Barack, Hilary and the albatross

During her visit, she was also given a prize at a special ceremony at the Palais des Nations to which I and other colleagues from the UN system were invited; in my case, as representative of UNESCO. And it was on this occasion that I first saw and heard Hillary speak in public. She looked, as she still does, much younger than her age, dressed very attractively in a pale pink Oscar de la Renta trouser suit. She was smaller than expected and carried herself with an easy sense of self-assurance.

The perfect presidential trophy wife, I said to myself as I watched her face the packed Palais audience; until she began to speak. Her voice was the first thing I noticed as being distinctly untrophy-like: it was a voice with presence; it immediately commanded one's attention. This voice was also distinct and deliberate in its delivery, and smooth and even of pitch. Then one noticed the content of her speech, the vocabulary and the structured sentences, all spoken with a perfect command of the English language. My ears, jaded from years of listening to boring UN speeches translated to and from six languages, perked up with relief!

She gave a perfectly appropriate talk about her commitment to the principle of medical insurance for her fellow citizens and about the importance of the work of the WHO, especially in developing countries. She thanked the jury for the prize and ended by saying that she had decided, after careful consideration, to give the prize-money (about 40.000 dollars) to a mother-and-child clinic in a village that she had recently visited in the West Lake Region of Tanzania.

In the evening, at the reception given in her honour, I lined up with the rest of the guests to shake her hand and say congratulations. When my turn came, I also added my sincere thanks on behalf of Tanzania. I said I was very touched that she had chosen this clinic, of all the many she must have visited the world over.

The reaction was immediate and warm; her eyes lit up, her face smiled and, placing her other hand on mine, she told me how much she had enjoyed her visit to Tanzania.

As for the prize, she said it had not been a difficult choice to make and had she had more funds, she would have given them to another such clinic in the country.

I asked her what had so pleased her about Tanzania during her visit; she replied that she and Chelsea, her daughter, had been most impressed by the friendliness of the people, their pride in their country, the peace and stability that was evident in spite of the poverty and of course, she added, the physical beauty of the place. I hoped she would come again on another visit very soon; she replied that she certainly would.

We could have chatted on but there was a long line of guests behind me and so I said goodbye and moved on, with this little exchange and the impression of the woman firmly printed in my memory.

Later on, I thought about her speech of support for the work of the WHO and the UN system, as well as her obvious affection for Tanzania and wondered how she would have explained the Clinton Administration's failure to resume her own country's membership of UNESCO. The US, a founder member of this institution, had withdrawn from it in anger in 1984, during the dark days of the Reagan presidency when the anti-UN agenda of the Heritage Foundation had gripped the minds of policy-makers in Washington.

(As it happened, the US resumed its membership thanks to George W. Bush who, for reasons only known to himself, suddenly announced the news in March 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq.)

I even began dreaming of a trip to Washington to interview her and ask her how she had resolved the contradiction, so evident to me, between her concern for mothers and children in a remote corner of East Africa and her husband's bombing of Iraq which was leading to the death of thousands of very young Iraqi children.

The subject of Iraqi children dying at the staggering rate of more than 700 a week as a result of US-UK bombs and severe economic sanctions (imposed by the West through the UN) could not be avoided by the international community in Geneva during the course of 1998. The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad had given briefings on this horrendous situation and colleagues from some major NGOs were saying the same thing.

On this subject, I would also have asked Mrs. Clinton to explain what her husband was doing in Iraq anyway and why he and Prime Minister Blair were continuing this so-called peacetime bombing of Iraq in 1998, a full seven years AFTER the end of the first Gulf War waged by the Republican George Bush the Father.

And last but not least, I would have asked for her reaction to the words uttered on American TV by Madeleine Albright, herself a mother and grand-mother, when she was US Ambassador to the UN. She was asked (on the programme Sixty Minutes) about the Clinton policy of bombing Iraq in order "to contain" Saddam.

"We have heard that half a million Iraqi children have died…that's more than died at Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?" asked the TV journalist.

Albright's answer should surely be engraved on her tombstone: "This is a very hard choice but yes, we think the price is worth it."

As we all know, President Clinton subsequently appointed Mrs. Albright her country’s first woman Secretary of State.

Needless to say, these questions remained in the realm of my imagination. But later that year, as events moved on for the Clintons in the form of the Lewinsky scandal, my brief contact with Hillary made me follow that story with particular interest.

The President of the world's only super-power became a laughing stock across the globe as that pathetic saga unfolded; poor Hillary looked crushed and humiliated in the little that one saw of her on TV. Then, in December 1998, there followed what must surely be one of the most degrading episodes in recorded presidential history, namely the attempt to organise a vote in the House of Representatives aimed at indicting President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of his relations with this White House intern. For months before that, we had been spared no detail in an epic inquiry carried out with rottweiler-like tenacity and relish by the Special Investigator, the Republican Kenneth Starr.

