“There is no crisis to be dealt with or managed when you are first lady”

March 8, 2008 by twitterpaters

by twit

zing. From the Associated Press on March 8, 2008:

“Her experience speaks for itself,” says former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who is advising Clinton’s campaign. She wasn’t the one making the final decisions on U.S. policy, he says, but “no one in the world got a better idea of the countervailing pressures. The most important decision a president can make is to send Americans into harm’s way. She knows what that entails.” A contrary view comes from Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state from the Clinton years and an Obama campaign adviser. She said Clinton’s involvement with foreign policy as first lady was “laudable and important, but it is hardly the same thing as the kind of crisis management” that is required of a president. “There is no crisis to be dealt with or managed when you are first lady,” Rice said.

hm. Hillary Clinton’s adviser says that the most important decision “a president can make” is about sending the military into harm’s way. So she gets a big ‘fail’ for voting to start the Iraq war, right?

Holbrooke also describes Clinton as having had foreign policy experience unlike anyone else in “the world.” With all of this awareness of “countervailing pressures,” it might seem plausible that she really should have known better than to vote to send our troops into Iraq.

Although, on the other hand, maybe she didn’t have the broad experience she’s claiming now, which would explain her lack of opposition to the war at a time when it could have done some significant good.

If she had gone after the idea of war in Iraq like her campaign has gone after Obama, maybe we wouldn’t be fighting a war in Iraq at all. Maybe her ability to throw a wrench into an otherwise smooth political process could have bought enough time for the mistake of an invasion to become painfully clear before we preemptively invaded the country.