My favorite newly-minted American is Christopher Hitchens, the acerbic, frighteningly intelligent, and very well-read immigrant from the mother country. I do not care for or agree with his militant atheism, but nobody is better at warming the feet of political scoundrels.
Hitch turns his attention in his latest Slate column to Senator Clinton's fabrication du jour, her claim to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia. It has been by now thoroughly documented that Ms. Clinton's story was false, but Hitchens shows why the falsehood cannot possibly have been innocent.
I remember disembarking at the Sarajevo airport in the summer of 1992 after an agonizing flight on a U.N. relief plane that had had to "corkscrew" its downward approach in order to avoid Serbian flak and ground fire. As I hunched over to scuttle the distance to the terminal, a mortar shell fell as close to me as I ever want any mortar shell to fall. The vicious noise it made is with me still. And so is the shock I felt at seeing a civilized and multicultural European city bombarded round the clock by an ethno-religious militia under the command of fascistic barbarians. I didn't like the Clinton candidacy even then, but I have to report that many Bosnians were enthused by Bill Clinton's pledge, during that ghastly summer, to abandon the hypocritical and sordid neutrality of the George H.W. Bush/James Baker regime and to come to the defense of the victims of ethnic cleansing.
I am recalling these two things for a reason. First, and even though I admit that I did once later misidentify a building in Sarajevo from a set of photographs, I can tell you for an absolute certainty that it would be quite impossible to imagine that one had undergone that experience at the airport if one actually had not. Yet Sen. Clinton, given repeated chances to modify her absurd claim to have operated under fire while in the company of her then-16-year-old daughter and a USO entertainment troupe, kept up a stone-faced and self-loving insistence that, yes, she had exposed herself to sniper fire in the cause of gaining moral credit and, perhaps to be banked for the future, national-security "experience." This must mean either a) that she lies without conscience or reflection; or b) that she is subject to fantasies of an illusory past; or c) both of the above. Any of the foregoing would constitute a disqualification for the presidency of the United States.
I am willing to bet that Hitch's story is every bit as honest and true as Hillary Clinton's duplicitous and false, and I think that it tells us a lot of what we need to know about the character of the woman who still has a distant chance at the White House.
But the Clintons have long sold themselves as a team, and Senator Clinton's claim to experience rests almost solely on her part in her husband's presidency. So it is worth while considering Bill Clinton's Balkans policy.
Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration? In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise.
Candidate Bill Clinton promised that he would use American bombers to stop Serbian genocide in Bosnia. But when the time came he did what a Clinton does with a promise. He was afraid that action in Bosnia would get in the way of Hillary's health care reform initiative.
It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself.
Of course, President Clinton (42) did eventually intervene in Bosnia, but only after a quarter of a million people had died. That is the context in which one has to judge Ms. Clinton's lie. She wanted us to believe that she flew in heroically to save these poor people. That woman is a piece of work.
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