Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: Will the Tools Be Any Different?!

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. Ambassador to the world, a dream not entirely shattered, nor entirely realized; rather , it is a fragmented and scattered dream. But the core of these fragments has been restored since she was first lady in the White House.

She dreamed of winning the primaries to return to the White House, not as First Lady but as the president of the United States, leader of the free world or others as U.S. presidents seem to give themselves. Certainly, the temptations of power nearly enticed her to run in 2000, but she did not and Hillary eventually had had enough of the stresses of hierarchy and grew weary.

En route to the White House, Hillary committed to positions she thought would be enough to guarantee her victory. For years she had demanded that international organizations add the Star of David to the cross and the crescent to the symbols used by international aid groups, but to no avail.

Today, Hillary Clinton returns to the White House as secretary of State. Perhaps the words repeated on most American lips since Bill Clinton stood for his second presidential stint were "vote Clinton, it’s like getting two for the price of one." In other words, both Bill and Hillary together. This is what may have spurred Obama to comment, upon appointing Hillary: “Here I am appointing two secretaries with only one.” Bill, the former president, will be the real advisor to Secretary of State Clinton. For Hillary, it will then be incumbent of her to travel the world and return world order, in line with her vision and the vision of the administration, washing away the dirt of the previous administration and preparing for a better world ruled by more realistic relations. This will only be pursued, of course, if that is the general will amongst Obama’s team.

In any case, will wisdom remain the key to Hillary’s character and diplomatic skills? The same skills she displayed in getting through the Lewinski affair with minimal losses, with a diplomacy that carried with it the envy of many, then standing by and supporting her husband for his second electoral campaign. Yet she subsequently recalled in her autobiography, “Living History”: “I want to pound his neck but he is my president.”

An American Story

Under the previous title, in her autobiography, Hillary tells us: “I was not born a first lady or a Democrat, neither was I born a defender of women’s and human rights nor was I born a wife or a mother. I was born an American in the middle of the twentieth century in a good time and place. I was free to choose as I wished, choices that were simply not available to previous generations of women in my country, choices that most women of this world simply cannot imagine. I reached adulthood at the peak of powerful social change and I played a role in political conflicts over question of what America stood for and what her role in the world was.

In these words, Hillary has summed up a lot of her own biography and her own ideological and intellectual drives, which have been in development ever since her birth on the 21st of October, 1947.

Her father was her first role model: “my father was from a generation that believed in possibilities without limits, a vision that America enjoys and whose values are deeply-rooted in life experiments during the Great Depression. Throughout this he believed in hard work and not in minutiae, relying upon himself and maintaining control over one’s desires and not getting lost in them.”

On the Political Battleground

Hillary recognized that it was her friend, former tennis star Billie Jean King, who pushed her into competing in the Senate elections in 1999 . She also received support from Father Trebo, who eventually became her friend and who wrote her a letter in which he said: “Hillary, I want to tell you something I’ve been telling my students for fifty years. the question which God will ask does not pertain to the Ten Commandments, rather he will ask the following question: What did you do in your life and how did you use the talents that I bestowed upon you? Run for senator, Hillary, run! My prayers will accompany you throughout your journey.”

So she pledged her candidacy. Her campaign, by her own admission, was a plunge into the history of the state in over which she battled, a history in which Iroquois tribes of the Union still reside in eastern parts of the U.S. Their adherence to democratic principles influenced the Founders a great deal and, in this light Hillary’s campaign was not easy. She committed a number of mistakes, particularly in the beginning, on a terrain (New York politics) that is not known for forgetting hastened mistakes.

Asking Israel for Forgiveness

Hillary would calculate her steps just right at each starting point, always keeping the Zionist lobby satisfied. Yet, she recalls in her autobiography that the worst incident in her life occurred during her formal visit to Israel, in the Autumn of 1999. “During this visit as first lady, I attended a gathering alongside Soha Daoud Tawil (widow of Yasser Arafat). Mrs. Arafat spoke before me in Arabic and we didn’t hear her (ugly) comment in which she described Israel’s use of poisonous gas in order to subdue the Palest inians. Many of the Jewish constituents felt a justified anger in response to Soha’s comments and disappointment that I didn’t take the opportunity to disapprove of her remark. In the end my campaign succeeded despite the enduring effects of this slip, yet I learnt a harsh lesson about the dangers of regular participation in the international diplomatic scene, with its local political complications in New York.

What’s in Her Quiver?

“What you don’t learn from your mother, you learn from the world.” This is one of Hillary’s favorite proverbs, one that she repeated often. But will she use this to learn about the U.S. diplomatic mistakes which endorsed the language of towers and planes; Hillary is a woman possessing a wide network of relations with organizations that work against Arab causes. It has not been possible for her to criticize Israel for its use of poisonous gas against Arab children. Will the bet remain on change or will the electoral slogans be nothing more than paving the way to the White House? Hillary is the third of three female secretaries of State (Albright, Rice and now Hillary)… will the tools of governance be any different?