The New York Review of Books didn't just dislike Hillary's book they hated it as a insipid self-serving promotion assembled by a "Book Team'.
Hillary
By Joseph Lelyveld
The book landed with a thud. It’s a stiff-jointed, careful performance, assembled by a “book team” of former and present aides from briefing papers, old speeches, town hall transcripts, and interviews. What we get are the highly edited reflections of a prospective candidate: part résumé, designed to reveal the depth of her immersion in global affairs and the extent of her familiarity with the world’s great and near great, scores of them (from the Empress of Japan to His All Holiness, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, to Bono); part rampart, designed not to reveal too much.
On a swing through North Africa, confronted by a question from a Tunisian lawyer who asks whether she understands why her country is so mistrusted by young people aspiring to democracy, given its compromises with corrupt autocrats who abuse human rights, Clinton gives the Yes…but response. “Yes,” it’s true, she concedes, “We’ve made a lot of mistakes. But I think if you look at the entire historical record, the entire historical record shows we’ve been on the side of freedom, we’ve been on the side of human rights.”
Not to the Tunisian lawyer but in an aside to her readers, almost as if she’s letting them in on a secret, she also says: “America will always do what it takes to keep our people safe and advance our core interests. Sometimes that means working with partners with whom we have deep disagreements.” It’s a proposition she illustrates by conceding that American values were bent in our dependence on the then president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh: “He was corrupt and autocratic, but he was also committed to fighting al Qaeda and keeping his fractious country together.” He’s our man in Sanaa, at least until we drop him.
So America stands up for freedom and democracy (unless it threatens one of our dictatorial "strategic partners")
Faced with a thorny choice—on Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Libya—her own instinct is usually to act in furtherance of America’s “global leadership” role, not abstain. On Afghanistan, for instance, she supports Obama’s 2009 decision to send in a “surge” of 30,000 more troops but wishes he hadn’t capped the number so firmly or publicly committed himself to their withdrawal by the end of this year. But when the Arab Spring sweeps into Cairo’s Tahir Square she’s understandably confounded. It’s Yes…but time again. Mubarak may have been “a heavy-handed autocrat who presided over a corrupt and calcified regime,” but he was “a longtime partner” who “supported peace and cooperation with Israel and hunted terrorists.”
Mubarak may have been a tyrant but he was our tyrant.
Hillary also wants to make sure readers know that Obama was tougher with Netanyahu that she would have prefered.
Her care in distinguishing her inclinations from Obama’s is even more conspicuous in her pages on the Israelis and Palestinians. As might perhaps be expected of a former senator from New York, she can’t find it in herself to scold Israel over its occupation of the West Bank; in fact, she never uses the word “occupation.” She recognizes the expanding settlements as a political problem, and she pressed hard while in office for a limited construction “freeze,” but says nothing to suggest that the problems posed by existing settlements or the actual conditions on the West Bank—the suffocating overlay of security checks, road blocks, army patrols—offend her sense of fairness or human rights. Of course, like all secretaries of state of the last half-century, she doesn’t mention that Israel never signed the nuclear nonproliferation pact, the treaty we’re rightly pressing Iran to observe. First she says that she feels “personally invested in Israel’s security and success,” then that she’s “someone who cares deeply about Israel’s security and future.”
We get the point. Still, it’s instructive to see how carefully she distances herself from Obama in recounting his difficulties with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two men repeatedly go to the edge of confrontation while she and the Israeli leader are able to work together as “partners and friends.”
“I learned that Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered, but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance that you could get something done together.” Someone who was “friending” long before the invention of Facebook, she believes in “building relationships and understanding how and when to use them.” What she gets out of this one is an agreement to extend the freeze on settlement construction for ninety days, except in East Jerusalem, at the cost of an additional $3 billion in military aid. Earlier, when Joe Biden was greeted on a visit to Israel with an announcement of new Jewish construction in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, a “furious” Obama instructed her to tell Netanyahu that he viewed the provocation “as a personal insult to him, the Vice President, and the United States.” Clinton puts the words in quotes so we understand that they’re the president’s. She delivers the blast but almost seems to excuse herself. “I didn’t like playing bad cop,” she writes, “but it was part of the job.”
Clearly Hillary is uncomfortable standing up for American interests when it might lead to a confrontation with the Israeli government, and displeasing their supporters in this country.
Is this the kind of President we as Progressives want?