Clinton and US Foreign Policy: If It Is Broken, Then Fix It

[McCamy Taylor]

However different we may be, there is far more that unites us than divides us. We share a common future. And we are here to find common ground so that we may help bring new dignity and respect to women and girls all over the world - and in so doing, bring new strength and stability to families as well.

Hillary Clinton “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” Speech Given in Bejing , 5 Sept. 1995

http://www.famousquotes.me.uk/speeches/Hillary-Clinton/

During her husband’s administration, Hillary Clinton approached foreign policy problems in an unorthodox way---as a matter concerning people and not global economies. In Northern Ireland, she brought together the women, who had traditionally been left out of peace negotiations, a bold move and an effective one given the importance of women in Irish culture.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/hume-and-trimble-clash-over-clintons-peace-role-1311181.html

According to Clinton:

"I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a room where they had never been before with each other because they don't go to school together, they don't live together; and it was only in large measure because I really asked them to come that they were there."

Mary Fox, the wife of a former IRA prisoner and one of the seven women at the meeting, said she had been there on behalf of the Footprints community centre.

"It was quite a political change for the women's sector after the visit of Hillary Clinton," she said.

According to John Hume, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Clinton’s contribution paid off:

"I can state from first-hand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland. She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many people and gave very decisive support to the peace process.

"In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward."

George Mitchell told Katie Couric

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/10/eveningnews/main3923206.shtml

She was helpful and supportive, very much involved in the issues, knew all of the delegates. She accompanied President Clinton on each visit he made to Northern Ireland, made several visits of her own. Her greatest focus was on encouraging women in Northern Ireland to get in and stay in the political process, the peace process. And I have said publicly many times and wrote in my book, the role of women in the peace process in Northern Ireland was significant. It did make a difference in the process, so as I said I think it was a helpful and supportive role.

In a New York Times interview in 1997, Clinton expressed this opinion about the ongoing negotiations in Northern Ireland:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E7DF1730F932A35752C1A961958260&scp=7&sq=Hillary+Clinton+Northern+Ireland+peace&st=nyt

''When people want peace,'' she said, ''it is the obligation of political leaders to find the common ground where it can thrive. That requires compromise and reconciliation.''

If anyone within the Bush administration had possessed this attitude, we would not have been at war these last six years, because the Iraqi people have been begging for peace. No one wins in a civil war. Women, who seldom participate in the fighting but who suffer the most from the deprivations of war---hunger, disease, poverty, loss of loved ones---have been left out of the negotiations for too long. The same goes for workers—most peace negotiations are conducted between the elite members of the two rival factions, people who will prosper no matter what happens.

It might be time for us to entrust U.S. foreign policy to someone who understands that it takes a village to raise a child, because the corollary is if the village is under attack, the child is the first one who suffers. And who wants to see a child die from hunger, illness or violence?

[dkf]

1. Wapo gave Hillary a Pinocchio for exaggering her role in the Irish Peace Process.

The Pinocchio Test

Hillary Clinton seems to be overstating her significance as a catalyst in the Northern Ireland peace process, which was more symbolic than substantive. On the other hand, she did play a helpful role at the margins, by encouraging organizations like Vital Voices, a women's group that takes a stand against extremism. One Pinocchio for exaggeration.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/clinton_and_northern_ireland.html

Nobel winner: Hillary Clinton's 'silly' Irish peace claims

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

"I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1581150/Nobel-winner-Hillary-Clinton%27s-%27silly%27-Irish-peace-claims.html

[McCamy Taylor]

3. Trimble is a British conservative who would have been supporting McCain over the Dems

and the elites over the people. Trimble would be like a Republican over here. I could never understand why any Democrat would take his word over that of so many other people, most of them Irish-Catholics (greens) who have a long history of close alliance with the US Democratic Party.

[dkf]

4. More from the WAPO article...

I just spoke to Senator George Mitchell, the Clinton administration's leading Northern Ireland peace negotiator, who said that Hillary was "not involved directly" in the diplomatic negotiations that led to the landmark April 1998 Good Friday agreement on power-sharing. On the other hand, Mitchell credits Clinton with taking an intelligent interest in the issues and getting acquainted with many of the key players.

Chris Thornton, a political reporter for the Belfast Telegraph, said that Hillary Clinton's visits to northern Ireland contributed to the "mood music" that made an eventual settlement possible, but were hardly key to reaching an agreement. "Would we have reached a settlement without that kind of stuff? Yes. Would we have got one without the intervention of Bill Clinton and George Mitchell? No."

