Never again
If even half of what Christopher Hitchens says is true about Hillary’s tall tale of the Tuzla tarmac, she should be made to retreat from public life and follow George W Bush into oblivion. Hitchens says that during the war in Bosnia, Hillary argued strongly against doing anything to end the hostilities there because it would be a quagmire that would jeopardize the Clinton domestic agenda in general and her healthcare reform initiative in particular. She was, according to Hitchens and his sources, persuasive in this argument. Hillary, therefore, helped shape the muddled and cynical Clinton policy toward genocide— and that was the real “foreign policy experience” that her phony tale of dodging sniper fire was supposed to supplant.
I have reason to believe that what Hitchens says about her covering for herself and attempting to rewrite history is the whole truth, for like him, I remember well the Bosnian war and the Clinton Administration’s long string of do-nothing broken promises to the ethnically cleansed.
At the time, I worked for the United Nations Special Commission established to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Sometimes, I wish I could forget some of what I learned there. It was banal work mostly, lawyerly and bureaucratic in the day-to-day. We wrote and filed reports, a form of macabre data-entry, categorizing in detail the crimes of drunken-rapist soldiers, seeking to discern larger patterns. In the end, we argued, as is well known, that these were no random horrible acts, but a strategy of the war, designed, implemented and refined by the men in charge.
We wrote up reams and reams of witness testimony. We talked every day in the offices about rape camps and genital mutilation and starvation and public flayings and so on and on. There was gallows humor and also a lot of ordinary office silliness. We ordered lunches. We had a Christmas party. Some days, though, out of nowhere, people broke down and cried at their desks, grown men with beards, weeping and shaking. Sentences in a meeting would break in the middle with awkward choking up. Tears would stream down otherwise placid workaday faces. You would casually overhear people discussing some matter that would make something in you freeze and weeks and months later that matter they were discussing would fill your dreams. I heard one of my Muslim coworkers tell a TV news crew that she thought the wars in the former Yugoslavia were the greatest tragedy of our lifetime, and I agreed.
At first we suspected that the unexpected and heartbreaking Clinton Administration delay in action was a matter of inexperience. The head of the Commission, internationally renowned human rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni, would return from Washington and shake his head, regretfully reporting on what he saw as the painful incompetence of the young Clinton team. Soon, however, these assessments changed. In fact, the delay and obfuscating and pretend-concern was all politics, he told us, that the unprecedentedly well-documented genocide happening in Bosnia had become part of a political shell game in DC and that we would have to look beyond the Clintons and the United States for support in halting the carnage and prosecuting the criminals.
Long after the Commission wrapped up, I have wondered about what the Clintons were thinking as the war raged on year after year. On some level, I guess I have avoided seriously looking into it, wary of the cynicism I feel would surely return as I dove back into what I still can only see as the grotesque failures of our country’s leadership and of the international political system of the time— precursors of the many failures to come.
Hitchens’ explanation, though, makes a lot of sense to me. It sounds right. That Hillary could use any of the Bosnian tragedy and her role in it as theater to puff up her resume makes her the monster of Samantha Power’s description. Maybe Barack and Hillary could talk about that in their next debate.
——
Image by Annie Liebowitz: Sarajevo, during the actual fighting, a record of the death of a boy killed by a mortar.
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Thanks for sharing your story JT. It’s very sad, indeed. I can remember walking on campus during graduate school then passing by a Bosnian who was giving a talk with a bullhorn on the quad, explaining about the killing and rape and torture that was going on there and pleading to anyone who would listen that something must be done to stop this; that the US must do something now before many more thousands die. It pained me to walk away from this man knowing our country was doing nothing. I remember thinking that surely we would do something. You see the Holocaust museum. You hear, “Never again.” We have to act soon. We are the US! But the delay went on and on. There was no excuse of ignorance. Clinton’s inaction was, and is, inexcusable. That, by itself, marks him as a failed president in my book. To find out now that Hillary was the driving force behind the inaction, and it was to save her precious health care plan which she herself doomed by her intransigence makes my blood boil. If this is really true I can only hope that the mainstream media picks this up and beats her into the ground with it. Sigh… Who am I kidding. The press loves crap like the Wright story, not such trivial things as who prevented the saving of thousands of (non-American) lives.
As I just wrote to a pal, it just shows that a policy wonk does not necessarily a good president make. Where’s the big picture, you know? The kind of thinking Hitchens ascribes to Hillary in the matter of Bosnia would match with her vote for the war in Iraq and her support of continued manufacture and use of cluster bombs. This is not leadership. This is missing the forest for the trees. It’s exactly what Americans are talking about when they ask for change. We don’t want that experience. Sorry.
I’m in total agreement. I’m still wondering when the press and Obama are going to really call her on this “experience” façade. (I have no doubt that McCain will pound her on it, should she be the nominee.) What are the great decisions that she’s made? From what I can tell, most have been terrible.
On a related note, I couldn’t help laughing when I heard Hillary compare herself to Rocky. Ha! She’s showing the same pigheadedness that she displayed during the health care debacle. She actually has more in common with Bush in this sense. Just as Bush stubbornly sticks with this damn Iraq war policy, so Hillary continues on with her campaign, both of which will likely lead to bad results. I despise the man, but at least Bush is doing it for some reason beyond personal ambition.
I’m with both of you on pretty much every point…but can you really fault her for not closing down shop? I mean, personal pride if nothing else. As much as it’s all rosey to suggest that her folding now would save the Democrats a lot of pain and embarrassment, I honestly feel like I would think less of her if she just gave in. I’m sure that’s not in her personality either, good of the party/country be damned. That being said, who knows what other tricks the Clinton machine has up its sleeve to try and snag the win, but just on matter of principal, I think it’s kind of far-fetched to ask her to call it quits.
Oh, man, I don’t count her out at all. And I would be stunned if she folded before August. At Slate, somebody wrote that she got the Rocky metaphor all wrong. In fact, she’s much more Apollo Creed, the champ, in that she was the immensely favored frontrunner who has been beaten up by an underestimated outsider dismissed by the establishment as laughably more than a long shot. Duh, Hillary. Think about it. The no-name black senator from chicago is obviously Rocky. She just can’t get anything right these days!
Chris, giving in is one thing, talk of poaching delegates, which could easily destroy any Democrat’s chance of winning the general election, and dirty tricks such playing on racism and religious bigotry is quite another. From this election you can see that Hillary subscribes to the Karl Rove philosophy of dividing the nation with the sole objective of winning — damn the consequences for the nation. Please, eight years of this crap is enough already!