Hillary, despite the Clinton administration's willful ignorance of the situation, wanted to intervene in Rwanda. She also urged intervention in Bosnia, long before her husband's administration decided to send American troops. Her counter-administration East Wing insurgency didn't end with genocidal conflicts, either: She also was against NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the rest of the Clinton administration embraced. Despite the fact no one seemed to listen to her on foreign policy, she was sent to Tuzla, Bosnia during a hail of sniper fire in order to accept flowers and a poem from a Bosnian child. And that went so well they sent her to Northern Ireland to broker peace in that war-torn country.
Uhh, not so fast. Those statements above contain various amounts of truthiness. Some are simply not backed up by facts, such as the cold, hard White House schedules on NAFTA. Others have been contradicted by those involved. One statement, her arrival in Bosnia under sniper fire, is an outright fabrication. (Known otherwise as a lie.)
It's obvious to anyone who's ever raised a teenager that there's some energetic prevarication going on here, an attempt to embellish a pretty thin foreign policy record. Understandable, but not forgivable, because of one tragic truth.
There would be no need to embellish her record, in a race against an opponent who also didn't participate in the Northern Ireland peace talks, and who also didn't arrive in Bosnia under sniper fire, and who currently holds similar views on NAFTA, except for one thing: Hillary Clinton bungled the most important foreign policy decision of her career. No, it wasn't a 3 a.m. phone call—she had plenty of time to think about her vote to authorize the Iraq War. She had plenty of time to study up on the idea, and perhaps read the National Intelligence Estimate which pretty clearly stated that Iraq (like Tuzla) held no threat. What's more, she had plenty of time to speak out against what has turned out to be the biggest foreign policy blunder in our nation's history—a $3 trillion dollar mess that has cost us 4000 lives and untold numbers of injuries, and has squandered our international respect and our Middle East street cred.
Just as she never spoke loudly enough on Rwanda, Bosnia, NAFTA, or any of the other major foreign policy decisions during the time she had the ear of the president and all his advisers, she never used her bully pulpit as the most famous member of the Senate to speak out against the Iraq War. If she had, there's a good chance others would have joined her, perhaps John Kerry or John Edwards (okay, maybe not Edwards—he was one of the sponsors of the resolution, after all). Others, including members of the media, would have examined the proposal more closely had the Senatorial wife of a former president spoken out against it.
But she didn't. That's a fact.
And she didn't arrive in Tuzla under a hail of sniper fire, either.
