Antony Blinken is not the Secretary of State the United States or the world needs, and the U.S. Senate should reject his nomination. Here are 10 reasons:
1. A president elect who has been part of every disastrous war for decades should not be nominating for Secretary of State a key advisor who helped him get numerous critical decisions wrong. Biden was the committee chair who guided the Iraq war authorization through the Senate with Blinken’s help. Blinken helped Biden into catastrophe after catastrophe in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere. If Biden claims to have regrets or to have learned anything, he’s not yet showing it.
2. Blinken has been part even of Biden’s hairbrained schemes that weren’t acted on, such as the plan to divide Iraq into three separate puppet states.
3. Blinken has supported Trump’s bombings in Syria and arming of Ukrainians, militarism that went beyond Obama-Biden policies.
4. Blinken has urged that campaign promises of ending endless wars not be taken too seriously.
5. Blinken is a war profiteer. He doesn’t just promote mass slaughter as a matter of principle. He gets rich from it. He co-founded WestExec Advisors in order to profit from his connections by lining up corporate contracts with the U.S. military.
6. The State Department as weapons marketing firm will grease the revolving door for Blinken, but spells disaster for the world. Blinken is supposedly on board with ending the war on Yemen. But what about ending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE? What about ending weapons sales to all brutal governments, as legislation sponsored by Ilhan Omar would do? Congresswoman Omar worked to elect Biden, but he seems to be taking the opposite approach. The United States is just saying goodbye to a president who both bragged about weapons deals and denounced the influence of the military industrial complex. Biden seems unlikely to talk in either of those ways, but likely to walk in Trump’s footsteps.
7. Blinken co-founded that weapons profiteering firm with Michele Flournoy who could be nominated Secretary of War. The State Department could become more an arm of the military than ever.
8. We’d been (absurdly) warned that corporate hack nominees would be necessary in order to get diversity tokenism. But this is a corporate hack white guy. Exactly how many times are we expected to roll over and play dead?
9. The big bucks (and deaths) are in the buildup to war with Russia and China. Blinken is all in. He’s a Russiagate believer, as well as a believer in militarism as the proper response to all hostility, fictional or otherwise. He’s openly pushing for hostility toward Russia.
10. Blinken supported the Iran deal but not peace with Iran, not truth about Iran. The Blinken-Biden team is dedicated to militarism on behalf of the Israeli, as well as the U.S., government. What could go wrong?
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David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
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