Bosnia burned while Bill fiddled

Christopher Hitchens is a shrill blow hard. But sometimes he is right. He has a column in Slate right now that nails Hillary's lies about Bosnian sniper fire with such precision that it should be required reading for anyone trying to sort out whether Hillary's lies about her excellent adventures with Sinbad matter. I used to laugh at and applaud the bumper stickers that say When Bill lied no one died. Hitchens' point: When Hillary lied, in fact, people had died, and her husband hadn't done enough to stop it. It doesn't require mental gymnastics to accept his central point. One of the things that Hillary's lie conceals is that the Clinton administration didn't do enough to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. And, by Hitchens' account, that was because Hillary feared her health-care reforms would be compromised by our involvement in the Balkans quagmire. Her lens was LBJ's war on poverty, which was lost, according to conventional wisdom, because of his decision to widen the war in Vietnam. As we spent resources there, and as LBJ lost support and leverage because of the unpopular war, we lost our chance to end poverty.

Historically, we can assess the measures the Clinton administration went to to avoid making a firm commitment to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. After claiming that he would help arm Bosnia's muslims to make it "a fair fight," Bill Clinton backed away from even this modest commitment, while working to undermine efforts by France to engineer a NATO plan to intervene. I think it is an exaggeration to claim that the only thing keeping Bill Clinton from stepping in to do more in Bosnia was Hillary's concerns about her health-care initiative. There were legitimate questions about how messy an intervention would be, and real concerns about how a long-term involvement in Bosnia would shape or undermine our long-range strategic goals. Clinton wanted to redirect NATO toward new priorities in a new international landscape, expanding its role in non-European security affairs and using it to absorb new Eastern European democracies, incorporating them into the alliance as a way of shaping the post-Cold War world.

Looming over the decision was U.S. failure in Somalia. Bill Clinton didn't have strong national security credentials when he entered the White House. When a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter went down in October 1993, and 18 U.S. servicemen were killed, Bill Clinton needed to restore confidence among U.S. military forces, who felt like they had been led into a no-win mission, without adequate forces to do the job, by a President who had avoided military service. He didn't want to repeat the experience in Bosnia. Even when HANDED THE OPPORTUNITY TO GO INTO BOSNIA WITH NATO BACKING, exactly the type of concerted international action the Bush administration only pretended to assemble in Iraq, Bill declined. Even when the proposed action on the table was NATO bombing to protect safe areas, Bill delayed. U.S. involvement only moved forward in 1995 when Bosnian Serbs escalated the conflict by taking UN peacekeepers hostage, making U.S. intervention more politically acceptable; polls showed 78 percent of Americans approved using U.S. forces to rescue captive UN forces and enforce safe-zone guarantees.

Two truths: Hillary's post-conflict trip to Tuzla says nothing about Hillary's foreign affairs readiness. The Clinton administration's timid, self-interested, and poll-driven choice to delay (and finally take part in) a Bosnian intervention says a lot about Bill's failings as a commander in chief. Hillary should not be condemned for her husband's lack of courage, compassion, or leadership, but she should be condemned, as Hitchens does, for attempting to suggest that her presence on that tarmac in Tuzla says anything about her willingness to face fire, or respond to international crises, or take on bullies. And her willingness to lie about being shot at, to gain a moment's notice on the evening news, is an insult to everyone who actually did face fire to bring peace to Bosnia and end ethnic cleansing there.

Update: The Clinton campaign's flawed efforts to talk their way out of Hillary's lie about landing under sniper fire in Tuzla continue in the Opinion pages of the New York Times today. Again, they hang their defense on: If her military escort took steps to keep the First Lady safe, she must have been at risk. And because she bravely faced those risks, she can deservedly be described as crisis-ready. That's like saying: because the TSA screens passengers at airports I fly from, and I bravely line up to fly anyway, I clearly have the right stuff. In actuality, I do answer the call when it comes at 3 a.m. All the time. In fact, I did last night, when my two year old couldn't sleep and called out to me. I grabbed him from his bed and we watched TV and ate rice cakes.