NY LIBERTARIANS MIGHT RUN CINDY SHEEHAN AGAINST
HILLARY CLINTON
From the Libertarians
for Peace Yahoo Group. [October 2, 2005]
 [HollywoodInvestigator.com] John Clifton, a Navy submarine veteran and Chair of the Libertarian
Party of New York (LPNY), has called for an end to martial law occupation
of Iraq, and a no-timetable withdrawal of military forces from the region. He rejects the compromise idea of a
timetable proposed by his own party's national organization.
He has also issued an 'open
invitation' to activist Cindy Sheehan,
a mother whose son died in the war last year, to consider running as a
peace candidate against Hillary Clinton in the 2006 U.S. Senate race.
"The invasion
remains unjustified, so the subsequent occupation has no underlying moral
basis,"
said Clifton. "Thus, neither does a phased withdrawal. If no
one can answer Sheehan's question, then there's no 'noble cause' for which
American troops or Iraqi civilians should be dying right now, period."
Sheehan
has openly challenged Senator Clinton to plainly speak out against the
war or "lose her job."
Mr. Clifton
has invited Sheehan to join others vying for the Libertarian nomination
when the party holds its state convention next April. He discounts
the
"we broke it, we must fix it" rationale offered in support of occupation,
pointing to the construction of over a dozen permanent U.S. military bases
in Iraq, which he says clearly shows the deployment is anything but temporary.
"It's
about empire-building, plain and simple," said Clifton. "The US-led
invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq was and remains
unconstitutional, is contrary to the non-aggression and non-interventionist
position of Libertarians, and to the principles of just war."
He
argues that evidence such as the forged Niger document and the Downing
Street memos prove the Bush and Blair administrations knew the case for
Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction was non-existent, and
not merely a mistake or "intelligence failure ' in the run up to the war.
Clifton
adds: "An exit plan recently commissioned by National
LP does not conform to the platform position authorized by the party
membership, as it has the appearance of accepting the legitimacy of the
intervention and current occupation. Many New York Libertarians instead
support the party's and Founding
Fathers' non-interventionist principles, as well as the will of the
sovereign people of Iraq, most of whom desire the military presence there
to end without a timetable."
Clifton's
appeal comes in the wake of a longer formal statement recently considered
by LPNY that also called for an immediate withdrawal of occupying forces
from Iraq. The statement was nearly identical to a resolution passed
by the Libertarian Party of California this August.
Recent polls echo this sentiment, such as one showing
52% now in favor of ending U.S. intervention of the country,"with or without
a timetable." Given the near 2,000 U.S. troops now dead and over
100,000 civilians estimated killed in Iraq since 2003, a recent Zogby poll
has even indicated 42% agree that President Bush should be impeached, if
it could be shown that he misled Americans into war.
Still,
the New York resolution was not approved, with half of the state committee
declining to vote on the measure. Mr. Clifton laments the equivocation
or 'pragmatism' of some members of his party, and notes it is lagging behind
the
public. "At this point, the majority of Americans are more 'radical'
in their position than many Libertarians are."
Mr. Clifton
is a black conservative Libertarian who voted for Reagan in '84, and he
himself ran against Hillary Clinton in 2000 as the LPNY candidate for U.S.
Senate. He admires Reagan's decision to pullout of Lebanon following
the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983, saying "the episode
teaches us there are responsible methods to respond to terrorism without
escalating intervention. Then as now, 'support our troops -- send
them home' is a sound strategy."
Clifton
agrees fully with columnist and former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary
Paul Craig Roberts, who has written: "Dead and wounded Americans are too
high a price to pay for a war based on deception. This alone is reason
to end the war, if necessary by impeaching Bush and Cheney and arresting
the neoconservatives for treason. Naked aggression is a war crime
under the Nuremberg standard, and neoconservatives have brought this shame
to America."
Citing
the example of China, Clifton points to the use of trade and diplomacy
to induce un-free regimes into becoming freer, as a more productive basis
for international policy.
"Libertarians are not pacifists" he says,
"we're opposed to introducing aggression as a means to solve problems,
including bad dictator problems. We're pro-JUST war, pro-Constitution
and opposed to fraud. The current Gulf conflict fails to make muster
on all three fronts. So I say, no more no-win wars based on lies. Let the globalists and militarists who backed this carnage and want it
to continue, send their own sons and daughters, and their own dollars to
build up their Empires. Americans should fight no one else's war,
anymore."
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