Sunday, October 17, 2010

Another Henry Kissinger She Is Not

I dropped into Borders today to buy a new One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (my book club is reading it, and the only copy I already had is a badly tattered one left over from college). While there, I flipped through a copy of Obama's Wars, mainly to see how many times Hillary Clinton was mentioned.

Judging by the excerpts from the book that ran in the WaPo, Hillary wasn't exactly present at the creation of the Obama administration's policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not so that Bob Woodward could detect, anyway.

Sure enough, the book's index has only 16 entries for Hillary Clinton under Afghanistan / Pakistan Strategy Review. Moreover, many of those entries are just mentions of her name, along the lines of Defense Secretary Gates went to the White House to press Obama for a decision on the Pentagon's recommended course of action; Hillary came along, too.

Maybe someday Hillary will write an inside account of her pivotal role in the administration's Af/Pak strategy-setting. But in Woodward's book, she is only a bit player.

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