by Jonathan Alter
It was four a.m. when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and by midmorning she was in the Oval Office conferring with President Obama. The night before, as her plane was en route from Tunis, they had agreed that the vote of the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on Libya meant that it was now decision time on launching a third American war in the Middle East, though no one in the U.S. government dared call it that. Muammar Qaddafi was ramping up his genocidal threats, pledging to show “no mercy” toward his own people (whom he described as “rats”) in the eastern city of Benghazi. Inside the White House, the president quickly settled on an American bombing campaign, but he and the secretary of state thought strongly that Great Britain and France should be seen as taking the lead. They agreed that there was no choice but for Hillary to sit down in person with both British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy. “I’m sorry, Hillary, but you’re going to fly over the Atlantic again,” said Obama, who was about to leave on his own foreign trip, to Brazil. So only hours after landing from Tunis, she was headed back to Paris.
It was four a.m. when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, and by midmorning she was in the Oval Office conferring with President Obama. The night before, as her plane was en route from Tunis, they had agreed that the vote of the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on Libya meant that it was now decision time on launching a third American war in the Middle East, though no one in the U.S. government dared call it that. Muammar Qaddafi was ramping up his genocidal threats, pledging to show “no mercy” toward his own people (whom he described as “rats”) in the eastern city of Benghazi. Inside the White House, the president quickly settled on an American bombing campaign, but he and the secretary of state thought strongly that Great Britain and France should be seen as taking the lead. They agreed that there was no choice but for Hillary to sit down in person with both British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy. “I’m sorry, Hillary, but you’re going to fly over the Atlantic again,” said Obama, who was about to leave on his own foreign trip, to Brazil. So only hours after landing from Tunis, she was headed back to Paris.
By then it was clear that the “Arab Spring” of 2011 was creating tumult not just in the Middle East but inside the Obama administration. Not since the fall of Communism, in the late 80s, has a U.S. administration faced a chain reaction of foreign crises that seemed so much out of its control.
At first, Hillary looked clairvoyant: in January, when the street protests were still small in Tunisia, she lectured decrepit dictatorial regimes at a conference in Qatar that “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” Within days, demonstrators filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a vibrant plea for greater freedom that swiftly spread to Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, and eventually even Syria.
But if Madam Secretary could be ahead of the curve, she was also sometimes behind it, caught in a dizzying series of upheavals that left her both exhilarated and exhausted. In early February, Hillary said the regime of Hosni Mubarak was “stable”; he was gone 17 days later. When she felt White House officials were pushing too hard in public statements for Mubarak to resign, Hillary complained to President Obama, who was unmoved. Yet on the big picture, especially the need to isolate the menacing regime in Tehran, the president and his secretary of state fully agreed. They understood immediately that, for all the facile accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy, a one-size-fits-all foreign policy wouldn’t work. Doctrines, they felt, were for the doctrinaire.
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