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Hillary Clinton’s Criticism of Russia on Syria and the Plank in Her Own Eye

by Jun 2, 2012Articles, Foreign Policy0 comments

The hypocrisy of accusing Russia of taking actions to foment a civil war while the U.S. is supplying rebel forces, including by coordinating the shipment of arms, reportedly including surplus weapons from the NATO adventure in Libya, to the Free Syrian Army via NATO ally Turkey, is staggering.

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The extraordinary hypocrisy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and of the U.S. in general, is difficult to ignore. From the New York Times, under the headline, “Clinton Says Russian Inaction May Lead to Syrian Civil War”:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton signaled the Obama administration’s mounting frustration with Russia over the unending violence in Syria on Thursday, saying that Russia’s refusal to take decisive action against President Bashar al-Assad threatened to precipitate the very civil war that Russian diplomats have said they wanted to avoid.

“I think they are, in effect, propping up the regime at a time when we should be working on a political transition,” she said during a news conference in Copenhagen….

“The Russians keep telling us they want to do everything they can to avoid a civil war, because they believe that the violence would be catastrophic,” she said. “They often, in their conversations with me, liken it to the equivalent of a very large Lebanese civil war, and they are just vociferous in their claim that they are providing a stabilizing influence. I reject that.”

Russia, along with China, has effectively blocked the United Nations Security Council from adopting more robust action that the United States and others believe would stem the violence, a point Mrs. Clinton and other American officials have repeatedly cited, though to little effect. But Mrs. Clinton, like other Obama administration officials, stopped short of calling for military action. “We’re nowhere near putting together any kind of coalition other than to alleviate the suffering,” she said, referring to humanitarian efforts to supply medical and other emergency supplies.

At the United Nations, the American ambassador, Susan E. Rice, also criticized Russia for continuing to provide arms to Syria’s government, most recently aboard a ship that docked Saturday at the Mediterranean port of Tartus. “It is not technically, obviously, a violation of international law since there’s not an arms embargo,” she said, “but it’s reprehensible that arms would continue to flow to a regime that is using such horrific and disproportionate force against its own people.”

We may agree that it is reprehensible for Russia to be arming Syria (assuming that assertion is true), but Clinton and Rice can, of course, turn that finger right around and point it at themselves. The hypocrisy of accusing Russia of taking actions to foment a civil war while the U.S. is supplying rebel forces, including by coordinating the shipment of arms, reportedly including surplus weapons from the NATO adventure in Libya, to the Free Syrian Army via NATO ally Turkey, is staggering.

The New York Times is a party to that hypocrisy by reporting these criticisms of Russia while declining to point out to readers the fact that the U.S. itself is fomenting the violence and seeking to escalate the conflict into a civil war with the goal of overthrowing the Assad regime.

“Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a log in your eye? Hypocrite! First take the log out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” – Matthew 7:3-5

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