[McCamy Taylor]

5. The WaPo thinks history is HISstory. Big boys with nukes flexing their muscles.

They support the NeoCon world view which is that those with the most power take the spoils and leave the women and children of the conquered lands to buy Monsanto's Terminator seeds and struggle under mounting debt while their children die of malaria from lack of a net and they die from AIDs and too many pregnancies from lack of condoms.

The NYTs has started writing this way under Bush-Cheney with their "administration sources", too.

Here are some references you should check out from the 1990s from the New York Times about Hillary Clinton and the esteem in which the Northern Irish held her. These pieces were written at the time that the peace accord was being crafted and shortly afterwards---and therefore are probably more accurate than articles like the WaPo political hit piece that you keep citing above.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E7DF1730F932A35752C1A961958260&scp=7&sq=Hillary+Clinton+Northern+Ireland+peace&st=nyt

Hillary Rodham Clinton stayed strictly on track today, traveling to this troubled city to sound the themes she has embraced in her carefully planned re-emergence: women, children and families.

In her first overseas trip after the very public celebration of her 50th birthday last weekend and the speculation it raised about her recast role as First Lady, she began the day by delivering a lecture in memory of Joyce McCartan, whom she met in 1995, when she and the President visited Belfast together. Mrs. McCartan, who lost a son and 17 other relatives to sectarian violence, ran a center that brought Catholic and Protestant women together to promote peace.

In a moving address, Mrs. Clinton spoke of the important role that women like Mrs. McCartan can play in helping to solve the world's most intractable problems.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE7D8103FF930A3575AC0A96E958260&scp=10&sq=Hillary+Clinton+Northern+Ireland+peace&st=nyt

Introduced by a 16-year-old student as ''a role model for young women around the world,'' Hillary Rodham Clinton told a cheering gathering of women in Belfast tonight that it was their ''courage and strength'' that had secured the new Northern Ireland peace settlement.

''Wives. Mothers. Sisters. Daughters,'' she told the 450 delegates to the ''Vital Voices: Women in Democracy'' conference. ''Few were household names. But having seen their lives and communities torn apart by violence, women came together as women have always done -- around kitchen tables, at the market, in gatherings like this. It was women whose whispers of 'Enough' became a torrent of voices that could no longer be ignored.''

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02E7D91E3FF937A25751C1A9669C8B63&scp=3&sq=Hillary+Clinton+Northern+Ireland+peace&st=nyt

Mrs. Clinton recalled that period solemnly and said that having been ''a small part in such a great historic change'' was a high point of the White House years for her. This was her fifth visit to the province, and she implied it would not be her last. ''I will always be there as a friend and an advocate and a partner as you continue the hard, hard work of peace and reconciliation,'' she promised.

But she said her real purpose this time in Belfast was to acknowledge the role women had played in securing political stability here and to urge them to continue and to energize other women elsewhere.

Speaking in front of an illuminated legend proclaiming ''Women raising their voices for a new Northern Ireland,'' she told the gathering of how a simple event that she had taken part in here two years ago -- the opening of a playground in a conflicted part of Belfast for use by both Catholic and Protestant children -- had resonated in far-off places.

She said that on a visit to Rwanda, she asked local women who had lived through massacres and machete attacks what she could do to help them. ''They said, 'Build a playground.' They had read about the playground in Belfast,'' she said.

''While the president and the prime minister are up at the legislature working on the big acts today,'' she said, ''I come here to celebrate daily small acts of courage.''

The old world order judges success in the arena of foreign policy by who is able to impose his will upon another country. That has lead the world to the brink of disaster. A gentle, caring touch is required, especially is you are the most powerful country on earth, but there are a lot of people in this country who see a caring approach as weakness.

[Bluenorthwest]

6. Those who listen to Trimble

I assume dig themselves some Tommy DeLay as well. Or some Dick Cheney. One or the other, which ever is more of a racist.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. K&R: "if the village is under attack, the child is the first one who suffers"

[bertman]

7. Now she gets her chance. I'm pulling for her. Not my first choice but I think she will be

a very good Secretary of State.

[Jakes Progress]

8. Naughty McCamy.

You said nice things about Hillary. Duck.

And don't look for your invitation to any of Arianna's parties.

Truth and facts and history are on your side, but those rarely trump prejudice and willful ignorance.

[McCamy Taylor]

9. ROFLMAO. Arianna can not write. Who cares what she thinks about anything?

Congrats on reaching 1000!

:party:

[Beacool]

10. Thank you, I'm sure that she will do a great job.

I still have mixed feelings about her leaving the senate, but I have no doubt that she can tackle the job at hand.

:hi: