Hillary Clinton Calls Condi Rice Able, But Not Enough

In a New Hampshire town hall meeting Hillary Clinton called for an end to the “era of cowboy diplomacy.” She used the situation in Pakistan as an example, saying she had urged the President in January to send a diplomatic envoy there to help calm tensions between the Afghani and Pakistani governments. But instead the President sent V.P. Dick Cheney, and “Cheney went out, read everybody the riot out, about you behave, you do this, you do that. Left. That was the end of it.” Hillary continued saying, “You have to laugh to stop from crying. It seems like we have one diplomat, Condi Rice. She’s an able woman, but she can’t cover the entire world, and yet that’s the only person that President Bush apparently is willing to send anywhere.” This is a theme Clinton used in the past. During a question and answer session in Iowa recently she discussed the fact that Bush uses Rice almost exclusively. “We have to get back to robust diplomacy,” Clinton said, “and by that I mean using people to be emissaries and presidential envoys around the world. It’s as though our government has a dearth of diplomats, because President Bush seems to use only very few people. I mean, read the paper. Condi Rice goes here and Condi Rice goes there and Condi Rice is there. That is not a foreign policy.” Hillary has been critical of Bush’s disregard for international treaties and norms, saying the Bush administration’s “attitude is that somehow the United States not only should, but must, go at it alone. That’s not going to work.”
It will probably take an army of diplomats to fix U.S. foreign policy by the time these guys are done, and Clinton has already signed on her husband Bill Clinton to take on that responsibility.
Alan Cosgrove