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Article 4.
Vanity Fair
Hillary Clinton - Woman of the World
Jonathan Alter

June 2011 -- It was four a.m. when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched
down at Andrews Air Force Base, and by midmorning she was in the
Oval Office conferring with President Obama. The night before, as
her plane was en route from Tunis, they had agreed that the vote of
the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone on
Libya meant that it was now decision time on launching a third
American war in the Middle East, though no one in the U.S.
government dared call it that. Muammar Qaddafi was ramping up his
genocidal threats, pledging to show “no mercy” toward his own
people (whom he described as “rats”) in the eastern city of Benghazi.
Inside the White House, the president quickly settled on an American
bombing campaign, but he and the secretary of state thought strongly
that Great Britain and France should be seen as taking the lead. They
agreed that there was no choice but for Hillary to sit down in person
with both British prime minister David Cameron and French
president Nicolas Sarkozy. “I’m sorry, Hillary, but you’re going to
fly over the Atlantic again,” said Obama, who was about to leave on
his own foreign trip, to Brazil. So only hours after landing from
Tunis, she was headed back to Paris.
By then it was clear that the “Arab Spring” of 2011 was creating
tumult not just in the Middle East but inside the Obama
administration. Not since the fall of Communism, in the late 80s, has
a U.S. administration faced a chain reaction of foreign crises that
seemed so much out of its control.
At first, Hillary looked clairvoyant: in January, when the street
protests were still small in Tunisia, she lectured decrepit dictatorial

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