[NYTr] Bill Clinton "Ambassador to the World?" Ask Latin America!

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 11, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/giordano10112007.html

Bill Clinton as Ambassador to the World?

Ask Latin America, First

By AL GIORDANO

On a recent trip to the island of his Oxford alma mater, Bill Clinton
didn't say what color the would-be First Laddie would choose for the
White House drapes, but he did tell the BBC what job he'd like Senator
Hillary Clinton to give him if she wins the White House: "I'd be of
most use to her doing something to try to help restore America's
standing in the world and build more allies and get us to work together
again."

The former president began his jockeying to become
Ambassador-to-the-World last month when he introduced his partner at a
Labor Day weekend campaign event in New Hampshire. "You want to fix
America's position in the world overnight?" he asked, claiming that
public opinion polls in Europe and Canada favor Senator Clinton in the
US election. "Elect Hillary president."

European and Canadian borders, however, mark the far limits of the
geographical zone where another Clinton White House might be a welcome
sight abroad. The greatest challenges for the United States brand,
internationally, come from the rest of the planet and its peoples. In
most corners of this earth, the name Clinton is as distrusted as that
of Bush.

Bill acknowledged to the BBC that "most of the alienation" around the
globe stems from the war in Iraq. That his favorite presidential
candidate voted to authorize that war in 2002 is only one of the
spoonfuls of salt that Clinton, Inc. heaps upon that wound.

How soon we forget that terrible day back on December 16, 1998 when
President Clinton addressed the nation in a televised speech: "Earlier
today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security
targets in Iraq."

And that was just five months after US cruise missiles rained down upon
an aspirin factory near Khartoum, Sudan: a murderous grandstand move
that changed the national subject just three days after the president
had the embarrassing duty to testify before a grand jury about his
personal problems. Clinton's claim that the Sudanese factory had to be
destroyed because it was developing chemical weapons of mass
destruction turned out to be as false as George W. Bush's WMD hoax.
Chemists waded through the rubble, collected soil samples and found not
a trace. Later, the Clinton Justice Department settled out of court
with the plant's owners, returning $24 million to them from the US
Treasury, to hush up the scandal.

Global distrust and resentment toward the United States did not begin
with George W. Bush; Clinton, as president, fueled it, too. The true
legacy of the first Clinton White House around the world precludes the
former president's illusory claim that he can somehow be the magician
that would "restore America's standing." While Bill Clinton remains
popular inside the United States, and perhaps among white elites in
Europe, he would be an albatross, not a talisman, around the neck of
future US policy in the Middle East and Africa. But that's not all. His
Latin America policies are remembered particularly bitterly in this
hemisphere.

The Democrats' Neighborhood Bully

Unlike former Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter,
whose legacies are revered in many parts of Latin America (in peasant
shacks throughout the hemisphere it is still common to find a portrait
of JFK next to those of saints, saviors and popes on candlelit altars),
Clinton's heavy-handed policies toward America's southern neighbors
still invoke widespread resentment and distrust down here. The
Democrat's success in enacting a North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) that his Republican predecessor was unable to sell to a
Democratic Congress makes Clinton the man singularly most responsible
for the destruction of the Mexican family farm, the natural environment
and the labor rights of industrial workers in Mexico. The corresponding
exodus of tens of millions of its citizens to the United States since
NAFTA took effect in 1994 has not been easy on the migrants, their
families or on US workers, either.

When it came to Mexico and Latin America, President Clinton was the
looter-in-chief. He wielded the US-imposed war on drugs and other
pressures to destabilize Latin American governments and economies. Once
weakened, it was easier to impose "free market" policies (and open the
door for corporate America) upon them.

In 1996 and 1997 the Clinton administration "decertified" Colombia as
drug-war ally (cutting off much US and international aid). Then in 2000
the Clinton-authored US military intervention called Plan Colombia
launched a terrible environmental and human bloodbath there that
continues to this day. As commander in chief, Clinton exempted the
Colombian state from most of the human rights conditions that the US
Congress had insisted be part of the multi-billion dollar expenditure.
Seven years later, the Colombian military and its related paramilitary
squads have assassinated thousands of Colombian union organizers, farm
worker leaders and other social fighters, the narco-state is more
corrupt, much of the Amazon rainforest has been harmed by Plan
Colombia's aerial herbicide assault, and the Colombian Civil War rages
on, unabated.

Even as Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, and Democratic Congressional
leaders now shun the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe due
to his relentless attacks on human rights, Bill Clinton made Uribe a
plenary guest of honor at his recent Clinton Global Initiative
gathering in New York. Last June, Clinton accepted an award from the
butcher of Bogota.

It was Washington's support for Plan Colombia, and the harmful effects
it had on neighboring countries, that began the rift between the US and
Venezuela, not, contrary to corporate media spin, anything that Hugo
Chavez had said or done at the time. The decayed US relations with
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador began not under Bush, but with the
Clinton administration.

In Latin America, Clinton hitched himself to a generation of
hyper-capitalist heads of state, visiting Brazil's Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, Argentina's Carlos Menem and Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo in 1997
as each of them pursued neoliberal economic policies. The consequences
on their peoples provoked their respective parties' electoral defeats
in the succeeding presidential campaigns there.

