A few online tomes about Hillary Clinton
Ron Brownstein argues in the Los Angeles Times that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination because of her appeal to white, blue collar Democrats. Michael Crowley argues in The New Republic that Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy hawkishness is not a form of political calculation, but rather what she actually believes. This part does ring ...
Ron Brownstein argues in the Los Angeles Times that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination because of her appeal to white, blue collar Democrats. Michael Crowley argues in The New Republic that Hillary Clinton's foreign policy hawkishness is not a form of political calculation, but rather what she actually believes. This part does ring true: [I]t's clear that the Clintonites left office deeply frustrated at the unsolved problem of Iraq and perhaps believing that some final reckoning was inevitable. "President Clinton recognized, as did I," Albright writes in her memoir, "that the mixture of sanctions, containment, Iraqi defiance, and our own uncertainty about Saddam's weapons couldn't go on indefinitely." Bush's approach was clearly blunter than what Clintonite foreign policy would have dictated. But, even as the "smell of gunpowder" turned into a stench, the foreign policy experts to whom Hillary was closest remained supportive of war with Iraq. "Most of the top [Clinton] national security team had sympathy for what Bush decided, in the broadest terms," says a Democratic foreign policy analyst. The most hawkish among them was former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, with whom Clinton conferred that fall. "If all else fails, collective action against Saddam is, in my view, justified by the situation and the record of the last decade," Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2002. Holbrooke's standard for "collective" seemed to include only the British and perhaps a handful of other allies. And Holbrooke made clear that a war to topple Saddam was unlikely to be easy and that U.S. forces might have to spend years in a postwar Iraq. Nor was Holbrooke alone. Varying degrees of support for the Bush resolution came from the likes of Rubin, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg. And, though she raised red flags about the war's risks, Hillary's close friend Albright ultimately concluded that Bush "should have this authority."
Ron Brownstein argues in the Los Angeles Times that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination because of her appeal to white, blue collar Democrats. Michael Crowley argues in The New Republic that Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy hawkishness is not a form of political calculation, but rather what she actually believes. This part does ring true:
[I]t’s clear that the Clintonites left office deeply frustrated at the unsolved problem of Iraq and perhaps believing that some final reckoning was inevitable. “President Clinton recognized, as did I,” Albright writes in her memoir, “that the mixture of sanctions, containment, Iraqi defiance, and our own uncertainty about Saddam’s weapons couldn’t go on indefinitely.” Bush’s approach was clearly blunter than what Clintonite foreign policy would have dictated. But, even as the “smell of gunpowder” turned into a stench, the foreign policy experts to whom Hillary was closest remained supportive of war with Iraq. “Most of the top [Clinton] national security team had sympathy for what Bush decided, in the broadest terms,” says a Democratic foreign policy analyst. The most hawkish among them was former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, with whom Clinton conferred that fall. “If all else fails, collective action against Saddam is, in my view, justified by the situation and the record of the last decade,” Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2002. Holbrooke’s standard for “collective” seemed to include only the British and perhaps a handful of other allies. And Holbrooke made clear that a war to topple Saddam was unlikely to be easy and that U.S. forces might have to spend years in a postwar Iraq. Nor was Holbrooke alone. Varying degrees of support for the Bush resolution came from the likes of Rubin, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg. And, though she raised red flags about the war’s risks, Hillary’s close friend Albright ultimately concluded that Bush “should have this authority.”
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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