Forum: Hillary hits home runs on tour
If you want to find a harsh crowd for an American official, send him - or her - to Pakistan. That's why reviews of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's stop in Islamabad during her latest dizzying tour of international trouble spots should make us take notice.
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"Drum roll for Hillary," wrote Rizwan Ghani in the Pakistan Observer, "because she has hit a home run."
Hillary, as she is known around the globe, does not earn accolades just for her cheerful smile. She is tough as nails. In fact, she's much tougher than her boss, President Obama. And her mastery of complicated issues can leave observers' jaws dangling from their hinges.
The Pakistani daily Dawn spoke of her "Iron fist in a velvet glove," as it described her taking on Pakistani officials over tense problems, including Afghanistan, the Taliban, China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation, Indo-Pakistani water disputes and so on.
And that was just one stop on the trip. In South Korea, she sent one of the strongest messages this administration has issued to Pyongyang, and then walked right up to the edge of the DMZ, within inches of nervous North Korean soldiers. On Afghanistan, no U.S. official can deal more openly and effectively with President Hamid Karzai. And speaking of Afghanistan, remember that Rolling Stone article that got Gen. Stanley McChrystal fired? The piece showed his aides tearing down just about every administration official, adding, "Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle."
In fact, Hillary Clinton, who was supposed to ignite the flames of conservatives' hatred, is becoming more popular every day across the political spectrum. Her hawkish foreign policy views gain her support on the right, and her well-known views on domestic policy keep the home fires burning on the left. The two fields intersect in one of the areas where she displays the greatest passion, her signature issue on foreign policy: the need to empower women in poor countries in order to transform the world.
Nobody has advanced the vision and worked more successfully to put it into practice. Since electrifying her audience in Beijing in 1995 declaring that "it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human r
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