Clinton visited Zedillo again in 1999, this time for an "anti-drug
summit" held on the vast hacienda of a banker accused of
narco-trafficking and drug money laundering, Roberto Hernandez Ramirez,
president and owner of Banamex. I reported the story from that summit,
and after a series of follow-up reports found myself defending a libel
suit filed in New York by his bank. We emerged victorious in 2001 with
a precedent that established, for the first time, First Amendment
protections for Internet journalists. But as that case was grinding
through the wheels of justice, something very strange and unexpected
occurred that shed more light on the Clinton administration policies
toward Mexico.

The Great Bank Robbery

In 1998, Clinton's treasury secretary Robert Rubin authorized a sting
operation on drug money laundering Mexican bankers called Operation
Casablanca, which led to the indictment of two Banamex executives and
motions to seize more than $3 million dollars from the bank. This came
at a time when Clinton's state department was rattling sabers with
threats to decertify Mexico as it had done in previous years to
Colombia.

When the Clinton administration came to an end in 2001, Rubin left
Treasury to become director of Citigroup in New York, the largest
financial services company on earth. After Rubin had, from Washington,
lowered the value of Banamex (to much greater impact than any of our
litigated news stories could have possibly had), he, from the private
sector in New York, engineered Citigroup's purchase of that same
Mexican bank in 2001. The former National Bank of Mexico, for a
controversially low price of $14 billion dollars (the sale was tax-free
on the Mexican end, causing wide outrage here), became the property of
Rubin's Citigroup in the United States, and the disgraced Hernandez
Ramirez along with another Banamex partner received seats on the board
of directors of Citigroup.

It's that kind of shenanigans and revolving door influence that Senator
Jim Webb (D-Virginia) invoked when campaigning against "Robert Rubin
Democrats" to win his seat in 2006. But it cuts much deeper in the
memories of the Mexican citizenry and press, which will never, ever,
view the extended hand of Bill Clinton as one to be welcomed, much less
one that could "restore America's standing."

Outside of the Caribbean island nation of Haiti, to where Clinton sent
troops to back the democratically elected government Jean-Bertrand
Aristide (and to where the Bush administration later sent troops to
back a coup d'etat against it), I can't think of a single other
populace in Latin America that would like to see Bill Clinton
representing the United States in the region again.

The oligarch class of Latin American countries would of course be
thrilled with a new Clinton administration, this time with Bill in the
role he openly seeks as Ambassador-to-the-World, in particular those
that took their money and ran to Miami.

Given various opportunities to break from previous Clinton
administration failures in Latin America, Senator Hillary Clinton had
made it clear that, if president, she'll continue down the same harmful
path. When last July, rival Democratic Senator Barack Obama said he
would be willing to meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in his first
year in office without preconditions, candidate Clinton labeled such
vision as "irresponsible and frankly naïve." When Obama went to Miami's
Little Havana to call for easing the US embargo on Cuba, the Clinton
campaign replied that it would not even "talk about" changes in US Cuba
policy.

What's not clear is whether Bill Clinton's testing-the-water campaign
in London last week in favor of his becoming the next administrations
roving international diplomat was a calculated message delivery from
the Clinton campaign, or whether the polls have simply gone to Bill's
head and he picks a peculiar way of lobbying his wife for the job he
wants. He has previously stated that he'll do whatever is asked of him
by his presidential spouse, should she win the Oval Office, but would
otherwise take a hands-off approach. The contrary statement to the BBC
was the first suggestion that one or both of the Clintons have that
specific foreign policy role in mind for the former president.

Candidate Clinton has also spoken aloud on the campaign trail that if
elected, prior to her inauguration, she would send "emissaries" across
the world to announce to foreigners that, "America is back" (a phrase
lifted from Obama's stump speech). But a new Clinton White House is not
likely to impress the world in the ways that a black American
president, son of an African immigrant, with a "post-boomer" way of
speaking and an outside-the-box approach to foreign policy clearly
would. "It would be, I think in many ways, a far more powerful thing in
the world, to have the first black president of the United States," the
South African former archbishop Desmond Tutu told ABC News last month.
"You don't know what it would do to people of color in other parts of
the world." The Ambassador Bill talk from the Clinton camp intends to
compete with Obama's strong point, but it reveals a belief in their own
hype that hits the red zone on the hubris scale.

In August, Senator Clinton (again, responding to a refreshing foreign
policy statement by Obama in which he ruled out first use of nuclear
weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan in the hunt for bin Laden) refused
to take the nuclear option off the table, and lectured Obama at an
AFL-CIO debate condescendingly that, "You can think big, but remember,
you shouldn't always say everything you think if you're running for
president, because they could have consequences," she reflected the
very kind of American arrogance that gives most of the world no reason
at all to trust or want to work with the United States.

While Americans feud at home as Democrats vs. Republicans, the previous
Clinton and Bush administrations have behaved without distinction
toward most of the rest of the world. The suggestion that I'm Bill
Clinton, I'm here to help you, and I can "restore America's standing"
for you, is laughingstock in other lands, and especially de risa among
the United States' closest neighbors in Latin America. We're just not
sure, as we listen to such fantasy, if we're laughing or we're crying.


[Al Giordano, the founder of Narco News, has lived in and reported from
Latin America for the past decade. His opinions expressed in this
column do not reflect those of Narco News nor of The Fund for Authentic
Journalism, which supports his work. Al encourages commentary,
critique, additional analysis and news tips for his continued coverage
of the US presidential campaign to be sent to his email address:
narconews at gmail.com. ]