Veteran journalist Roger Cohen has a must-read op-edthis morning in the NYT. He covered the war in Bosnia, from Sarajevo, and saw first-hand the carnage, while President Bill Clinton hemmed and hawed, just as he had done while the Rwandan genocide was unfolding. And he was in Bosnia after the war ended, the time-frame in which Mrs Clinton made her Tuzla stop-over. His assessment of her fabrication is the most scathing I've seen yet from anyone with first-hand knowledge. Read it for yourselves.
Imagined Snipers, Real Challenges
Here’s some news for Hillary Clinton: the Bosnian war was over in 1996.
Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured President Bill Clinton’s circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by shelling from Serbian gunners, know that.
That's just for starters.
Only after the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, three years after the initial Serbian genocide of 1992 against that population (and one year after a genocide on his watch in Rwanda), did the gelatinous Clinton develop some backbone.
Yes, that's harsh, but moral outrage is something too few in the media have the stomach to express. Not out loud, Not in the polite company of the corporate hands that feed them and support the Clintons. Compare Cohen's tone with, I don't know, Andrea Mitchell's, for instance... She was there too.
So, yes, the war was well and truly over when Hillary Clinton arrived in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996. It was over, although she recently recalled “landing under sniper fire.” It was over when “we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Oh, please. Researching a book, I also visited that base in 1996 to talk to Maj. Gen. William Nash, then the commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. If you’d lived the war, the base was a small miracle of American order and security.
So why hasn't a single one of the journalists at CBS news or NBC news who have come out in recent days to say they were there, on that trip, with Mrs Clinton, and who have gently pooh-poohed her fabrications, stated clearly and unequivocally this simple fact: THE WAR WAS OVER. Ergo, Clinton's entire story was a bald-faced lie the first time she told it in February? Are they paid to inform the public, or to do their share of damage control when a negative story breaks out about Mrs Clinton? Inquiring minds want to know!
Clinton made up Bosnian sniper fire in an attempt to show that she’s tougher than Barack Obama; that she’s a hardened, seasoned, putative commander in chief ready to respond to crisis when the “red phone” of her fear-mongering ad rings.
John McCain’s own recent “misspeaking” about Iran, placing (Sunni) Al Qaeda in (Shiite) Iran, also smacked of muscle-flexing: he wanted to signal toughness to the mullahs in Tehran, where Obama has suggested he’d seek dialogue.
But what the United States, and those that look to it, need now is not more braggadocio from the White House. We’ve had a seven-year dose. That’s enough.
Now here's the raw truth this reporter exposes, like an ugly, festering wound which McCain and Clinton both want to keep under wrap, no matter who dirty and purulent the bandage gets:
American hard power has not worked.
Well, duh. But when will that lesson begin to sink in? When 9and IF, bif if, by the way) a new American administration unmuzzles the media and allows shots of soldiers' coffins being returned to their families? When the new Prez starts attending burials at Arlington cemeterry? When the true story is finally told, as it was in Vietnam, by the likes of Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, about the abomination being carried out n Iraq in the name of the American people?
The article goes on at some length, thoughtfully sifting through the enormous international challenges facing the U.S. today and laying out, in clear-eyed, tough-love language, the real options that exist to effectively deal with them. Please take the time to read it in its entirety.
I'll add one more quote, from Cohen's conclusion:
Obama, in his speech on race, did important things. He confronted reality, thought big, probed division, sketched convergence. He took Americans and many people beyond U.S. shores to a different mental place. Imagine that capacity applied to GWOT, Iran, Russia, China and Israel-Palestine.
If you don’t like the sound of that, there’s always seasoned swagger of the sort that runs from imaginary snipers.
Please help spread this important Op-Ed around the blogosphere.
UPDATE: From the comments. Cohen's piece in response to Obama's speech "A More Perfect Union" is also worth your time today. (H/t billysumday)