazi annex was an un-American operation and was where we switched sides in the war on terror.

This is a perfect example of just how blitheringly stupid a set of self-appointed intellectuals can get once they get on a theoretical jag. Even more so should the researchers think “... including the fact that she (HRC) is a very smart, informed, and articulate politician.

“Military families” are roughly 1% of the population. HRC has no association in the twisted minds of liberals with “endless war”. She is a kind, caring, phenomenally experienced leader with arguably more experience near the Oval Office than anyone including the Oval Office Cleaning Crew.

Had Trump not run, she would have won and won bigly. She lost because she managed to offend even her most active genitalist supporters with her vicious, cheating, murderous lying ways. Period. She started by writing off middle class whites. Then she offended half the country with “deplorables”. It became clear even to diehard libs that Bernie had been snaked out of what might have been a winning campaign that was cleaning her clock early and often. And finally, when the lying got so bad that even ardent women supporters could not abide her deception, they stayed home.

I think possibly the disastrous nation building in the Middle East lead voters to Trump in the primaries. I am not sure how that played though among moderate voters. The polls showed that people still believed, greatly to their error, that Trump would more likely get America into new wars. So while Clinton was definitely more the warmonger, that didn’t seem to reach the ears of swing voters, as far as I can tell.

The attempt to hide the view of Hillary collapsing said everything we needed to know about the “transparency” of the campaign. Then they doubled down and started lying about it.

At that point anyone who didn’t know Hillary’s campaign staff were pathological liars had an IQ below room temperature.

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