Hillary distorts husband's record on Bosnia and dishonors the dead...

I finally watched Hillary Clinton's interview on This Week with George Stephanopolous from almost three weeks ago. I shouldn't be surprised that a Clinton would lie or misrepresent what had happened in the Balkans, but I have to admit that I was a bit shocked when she characterized her husband's Balkans policy in a way that portrayed him as the guy trying to stop ethnic cleansing and forge a coalition to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia and Kosovo. Outrageous! And she claimed the Republican-controlled Congress at the time tried to block her husband's efforts. Unbelievable.

The reality was that Bill Clinton and his aides repeatedly lied about and denied the genocide in Bosnia and refused to engage in a serious response to the Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo until forced to by bipartisan congressional pressure. In Bosnia, it was the passage of legislation - by veto-proof margins in both houses! - that would have allowed the Bosnians to defend themselves that compelled Clinton to finally step in, though the belated intervention was essentially to appease the infamous dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton had refused to acknowledge that a genocide was being committed in Bosnia, refused to lift the arms embargo himself to allow the Bosnians to defend themselves (though he had pledged in the 1992 election to do exactly that!), and failed to live up to our NATO obligations to use air power to stop the shelling of civilians in so-called "safe areas" - actually the least safe areas in Bosnia during the war.

Hillary's gross distortion, turning her husband's complicity in Bosnia into an alleged heroic act, should come as no surprise. After all, her husband refused to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda, as in Bosnia denied it was a genocide, and even forced the UN to withdraw its limited peacekeeping force in Rwanda so that if it failed to stop the slaughter he would not feel pressure to send troops to protect innocent lives. Then several years later he had the audacity to travel to Rwanda and tell the survivors he wished we had known what ad happended there so we could have helped. Unbelievable.

I have not chosen a candidate to support in the '08 campaign. But I do know for whom I will not vote. I had enough of Clinton foreign policy failures and lies in the 1990s. And I've had enough of Hillary Clinton's disrepect for the truth and the victims of genocides who could have been saved had her husband just let others do what they wanted to do: defend the innocent.