Clinton: Including Women Essential to Peace Processes - Launches National Action Plan Academy

“Today marks a very important next step, shifting from saying the right things to doing the right things, putting into action the steps that are necessary not only to protect women and children but to find ways of utilizing women as makers and keepers of peace,” says Hillary Rodham Clinton, in reference to the newly launched National Action Plan Academy.

“This is what we call Smart Power, using every possible tool…leaving no one on the sidelines, showing respect even for one’s enemies, trying to understand, and insofar as is psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view, helping to define the problems [and] determine a solution, that is what we believe in the 21st century will change the prospect for peace,” she said.

But she also told the audience that the world still has a long way to go in terms women’s participation.

Of the hundreds of peace treaties signed since the early 1990s, between or within nations, she said fewer than 10 percent had any female negotiators and fewer than 3 percent had women as signatories.

“Is it any wonder that many of these agreements fail between a few years?” Clinton asked......

The event also marked the launch of a book called Women on the Frontlines of Peace and Security, the outcome of a joint effort between the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Defense to advance women’s participation in preventing conflict and keeping peace.

“Some 48 countries and regional organizations around the world have adopted national action plans to implement the principles of historic U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325,” Verveer noted before the event. “This global symposium will spotlight opportunities and challenges by bringing together thought leaders and expert practitioners.”

The resolution, passed in 2000, acknowledged the importance of women in peacemaking roles and the disproportionate effect of violent conflict on women.

Swanee Hunt, founder and chair of the Institute for Inclusive Security, said the partnership is building momentum so that more countries will create national action plans with serious impact.

“The academy is about sharing innovative ideas that will propel us collectively toward this new global standard,” she said. Full article

Hillary Clinton and "The Third Way" How America's First Lady of the Left Has Bamboozled Liberals and Conservatives Alike - David Horowitz - June 2000:

".......New Left progressives—including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee—were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers.* We did this then—just as progressives still do now—in the name of "social justice" and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.

As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you."* Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists—and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today.

But they are lying. (And when they defend racial preferences now—a principle they denounced as "racist" then—even they must know it).

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity—often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty—then or now—to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason......

....Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left—by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints..."

"..........Whatever the current object of adulation— the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America —the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.

It is all part of what Bruckner calls “the enchanting music of departure.” Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world—its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition—are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. “Ignoring the real human race entirely,” Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, “I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world.” The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts “were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history.”

The Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall does not mention The Tears of the White Man in The Culture Cult, his [1] new collection of essays. But his discussion is everywhere informed by the same spirit of salutary impatience. What Bruckner criticizes as Third Worldism, Sandall castigates as “romantic primitivism” and (marvelous phrase) “designer tribalism.” What is romantic primitivism? In the words of Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, it is “the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization.” Sandall begins with a small but telling contemporary example. In 1996, the actress Lauren Hutton took her two young boys to Africa to witness a bunch of Masai warriors and their witch doctor perform a tribal dance, slaughter a cow, and drink some warm blood straight from the carcass. The whole spectacle was captured for the television audience by Ted Turner’s minions. Miss Hutton loved it: according to Sandall, “Wow!” was her frequent refrain. But her young children, one of whom burst into tears, were terrified. Quite right, too. The purpose of the television show was to show that “Masai culture is just as good as Western civilization, if not better.” Miss Hutton’s enthusiasm was sparked by the display of “authentic” tribal passion. But her children saw the episode for what it was: a glimpse into the heart of darkness, the abyss of uncivilized barbarism.

What Sandall describes as “the culture cult” dreams of a new simplicity: a mode of existence that is somehow less encumbered, less rent by conflicting obligations than life in a modern industrialized democracy. It is a vain endeavor. The romanticization of the primitive only emphasizes one’s distance from its simplicities. Romanticism in all its forms is an autumnal, retrospective phenomenon: the more fervent it is, the more it underscores the loss it laments. “It is time,” Sandall writes, “to stop dreaming about going back to the land or revisiting the social arrangements of the past.” Miss Hutton’s happy ejaculations were prompted by such dreams. What she heard among those Masai savages as they danced about and drank blood was Pascal Bruckner’s “enchanting music of departure.” But it is, alas, a departure to nowhere. As Sandall observes, life is about “ever-extending complexity.” To deny that is to neglect the “Big Ditch” (Ernest Gellner’s term) that separates the modern world from its primitive sources. On one side of the ditch is the rule of law, near universal literacy, modern technology, and the whole panoply of liberal democratic largess. On the other side is— what? “Most traditional cultures,” Sandall writes, “feature domestic repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints. If you want to live a full life and die in your bed, then civilization—not romantic ethnicity—deserves your thoughtful vote.” .......The Perils of Designer Tribalism

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks at CNAS's rollout event, June 2007

Center for a New American Security "The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank established in 2007 by co-founders Michèle Flournoy and Kurt M. Campbell which specializes in U.S. national security issues. CNAS's stated mission is to "develop strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies that promote and protect American interests and values." CNAS focuses on terrorism and irregular warfare, the future of the U.S. military, the emergence of Asia as a global power center, and the national security implications of natural resource consumption. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg has called CNAS "an indispensable feature on the Washington landscape."[2] Speaking at the CNAS annual conference in June 2009, U.S. Central Command Commander GEN David Petraeus observed that "CNAS has, in a few years, established itself as a true force in think tank and policy-making circles"

The Obama administration has hired several CNAS employees for key jobs. Founders Michèle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell formerly served as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, respectively. In June 2009 The Washington Post suggested, "In the era of Obama...the Center for a New American Security may emerge as Washington's go-to think tank on military affairs."......

Michèle Flournoy [who is expected to be in a Hillary 2016 administration]

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MORE on Michèle Flournoy's think tank and it's "GREEN GLOBAL" goals:

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Natural security program

Sharon Burke, a CNAS researcher who originated the concept at the Center, described natural security as follows:

In the 21st century, the security of nations will increasingly depend on the security of natural resources, or “natural security.” The modern global economy depends on access to energy, minerals, potable water, and arable land to meet the rising expectations of a growing world population, and that access is by no means assured. At the same time, increasing consumption of these resources has consequences, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, which will challenge the security of the United States and nations all over the world. Natural security ultimately means sufficient, reliable, affordable, and sustainable supplies of natural resources for the modern global economy. This will require the United States to both shape and respond to emerging natural resources challenges in a changing strategic environment.

CNAS launched its Natural Security Program[29] to study this set of issues in 2009, in addition to the Natural Security Blog. The natural security concept is closely related to a body of study described as "environmental security," which dates back to the late 1970s. A February 2008 book, Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World, used the term in a different context, profiling the way in which fabricated defense systems echo or can draw lessons from defense systems found in natural organisms, systems and processes. The University of Arizona also has an academic program based on the biological concept of natural security. As part of a series titled "Why We Might Fight," New York Times reporter Thom Shanker wrote a 2011 article called "A Need for Natural Security," which profiled the link between natural resources and security challenges in China, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, the Niger Delta, the Arctic, and the Amazon rainforest.

Previous to the launch of the CNAS program, Hal Harvey, founder of ClimateWorks, authored a 1988 piece called "Natural Security" in the journal Nuclear Times.

Sharon Burke is now Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs. She was sworn in as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs on June 25, 2010. She is now the principal advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense on operational energy security and reports to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics."....

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