Far more than any humanitarian concerns, these imperial ambitions led Washington to push NATO airstrikes against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999, which even the normally reluctant Congressman Bernie Sanders voted to support. The Clinton administration then sent Col. Robert Helvey, of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to train 20 militants from the Serbian student group OTPOR in the techniques of strategic nonviolence to undermine the authority of the Serbian leader Slobadan Milosevich, "the Butcher of the Balkans." Supplied by the United States and backed by NATO, OTPOR overthrew Milosevich and created the pattern for the color revolutions that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would use primarily against pro-Russian governments on the edges of the former Soviet Union.
You can read the story at length in "How Washington Learned to Love Nonviolence," which I wrote in 2009. But events moved on. As Obama's secretary of state, Hillary Clinton presided over the National Endowment for Democracy, Foggy Bottom's own "democracy bureaucracy," and outside contractors like Freedom House to create a second Orange Revolution against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. You can find this documented in "Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev," Part I and Part II. Hillary and Bill even played a personal role in the run-up to the coup against Yanukovych, speaking at an oligarch-sponsored conference in Ukrainian Crimea in September 2013.
The role of the Clintons dramatizes two key historical realities. Many progressives tend to whitewash the Democratic Party by blaming the coup on Republican neocons. Their best evidence is the hands-on role played by Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state, the wife of Robert Kagan, one of the neocon founders. But Hillary was Nuland's long-time boss and mentor, and she exemplifies her party's long tradition of liberal intervention. Kagan has now turned against the Republicans and endorsed Hillary for president. A historian by trade, he has also been calling himself a liberal interventionist.
Second, where Nuland gained fame for saying "f*ck the EU," Hillary characteristically used Washington's coup-making machinery to serve European ambitions to bring Ukraine into the EU -- not into NATO, at least not at the time. Obama made this clear in a roundabout way in the April edition of Atlantic Monthly -- and in scathing terms.
"There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what it is worth going to war for and what is not," he told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. "Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it."
What neither the foreign policy realist Obama nor the more interventionist Hillary Clinton has ever made clear is how it was in America's interest to make a coup in Kiev to help the EU expand to include a conflict-riven and extremely corrupt Ukraine.
Sarkozy's War
A bigger problem arose over Hillary's first war in Libya. And, once again, it was never quite the humanitarian venture that both she and Obama made it out to be.
As I reported much too cautiously in April 2011, the story began the previous Autumn, when Nuri Mesmari, Gaddafi's chief of protocol and one of his closest confidants, came to Paris and began meeting regularly with French intelligence officials. On at least one occasion, at the Hotel Concorde Lafayette on November 16, he reportedly had a long session with close collaborators of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Shortly after, French soldiers disguised as businessmen travelled to Benghazi to meet secretly with Col. Abdallah Gehani, a Libyan Air Force officer whom Mesmari had identified as about to turn against Gadhafi. On January 22, Gadhafi's security forces arrested Gehani, but the rebellion was already under way, breaking out on February 17, initially as a peaceful protest, but increasingly with armed force.
Much of what I reported has since been confirmed in Hillary's secret emails and Exit Gaddafi, a book by Ethan Chorin, a former US diplomat. Sarkozy and his government were in touch with the rebels well before the philosopher and journalist Bernard Henri Levy ever warned of an imminent massacre of civilians in Benghazi -- and months before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met in Paris on March 14, 2011, with the Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril and gave him her seal of approval.
Some of the story still remains a mystery. On February 25, for example, the too-well-connected Israeli news service Debkafile reported that the night before French, British, and US military advisers landed in the region, dispatched from warships and missile boats off the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk. Was this Israeli-inspired propaganda? Or was the US militarily involved before Hillary gave her go-ahead?
Whatever Washington's start date, the bigger question is why Clinton and Obama went along with Sarkozy's war, knowing as her emails state that French companies had been guaranteed the lion's share of Libya gas and oil. Hillary's answer comes through all too clearly in the two-part New York Times special on her leading role in yet another war of choice that "ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms."
The defining moment, and one that shows the danger that NATO and our European allies now pose, came on March 19, when the wily Sarkozy met in Paris with British prime minister David Cameron and Secretary Clinton. French jets were already in the air, he told them. "I will recall them if you want me to." Hillary was not prepared to object. "I'm not going to recall the planes and create the massacre in Benghazi," she grumbled to an aide. And that was how Sarkozy blackmailed the world's most powerful nation into a war that served no American interest other than making nice with untrustworthy allies.
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