Something Lost, Something Gained by Hillary Rodam Clinton
Book Review by Bruce Fein*
Censored from Hillary Rodam Clinton’s latest jejune scribbling unworthy of Abigail Adams or Mary Wollstonecraft: “We came, we saw, he died.”
That was the Julius Caesar-like chortle of then secretary of state Hillary Clinton to a television news reporter on October 11, 2011.
Approximately six months earlier, Ms. Clinton had exhorted President Barack Obama to initiate an extraconstitutional, criminal war of aggression against Libya and its leader Muammar Gaddafi, after he had abandoned WMD. Among other things, Ms. Clinton’s war violated the United Nations Charter and international law.
In a primary debate on October 13, 2015, Ms. Clinton stoutly defended her belligerency as “smart power at its best.”
What did her smart power accomplish?
It turned Libya into a wilderness where human trafficking, slavery, and militias thrive. Millions of refugees fled across the Mediterranean Sea in decrepit vessels. Thousands died. Survivors convulsed European politics giving fuel to right-wing extremists. ISIS established a beachhead. Muammar Gaddafi’s conventional weapons fell into the hands of terrorists. North Korea and Iran avowed they would never renounce nuclear weapons to forestall American military interventions seeking regime change.
Even President Obama later confessed the war in Libya was his “biggest mistake.” He had no cure for Libya’s failings. Its political diseases metastasized and continue to this very day with no remission in sight. Ms. Clinton ignored the prime cornerstone of wisdom: leave imperfections or infirmities undisturbed unless you know of a cure less bad than the disease.
The conspicuous omission of the former secretary of state’s jumbo blunders regarding Libya is emblematic of her memoir passim, i.e., airbrushing out the indefensible or embarrassing to create an illusion of luster. It blemishes Ms. Clinton’s character and turns her memoir into a jumble of soporific puerilities.
Oliver Cromwell displayed admirable strength in reportedly instructing his portrait painter, “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.” King Charles I, whom Cromwell beheaded, preferred the sanitized portrait painting of Anthony van Dyck. Ms. Clinton’s narrative aligns more with the King than with the Protector.
Ms. Clinton scampers away from her Senate vote, without reading the CIA’s 92-page intelligence report, supporting President George W. Bush’s extraconstitutional criminal war of aggression against Iraq in 2002 fueled by the patently erroneous assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. The war turned Iraq into an Iranian satellite and gave birth to ISIS. United States troops remain in Iraq having accomplished nothing in more than two decades other than transforming archenemy Iran into a regional hegemon at a cost of more than $1.1 billion according to Brown University’s Cost of War project. The evil politicians do live after them.
Ms. Clinton paints herself as an unflinching advocate for women’s rights. She swoons over her pedestrian assertion in Beijing in 1995, “Women’s rights are human rights.” That platitude is self-evident, even if women’s rights, like other rights, including freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion, are often honored more in the breach than in the observance. More than two centuries before Ms. Clinton, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John on March 31, 1776:
“I long to hear that you have declared an independency -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
Mary Wollstonecraft eloquently and passionately championed formal education and moral rights for women in her landmark 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects.
Is Ms. Clinton a role model for women seeking emancipation from treatment as sex objects? She dismissed sex-related accusations against President Bill Clinton in 1998 as born of “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” She publicly closed her eyes tight against her husband’s notorious philandering, including encounters with Gennifer Flowers Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky.
It seems it is not that Ms. Clinton loves women’s rights less, but that she loves power, celebrity, and opulence more that she has stuck with Bill. Actions speak louder than words.
*Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and is author of American Empire Before The Fall and Congressional Surrender and Presidential Overreach.