“Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday that if she is elected president, she would make her husband a roaming ambassador to the world, using his skills to repair the nation’s tattered image abroad,” reports the Associated Press. “I believe in using former presidents, particularly what my husband has done, to really get people around the world feeling better about our country,” Hillary said. “We’re going to need that. Right now they’re rooting against us and they need to root for us.”

Of course, we shouldn’t expect Clinton or a fawning corporate media to mention the reason why “people around the world” are “rooting against us.” It wouldn’t have anything to do with invading small, defenseless countries, would it? “The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States, not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well,” notes the Pew Global Attitudes Project. “And despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran—and in many countries much more often—as a danger to world peace.” More specifically, the United States is a danger to the Iraqi people, as the United States, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and published in the esteemed medical journal Lancet, are responsible for the death of over 650,000 Iraqis. Lest we forget, Hillary voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq, thus she is party to mass murder.

Back in 2003, another poll indicated Bill Clinton “ranks as this nation’s third best chief executive,” right behind Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. “Silly Clinton. All you did was provide peace and prosperity—why would we ever want that again?” remarked the “liberal bomb thrower” Oliver Willis upon the publication of the poll results.

How soon we forget. Bill Clinton, according to Edward S. Herman, “has gone beyond the Bush [Senior] record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style. A skilled public relations person, he has refined the rhetoric of humanistic and ethical concern and can apologize with seeming great sincerity for our earlier regrettable sponsorship and support of mass murder in Guatemala while carrying out similar or even more vicious policies in Colombia and Iraq at the same moment…. Clinton’s crimes range from ad hoc bombings to boycotts and sanctions designed to starve into submission, to support of ethnic cleansing in brutal counterinsurgency warfare, and to aggression and devastation by bombing designed to return rogues to the stone age and keep them there.”

On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad, supposedly in retaliation for an assassination attempt against his predecessor. Clinton’s raid killed eight people, including the renowned artist Layla al-Attar. Later, Clinton bombed Afghanistan and the Sudan, the latter targeting a pharmaceutical factory, a major source of medical drugs in that impoverished country. As Herman notes, in Yugoslavia Clinton and NATO targeted civilians “in houses, hospitals, schools, trains, factories, power stations, and broadcasting facilities.” According to Yugoslav authorities, “60 percent of NATO targets were civilian, including 33 hospitals and 344 schools, as well as 144 major industrial plants and a large petro-chemical plant whose bombing caused a pollution catastrophe. John Pilger noted that the list of civilian targets included ‘housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centres, theatres, museums, churches and 14th century monasteries on the World Heritage list. Farms have been bombed and their crops set afire,’” in other words, massive war crimes.

But all of this pales in comparison to Clinton’s complicity in genocide. “Bombs are merciful compared to what Clinton has done to the innocent children of Iraq, the most vulnerable of all, by maintaining ten years of the harshest sanctions in the history of mankind, begun on August 6, 1990, and kept in place at the insistence of the United States,” writes David L. Harten. “In 1989, the literacy rate [in Iraq] was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities,” Anupama Rao Singh, UNICEF’s senior representative in Iraq, told John Pilger in early 2000. “Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest.”

In 1996, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “567,000 Iraqi children had died as a direct consequence of economic sanctions,” and the following year UNICEF reported “that 4,500 Iraqi children under five were dying every month as a result of sanctions—induced starvation and disease.”

According to Shuna Lennon, in a paper presented to the International Law Association on February 29, 2000, Clinton’s “blockade/sanctions regime was illegal from its inception under the Geneva Protocol,” specifically the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions 1977, articles 48, 51, 54. “The blockade/sanctions regime is by its nature inherently illegal under the Geneva Protocol, for three reasons. First, it targets civilians in breach of Articles 48 and 51(2). Secondly, it constitutes indiscriminate attack, in breach of Article 51(3). Thirdly and most flagrantly, it employs starvation as a method of warfare, in breach of Article 54.” In addition to violating the Genocide Convention, Clinton’s medieval siege and embargo violated the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1950. In short, Bill Clinton is a war criminal by any standard and as such should face prosecution, not be assigned as his wife’s “roving ambassador,” that is if she is elected, excuse me selected to be president.

Finally, Hillary may as well appoint a Mob boss as her special ambassador. During the Clinton years, special prosecutors investigated the following: Bank and mail fraud, violations of campaign finance laws, illegal foreign campaign funding, improper exports of sensitive technology, physical violence and threats of violence, solicitation of perjury, intimidation of witnesses, bribery of witnesses, attempted intimidation of prosecutors, perjury before congressional committees, lying in statements to federal investigators and regulatory officials, flight of witnesses, obstruction of justice, bribery of cabinet members, real estate fraud, tax fraud, drug trafficking, failure to investigate drug trafficking, bribery of state officials, use of state police for personal purposes, exchange of promotions or benefits for sexual favors, using state police to provide false court testimony, laundering of drug money through a state agency, false reports by medical examiners and others investigating suspicious deaths, the firing of the RTC and FBI director when these agencies were investigating Clinton and his associates, failure to conduct autopsies in suspicious deaths, providing jobs in return for silence by witnesses, drug abuse, improper acquisition and use of 900 FBI files, improper futures trading, murder, sexual abuse of employees, false testimony before a federal judge, shredding of documents, withholding and concealment of subpoenaed documents, fabricated charges against (and improper firing of) White House employees, inviting drug traffickers, foreign agents and participants in organized crime to the White House. (See The Clinton Legacy.)

Of course, Americans have short memories, or are amnesiacs altogether, and most of them know nothing about Clinton’s record as a war criminal. For many Americans, all that matters is Clinton made them feel good because he is a more accomplished actor than his successor, the dysfunctional former alcoholic George W. Bush. In fact, last year, Bush referred to Clinton as “my new brother,” in part because of “shared experiences,” for instance killing off large numbers of Iraqis. Clinton “has found his surrogate family,” writes Peter S. Canellos for the Boston Globe. “He is part of a sprawling clan, legendary for its warmth and unity. It is a clan that is so accustomed to acquiring surrogate sons and daughters that adoption has become a part of its strength…. Clinton has become a member of the Bush clan,” or rather crime family.

Turn them upside down, they all look the same.