Hillary Clinton and the Dangers of Hubris

I got this from Real Clear Politics. Though some think it is a conservative site it carried articles everyday from Slate, Salon, the Nation, ect. It carried a balance of articles of all sides and media. there is no one point of view.
This article came from a mainstream columnist from the Chicago Tribune.



Democrats hope that when it comes to international affairs, Clinton would represent a big change from George W. Bush. Republicans harbor that fear. In truth, this is one realm where the two are more alike than different. It's no accident that she voted for the resolution authorizing the president to invade Iraq. And it's no mystery that she was slow to admit the war was failing.

She didn't support the war because she was hoodwinked by Bush. She didn't do it for strictly political reasons. She supported it because of her conception of America's proper role in the world -- which combines a thirst for altruistic missions with a faith in the value of military force to get what you want. Those same impulses, of course, motivated the neoconservatives who urged Bush to go into Iraq.

snip-


As Michael Crowley of The New Republic has noted, she had another reason for supporting Bush on Iraq. "I'm a strong believer in executive authority," she said in 2003. "I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."

There you have it. A Hillary Clinton presidency promises to unite Madeleine Albright's zeal for using bombs in pursuit of liberal ideals with Dick Cheney's vision of the president as emperor. Won't that be fun?


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/07/hillary_clinton_and_the_danger.html

the first paragraph is not true, this is quite a revealing article. Don't forget Madeleine Albright was asked in an interview if the death of 100,000 Iraqi children due to Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iraq was, in hindsight, a mistake. Albright said it was "worth it." Worth it???

Given that blunder alone, it's amazing that they brought her out to speak approvingly about Hillary's knowledge of diplomacy. And there's more info to remind those who may have forgotten about the other screw-ups Bill and Madeleine cooked up.


"On the morning after the South Carolina debate, the Clinton campaign trotted out former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to gush about the senator's declaration that she would not meet with various dictators "until we know better what the way forward would be." Said Albright, "She gave a very sophisticated answer that showed her understanding of the diplomatic process."

"Being praised for your diplomatic sophistication by Madeleine Albright is like being complimented on your sense of humor by John Kerry. Albright is the renowned diplomat who helped the Clinton administration blunder its way into an 11-week aerial war in Kosovo. Albright was confident that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic would cave at the first whiff of gunpowder, and was shocked when he didn't."

"That misjudgment had disastrous consequences. The Serbs responded not by capitulating but by greatly escalating their war on Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. Some 10,000 of them died, and more than a million were forced from their homes. If the war was a success, it was a very mixed one. The same could be said about Bosnia and Haiti, where the results fell far short of our intentions. Like Iraq, the Kosovo war demonstrated the folly of taking military action without preparing for the worst. Both also showed the dangers of unchecked hubris."

"But those are not lessons Clinton has necessarily absorbed. When she ran for the Senate in 2000, she mocked Republicans (such as Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell) who think "we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time." On the contrary, she said, we "should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one."

very close and part of the dlc...I have been reading lots of stuff about the dlc and it is very scary to me...

is the notion that she is the one to 'do over' the legacy of the First Clinton Presidency. As she so self-righteously proclaimed 'there are no do overs in life'.