Watching her husband being excoriated on TV all day and every day must have been an ordeal for Hillary, to put it mildly. Bill Clinton survived the vote but his credibility and reputation disintegrated over the following months as his presidency limped to its close in December 1999.

During the scandal period, many journalists had asked why Hillary had kept silent; why she had not left her husband, nor booted him out for the disgrace he had brought on their marriage and on the highest office of the land.

She did not answer, she did not explain; she stood by her man and she saw it through. And after leaving the White house, she did not get angry or bitter; she got to be US Senator for New York and a very good one at that, by all accounts.

One does not have to be a psycho-analyst to see that the wounds caused by the Lewinsky affair to Hillary's pride as a woman, as the First Lady and as a partner in her and her husband's joint career in politics came to form the main motivation for a new career for herself after leaving Washington.

As Carl Bernstein explains in his biography of Hillary "Woman in Charge" in marrying Bill very soon after university, she gave up the chance of an independent career for herself where her considerable intellectual gifts could have found fulfillment. However, if she chose to hitch her wagon to Bill's political star, it was within a partnership of equals where their combined talents were to be harnessed in order to serve a shared ambition to reach the highest spheres in US politics.

And this strategy worked; for it carried them very swiftly, via the Democratic Party, from the periphery of Arkansas to the White House. It was here where it fell apart, thanks to her husband's reckless behaviour with an intern, leaving Hillary to face humiliation at first and then serious collateral damage when he lied about the episode.

After entering the Senate, she became a politician in her own right with a vengeance and worked hard to redeem herself (and her husband)) through another self-generated ambition, namely to re-enter the Oval Office in 2008. And this time to do so on her own terms, through her own capacities, with her own personal credit intact. And from this source came the driven, single-minded pursuit, within a weakened Democratic party, of a goal designed to re-write the record of the Clinton joint -life -project, so mindlessly trivialised by her partner in its first version.

The joint-project-marriage is an interesting phenomenon to observe as more and more bright, well-educated women face the dilemma of fulfilling their professional ambitions within this type of partnership from the confines of another traditional and emotional one, that of being married to the same man for love.

Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher, explains this dilemma very clearly in her book, "The Second Sex." In a marriage she explains:

"Man is first of all what he does in the world among other men...In certain privileged cases, the wife may succeed in be- coming the husband's true companion, discussing his projects, giving him counsel, collaborating in his works. But she is deluded if she expects in this way to accomplish work she can call her own, for he remains alone the free and responsible agent."

De Beauvoir continues, "Each man readily salutes in the woman who shares his life a colleague and an inspiration, but he nonetheless regards his work as entirely his own..." Consequently, she concludes, "only independent work of her own can assure woman’s genuine independence."

And one might add, genuine self-respect and self-fulfillment.

For the next six years, in a single-minded quest to become President, so absorbed and centred did Hillary become on re-fashioning herself as the perfect, potential, presidential nominee, that she was unable to notice how much the US was changing, mostly because of the Iraq war and its disastrous consequences on the economic, social and psychological state of the country.

During the first months of the campaign, she had no political project to offer, except "to be ready on day one." Her main campaign instruments were money, tough macho-talk in support of the Iraq war (with herself as the Commander-in-Chief), and an absurd presumption of entitlement, all of which evaporated as increasing numbers of Americans from all walks of life turned to Obama, much to her disbelief and Bill's fury.

After Obama's victory at the Democratic primaries, TV pundits started asking where in the campaign “Hillary went wrong”, as though she had taken a wrong turning on the highway by mistake! It could be argued that where she went wrong was in the quest itself.

Her priority was to aim for the top for herself, to re-gain her self-respect and rectify her husband's mess of a legacy, not to heed her fellow,-citizens, hoodwinked, humiliated and impoverished by the policies of one of the most irresponsible and rapacious administrations they have ever produced.

Thanks to this group, the US has become a menace to the well-being of the entire planet, including its own population, which is why Bush's domestic rating has now sunk to 28% and why there is so much anti-US feeling around the globe. And this is surely why Obama's offer of change has sparked such a response; it is a code-word which makes sense to millions of ordinary American citizens, given what they have been going through -and still are-under the Bush regime

Ironically, the man who only narrowly defeated Hillary at the Democratic primaries is the one who has paid her the most serious and sincere compliment of her political life. On May 22, at a massive gathering of his supporters in Ohio, Obama, sensing victory, began his speech by acknowledging Hillary and her achievement.

