What Hillary Hasn’t Done in Foreign Policy
by Jon Wiener
During the eight years Hillary was First Lady, she didn’t deal with
terrorism, Osama bin
Laden, or Al Qaeda.
She wasn’t a decision-maker on any of the other big foreign policy issues
of her husband’s
presidency: whether to send troops to Bosnia or Kosovo, whether to bomb
terrorist bases in
Afghanistan or suspected terrorist sites in the Sudan.
She didn’t deal with the problems in the CIA and other intelligence
agencies. She didn’t
work on nuclear proliferation. She did not deal with genocide in Rwanda.
When Bill Clinton brought Israelis and Palestinians to negotiations at
Camp David in 2000,
Hillary wasn’t there.
These are the conclusions reached by New York Times re****ter Patrik Healy,
who re****ted on
Dec. 26 on his conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and
his interview
with Hillary herself.
“Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance,” Healy wrote. “She did
not attend
National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the
president’s daily
intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in
Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.”
Most im****tant: Hillary did not do “the hard part of foreign policy” -
“making tough
decisions, responding to crises.” That’s what Susan Rice told the New York
Times - she was
a National Security Council senior aide and a State Department official
during the Clinton
administration. She’s now sup****ting Obama.
Readers may recall that Hillary has claimed to be the most experienced
Democratic
candidate not just on domestic issues, but also on international, because
of her eight
years in the White House. She often says she visited 79 countries as first
lady. She often
talks about meeting with the president of Uzbekistan and the prime
minister of Czechoslovakia.
But when the New York Times re****ter asked her to name three major foreign
policy
decisions in which she played a decisive role as first lady, she
“responded in
generalities” rather than specifics.
When the Times asked her to cite a significant foreign policy lesson she
learned from the
1990s, she replied “There are a lot of them,” and went on to talk about
“the whole
unfortunate experience we’ve had with the Bush administration.”
What did she do on those trips to 79 countries? These were mostly
“good-will endeavors”
where she sup****ted nonprofit work. She acted as “a spokeswoman for
American interests.”
She often spoke out for women’s rights — especially at the 1995 UN
conference on women in
Beijing. She brought Catholic and Protestant women together at a meeting
in Northern
Ireland. And, Healy re****ted, she often advocated “the expanded use of
microcredits, tiny
loans to help individuals in poor countries start small businesses.”
Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. Since then he’s written
more than 100
stories and reviews for the magazine, many about American history,
university politics,
and California life. He’s also professor of history at the University of
California,
Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.
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