The Clintonian Foreign Policy Legacy

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Barbara Crossette: Bill Clinton's foreign policy record, on which his wife is running, was anything but stellar. Her tough talk on Iran only illuminates how little foreign policy matters in this campaign.

The Clintonian Foreign Policy Legacy
By Barbara Crossette


That Hillary Clinton has apparently found success in talking tough about foreigners and sinking to Bush-like "politics of fear" only illuminates how little American foreign policy has been seriously debated in the Democratic presidential nominee race, and how little voters know or remember about Bill Clinton's international legacy.

Against the background of Hillary Clinton's repeated claims to cosmopolitan experience, her scores of foreign stopovers (not unlike the travels of Laura Bush) and her meetings with a lot of world figures, the record of the 1992-2000 period bears more scrutiny than it is getting, beyond the NAFTA flip-flop. This is nowhere more urgent than in the discussion about how the United States goes about getting back into the world after years of offending friends and enemies alike, and whether the Clintons failed at grasping coming threats to America.

The Clinton record on which Hillary is running is anything but stellar in global or even US security terms. What would become the hallmark political timidity of the Administration was first demonstrated after eighteen American troops were killed in Mogadishu in October 1993 in an ill-fated assault on a Somali warlord. Though that operation was entirely American-planned and led, the Clintons let stand (if not promoted) the isolationist falsehood that the tragedy was the fault of the United Nations, which also had a peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu.

Worse, the Somalia syndrome led to frantic efforts by the Clinton team to prevent any action by the Security Council on Rwanda six months later, action that may have prevented or at least mitigated a looming genocide. Bill Clinton later "apologized" to the Rwandans, but long after hundreds of thousands of people had been slaughtered.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080512/crossette