He told the crowd that together they had all come a long way, that the road had not been smooth, with "some bumps, some mistakes which I have made because I have faced one of the most formidable candidates ever in a presidential campaign."

And he went on, "Whoever wins this race, one thing is clear: the USA that my daughters and yours will grow up in will have been changed forever because of the contribution of Sen. Hillary Clinton."

With these words, Obama has included Hillary in his eventual, probable, victory by identifying her place in the history of their country, not as one who was defeated but as one who, like himself, has indelibly changed the country for future generations.

Obama has repeated these words several times since Ohio and it has taken Hillary many weeks to accept and take ownership of this recognition of her own unique contribution which owes nothing to her husband, given the negative role he has played in her campaign. But even in her speech on unity and her support for Obama’s nomination, she still wanted to give her man a central place in her romantic version of the glories of that "historical" democratic presidency.... under her husband!

Another rather different take on those happy days came from the Washington correspondent of the Financial Times, Edward Luce, who recently wrote that:

"When Bill Clinton told Hillary about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, the First Lady banished him to one of the White House couches for several nights. "I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging her for forgiveness and planning strikes on Al Qaeda", Mr. Clinton recalled. (FT: June 7 2008)"

Leaving aside this extraordinary linkage “recalled” in hindsight by Clinton, between begging for forgiveness and striking Al Qaeda (rather ineffectively)--as though the bombs were an atonement for Lewinsky--it is obvious that Bill seems to suffer from amnesia, for nowhere does he talk about striking Iraq for 8 years!

In fact, on or off the White House couch, Bill indulged in very heavy, systematic “peacetime bombing” of Iraq with his friend PM Blair for the entire period of his presidency. This is what Prof. Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University writes in his book, Good Muslim Bad Muslim:

By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than the US invasion of Viet Nam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the Wall Street Journal they would soon run out of targets: 'We're down to the last outhouse.'

That was two months before President Clinton, bedeviled by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and faced with a vote in the House of Representatives indicting him for perjury and obstruction of justice, decided to unleash round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. This round-the-clock bombing (called Operation Desert Fox) began on December 16 and ended on December 19, 1998. The US Government reported that American and British forces flew more than 650 strike and strike-support sorties, that navy ships and submarines fired 325 cruise-missiles, and that additional cruise-missiles were fired by US Air Force B-52s.

The air strike campaign on a defenceless civilian population in peacetime was only half the story; the other half was the comprehensive regime of economic sanctions imposed through the UN. From 1990, ALL exports from, and ALL imports to Iraq were banned (except for some medical and some food items) and a marine and air-blockade was added for good measure. The consequence on a country already devastated by 10 years of war was the death of infants on a mass scale.

The combined onslaught of air strikes and sanctions amounted to “a vicious low-intensity, high-casualty campaign conducted through the offices of the UN; in reality, this was nothing short of an officially conducted and officially sanctioned genocide, primarily of children mostly under five,” Mamdani writes.

The US-UK policy on Iraq went mainly un-noticed from 1991 to 1998 when pubic knowledge of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Iraq filtered through to the Security Council, thanks to two non-permanent members at the time, Canada and Brazil. Their efforts produced a Security Council resolution asking the UN to assess the humanitarian conditions obtaining in Iraq.

The following year, in 1999,UNICEF presented its demographic survey that tabulated, for the first time, the full extent of the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the sanction regime in Iraq.

UNICEF estimated that infant mortality rates in children under five had more than doubled from the period 1984-1989 to the period 1995-1999, leading to about 5000 deaths a month ABOVE the pre-sanctions rate.

In 2000, the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, meeting at its annual session in Geneva, reported that sanctions against Iraq were "the direct cause of half -a -million to one -and- a -half million deaths, the majority of the dead being children."

As Mamdani comments, "Even the minimum estimate was THREE times the number of Japanese citizens killed during the US atomic-bomb attacks" at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the price that Albright was willing to pay.... down to the last Iraqi infant!

Meanwhile, back on that White House couch, it was Monica not massive death counts that caused so much strife in the First Couple's marriage. And, strangely in the popular mind, not to mention the popular press, it is still the Lewinsky scandal that the Clinton presidency remains tainted with, not the fate of Iraq's children and their mothers.

That was then. For now, as the man from the FT says in his article mentioned above, it is unlikely Obama will have Hillary as his Vice-President because "the Clintons bring with them more baggage than gets lost at Heathrow every week!"

And Hillary and her glass ceiling with its 18 million cracks, in all this?

One could put it this way perhaps: "Standing by your man is one thing; standing by your principles is quite another."

*Annar Cassam is Tanzanian, former Consultant at UNESCO/PEER Nairobi and former Director, UNESCO Office, Geneva.

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