The AP takes a skeptical look at Hillary Clinton’s claims of vast foreign policy experience as first lady.

Clinton also took a keen interest in foreign policy, traveling to more than 80 countries, with her husband and alone, to promote U.S. policy and the cause of women and children.

But Clinton is taking credit for accomplishing more than some of those who were active in foreign policy during the Clinton years recall.

The article goes on to examine Hillary’s various claims to fame. Here’s the doozy, which even the AP let slip by.

SERBIA: “I urged him to bomb.”

Clinton doesn’t bring this one up now, but in a 1999 interview published in Talk magazine, the first lady was quoted as saying that she had urged her husband to recommend a NATO bombing campaign on Serb targets to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

According to the story, Clinton called the president on March 21, 1999, from her travels in North Africa. “I urged him to bomb,” she was quoted as saying. “You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?” NATO airstrikes began March 24.

First, the threat to civilians in the region was overhyped. Yet no one accuses the Clintons of “cherry picking” intelligence.

But how can Hillary refer to the civil war massacres in the Balkan as the major holocaust of her time when 800,000 Rwandans were macheted to death just five years prior?

The Clintons conveniently forgot that Bill was “the first black president” and looked the other way as 8,000 people a day bled to death for 100 consecutive days.

Now apparently, that deed doesn’t even merit being remembered by Hillary. 

UPDATE:

Obsidian Wings debunks claims Hillary argued for Rwandan intervention. Such a lie is grotesque and easily refuted. Bill Clinton always claimed the US didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

So: Clinton didn’t mention that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda in her memoirs. Neither did Madeleine Albright. Neither, as far as I can tell, did anyone else. Military intervention was not considered as an option, “never even debated”, which means that any advocacy she did engage in must have been pretty ineffective.

But it’s worse than that. The Clinton administration did not simply fail to intervene militarily in Rwanda. It took a number of steps that made it easier for genocide to be committed. Not taking these steps would have been much, much easier than sending actual troops to Rwanda. They would have made a real difference. And yet the Clinton administration failed to take them.

What Clinton did was worse than inaction, he actually made things worse.

So, to sum up: the US didn’t just fail to intervene in Rwanda. Our government urged the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping forces that were on the ground protecting Rwandans, for no better reason than to keep the Belgians from looking like cowards. It refused to jam the radio station that was passing on instructions for genocide. It blocked further efforts to reinforce the peacekeeping forces there. It also failed to do any of the much smaller things that might have shown that our government was not wholly indifferent to the people of Rwanda who were, at that time, being hacked to death with machetes.

It’s worth bearing this background in mind when you hear Hillary Clinton claim that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda. If you don’t, you might think: well, it’s perfectly comprehensible that she might have argued for military intervention but failed to convince her husband. After all, military intervention in another country is a big deal, not to be undertaken lightly. And it’s easy to imagine Hillary Clinton being in favor of it, and her husband reluctantly concluding that it just wasn’t something he could do.

It’s a lot harder to imagine that while Hillary Clinton was advocating military intervention, she not only failed to convince her husband to send troops, but also failed to convince him, for instance, not to advocate the withdrawal of most of the UN peacekeepers, or that he really ought to order the Pentagon to jam Radio Milles Collines. If she was doing her best behind the scenes, and failed to accomplish even this — if, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t persuade her husband not to advocate withdrawing UN peacekeepers just to provide cover for the Belgians — then we really need to ask how effective an advocate she really is, especially since no one except her husband, in full campaign mode, seems to remember her efforts at all.