Hillary the hawk

Intervention it is then. Cue lots of politicians walking around with rousing West Wing music in their minds’ ears. This is the part where they get to play the good guys. Until something goes wrong, and they are bungling idiots again.

Of course, it’s good for everyone to feel that a bombing campaign in Libya is a multi-lateral, UN decision – not an Iraq. But if this turns into a long campaign, American airpower will be expected to do the vast majority of the work. And while Obama may be reluctant to engage on a third front, there are plenty of enthusiasts in Washington – none more so than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that Clinton has been using Obama’s indecision over Libya to promote herself. The former first lady is making another play for the presidency. Hillary recognises that Obama’s unwillingness to bomb Gaddafi is a political misstep. She long ago realised that the way to impress Americans who might otherwise oppose her was to sound aggressive about US foreign policy.

In her long campaign to be elected president in 2008, she desperately tried to sound bellicose about Iran in order to expose Obama’s doveishness. Look at her here talking with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News:

Of course, Hillary is not the only Democrat hawk. American history is full of them, from Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden to Nancy Pelosi. Democrats are in many ways America’s greatest pro-war constituency.

But Mrs Clinton is more hawkish than most. She doesn’t mind attacking even her husband if it makes her sound tough. She revealed to her biographer, Gail Sheehy, that she had urged Bill to bomb the Serbs in 1999. They argued for days, apparently, before the president finally caved in and ordered the strike.

In the decade-long build up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, she consistently attempted to out-flank Republicans by calling for intervention. She hailed the 1998 bombing of Iraq, which killed thousands of Iraqis without killing Saddam or destroying any WMDs, as a strategic masterstroke.

Maybe I am being too cynical; maybe Hillary isn’t scheming; maybe she just really likes bombs and guns. This is the woman, remember, who pretended that she had landed in Bosnia under sniper fire, when in fact the footage showed she had been greeted by children. She later said she had ‘misremembered’

So why should anybody take her seriously about Libya? She is now being lauded for waging ‘a tireless internal campaign in favor of U.S. action in support of Libyan rebels’. But is her position the considered, expertly informed one of a Secretary of State, or is it just another war cry from Hillary the hawk?