Bill Clinton: Hillary wants me to restore image of US

It will enrage right wingers, but Bill Clinton is the man to restore America's tattered image worldwide, and he has told the Guardian that, if Hillary is elected, she wants him to set about restoring that image immediately.

"The average American knows instinctively that we have almost no problems in the world that we can solve all by ourselves," he says. "And that, I think, is helping her candidacy, because people believe - I think rightly - that if she were elected she would quickly move to restore our standing in the world, and tell people there may be a few occasions when we have to do something on our own, but our strong preference is going to be to be cooperative."

The collective effect of American unilateralism has been "to enrage the world at the very moment when we had more support than we've had in recent memory, because of 9/11", Mr Clinton says.

I think most Americans have no idea, and some have little interest, in how the rest of the world views the United States. It's become really easy for some Americans to write off criticism of Bush as a lazy form of anti-Americanism, but this ignores how wildly popular the United States was during the Presidency of Bill Clinton.

And Clinton's trick was really that he pretended to listen. He still, by and large, did whatever he thought best served America's interests but he didn't walk over people in the way that they Bush/Cheney presidency does. Bush ignores international law almost as a matter of course. He appears to believe - by stating things like "America doesn't need a permission slip to defend herself" - that international law is something to be obeyed by other country's and that such triflings need not be considered by the United States.

He, in effect, turns the rest of us into inferior beings when he does this, as if there are two classes of humans. Americans, who are above international law because of their special purpose to "liberate" mankind and the altruism which is behind their every action, and the rest of the planet who are basically less civilised than the people of the United States which is why most of us can't be trusted with nuclear weapons etc., and why all of us must live under the very international law which the US rejects. The one exception to this is, of course, Israel. A country that blatantly disregards international law often and with the blessing of the United States who proudly vetoes any attempt by the international community to make Israel comply with the same laws that America insists the rest of the world adheres to.

This is why, without even a hint of irony, some Americans favour an Israeli attack on Iran to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power; ignoring totally the fact that Israel herself remains, not only a nuclear power, but the only country on the planet which refuses to recognise her own borders.

So, against this blatant hypocrisy, the job of restoring America's image amongst the rest of us lesser beings is one that Clinton is especially suited for. After all, he used to treat us as if we were almost equals!

Mr Clinton argues that American voters are tiring of a politics and media that have been under the sway of "the most ideological, rightwing element of the Republican party", leading to a national climate in which "three-dimensional reality" has been turned into "two-dimensional cartoons, and then [the rightwing media] try to get people to divide up on the basis of whether you like the cartoon or not ... I want the American people to stop rewarding the ideological wing of the Republican party, so we can have a centre-left party and a centre-right party and they can have real debates about real things."

There will one day be thesis's written about the abdication of responsibility by the American media during the Presidency of George W Bush. His blatant, stunning and repeated illegality appears to have poleaxed people. It's as if the American system really isn't prepared for someone who comes in and rips up all the rule books, claiming that they are doing so in order to protect national security.

Yesterday's revelations that Gonzales secretly introduced far reaching justifications for the US to torture people, justifications that James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, said Americans would be "ashamed" of when the rest of the world came upon them, could normally be expected to be the subject of a national scandal. But the Bush presidency's lurch into illegality is so accepted, the Democratic response to it so feeble, that none of us expect anything to happen.

I can literally think of nothing that this man could do which would result in the Democrats attempting to impeach him. Secret overseas prisons, jailing American citizens without trial, wiretapping blatantly without legal authority from FISA; the list is almost endless.

So the battered image of the US really does need some restoring and I'm not convinced that any of the people who have sat on their arses while Bush has flouted every convention known to man are the people to do it.

Maybe it is best to go back the way, to good old Bill Clinton. Because I'll find it very hard to forgive the current clutch of Democrats for their utter spinelessness.

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Tags: Bill Clinton, George Bush, America's image worldwide, anti-Americanism