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Hillary's tall tale of Tuzla
Clinton's Bosnian misadventure should disqualify her from the presidency, but the airport landing is the least of it.
- By Christopher Hitchens
- Published: 00:44 April 4, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
The punishment visited on Senator Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself.
There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken".)
The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true.
Let us examine how Clinton has managed to commit both of these offences to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivalled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.
I remember disembarking at the Sarajevo airport in the summer of 1992 after an agonising flight on a UN relief plane that had had to "corkscrew" its downward approach in order to avoid Serbian flak and ground fire. 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 defence 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 Senator 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 an 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 US.
Yet this is only to underline the YouTube (actual) version of events and the farcical or stupid or Clinton campaign communications director Howard Wolfson (take your pick) aspects of the story.
But here is the historical rather than personal aspect, which is what you should keep your eye on. Note the date of Senator 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, Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise.
Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith's admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics :
"... The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have 'deep misgivings' and viewed the situation as 'a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform.' The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the 'ethnic cleansing' by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people."
No tears for anyone
It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the US did not receive national healthcare 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 Senator 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.
In the end, and over her earlier strenuous objections, the US and its allies did rescue our honour and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Senator Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account!
Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate Magazine, where this column originally appeared.
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