Michael Crowley at The New Republic: Hillary the Hawk? The Real Reason She Won't Apologize

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Excerpts from the must read four page article...may require subscription

THE REAL REASON SHE WON'T APOLOGIZE.
Hillary's War

by Michael Crowley

Post date: 03.26.07
Issue date: 04.02.07

<>The truth about how Clinton came to support Bush's war (albeit with reservations), and how she has thought about it since, has always been shrouded in mystery. People assume that Clinton is playing politics, that she voted for the war to look tough or because Bush was popular and that she won't apologize now for fear of looking like a flip-flopper. Political observers scour her daily statements--her head-nodding, even, in one recent New York Times article--for clues to her thinking. Or they speculate about what she might do in the future. But the key to understanding Hillary Clinton's foreign policy lies in the past. And, as one probes her inner circle and reconstructs her record, an alternative reading emerges: What if the hawkish Hillary of 2002 wasn't just motivated by political opportunism? What if she really believed in the war?

<>As a result, it's not easy divining how Clinton thinks about national security in general, much less what factors led to her support for the Iraq war resolution. Her aides allowed me only a fleeting hallway encounter with Clinton herself. So I set out to unravel the mystery by calling dozens of former Clinton officials and Democratic aides. I also dug into her past, from her college career through eight years in the White House and six in the Senate. Sifting through Hillary's life, a portrait begins to emerge of a woman who has always been more comfortable with the military than many of her liberal boomer peers. I found that Clinton had aggressively pushed her husband to use force when he was president; that one of her most influential new advisers was a former senior aide to hawkish Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia; and that, although she opposed President Bush's Iraq "surge," she has consulted regularly with one of its prime architects. I even found that, in her late twenties, Hillary Rodham Clinton briefly attempted to enlist in the U.S. Marines.

That last fact--reported in 1994 but largely forgotten since--underlines the degree to which, unlike many of her peers, Clinton has never allowed Vietnam to define her vision of foreign policy. It's true that the war helped pull her from her roots as a Goldwater Girl and a president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans and drive her into the Democratic Party. During her junior year at Wellesley, she even knocked on doors for Eugene McCarthy's antiwar campaign. But Vietnam apparently didn't imbue Hillary with a loathing for the military. In 1975, just months after the last U.S. troops returned home, Hillary was living in Arkansas with Bill, who had mounted a failed bid for Congress the previous year. The young couple, who would marry later that year, were both teaching law at the University of Arkansas, when Hillary, for reasons never made entirely clear, decided to enlist in the Marines. When she walked into a recruiting office in Little Rock and inquired about joining, the recruiter on duty was unenthusiastic about the 27-year-old law professor in thick, goggle glasses. "You're too old, you can't see, and you're a woman," Clinton recalled him saying. "Maybe the dogs"--Marine slang for the Army--"would take you." Deflated, Clinton said she decided to "look for another way to serve my country."

<>Hillary Clinton still talks regularly with her husband's senior foreign policy team, whose generally hawkish slant may help to explain why Hillary has been far slower than her Democratic rivals to shift left on the war. (It's telling that the three well-known former Clinton foreign policy officials who have signed up with Obama's campaign--former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, State Department African affairs expert Susan Rice, and Greg Craig, a lawyer and onetime adviser to Albright--are more dovish than many of their old colleagues.) Hillary's campaign still lacks a formally structured foreign policy team, perhaps in part because her lasting personal friendships provide much of the advice she needs. A month after Hillary's election to the Senate in 2000, for instance, Holbrooke hosted a gala dinner for her at his private residence in Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria Towers, featuring attendees like Robert DeNiro and Harrison Ford. When Hillary traveled to Munich in 2005 for a speech about the United Nations, Holbrooke was there, taking notes in the front row. He's also inside enough to have recently solicited recommendations for a new full-time foreign policy aide to join Clinton's campaign. "He's obviously gunning for secretary of state," a Democratic foreign policy expert told me. "He's putting all his eggs in this basket."

<>Newer additions to Hillary's fold also suggest that her hawkish profile is about more than just polls. One is her Senate foreign policy staffer Andrew Shapiro. The 39-year-old Shapiro is affable but charged with nervous energy. (Sitting in the audience at a recent Clinton speech on the military, he rocked steadily back and forth like Rain Man at Wapner time.) A Gore-Lieberman campaign aide and Justice Department lawyer, Shapiro was also briefly a research assistant at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a center-right think tank. Shapiro is "a mainstream foreign Democratic policy establishment moderate," says a congressional foreign policy aide. "He's hawkish on defense issues and Israel." It is Shapiro, Hillaryites say, who is in the room for most of her important foreign policy decisions.

http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070402&s=crowley040207

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1. Post edited to add a bit more about Hillary's trip to the Marine recruiter in Little Rock in 1975

Hillary's answer to Crowley when he asked this...

As for the meaning of the recruiting visit, "I can't tell you," she said with a dismissive wave. "You go look at that." And at that, the door shut, and she was gone, a faint silhouette behind tinted windows.