I posted this last week, but now I realise why, as a European actively involved in campaigning against Serb ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide, I felt so strongly about her lie. Christopher Hitchens has made it clear. It's not only that Hillary recklessly padded her CV, and refused to account for it in any coherent way. It's much bigger than this. He has now shown, as I always heard and suspected, that Hillary was the brake on Bill when he initially wanted to intervene and hammer the heavy Serb guns to stop the massacre of innocent civilians. That she should use this war, the same war she helped to prolong, to enhance her credentials, is really deeply shameful.

The Hitch's piece is here

http://www.slate.com/id/2187780/

My original diary below

Oh and I should have realised I would get lots of 'What did you Brits do?' comments. Since I've already explained umpteen times how pusillanimous the British government were, and how I and many others really welcomed US military intervention here, I'll refer you to the previous answers I gave

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/3/28/132411/775#readmore

Update [2008-3-31 18:12:56 by brit]: Despite the two instances cited by Hitchens, and because no one seems to trust him or the Bedell Smith book, or Roger Cohen's article, I have also found TWO contemporaneous accounts of Hillary dissuading Bill from intervening in 1993 in Elizabeth Drew's book ON THE EDGE and Richard Reeves, RUNNING IN PLACE. This is not just spin

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Update [2008-3-31 16:11:10 by brit]: This has just got worse. Christopher Hitchens has just posted an article in the Slate to prove what I always suspected. It was Hillary, who as reported then, was against early intervention because she'd read The Ghosts of War, and convinaced Bill that Bosnia was an ancient tribal quagmire

http://www.slate.com/id/2187780/

Bosnia is now coming back to haunt the Clintons, and so it should. Though both America, and the Clintons, are loved in Bosnia for finally forcing intervention after the Srebrenica massacre of 2005, the whole Tuzla Tale media outrage has made me revisit my feelings about the Clintons and American foreign policy in the 1990s

Let me be totally frank. In the end it took the US to silence the Serb guns which had encircled the civilian populations of Bosnia for three years. For Europeans of my generation, the final and effective use of US military power totally changed our mindset about US foreign policy. Through the post Vietnam years, especially in Latin America, myself and fellow left wingers had seen American power as mainly pernicious. Bosnia changed all that. We finally saw the use of military force for humanitarian reasons. The US showed Europeans how ineffective they were at policing their own continent.

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