Hillary plays loose with the truth

1998: Hillary Clinton claims that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his people;

1998: She claims that action against Hussein is in the interests of the United States;

2002: She said “facts of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction are not in doubt … Saddam obstructed the weapons inspectors’ work … Saddam has given aid to al-Qaida … the authority to use force is inherent in the original 1991 United Nations Resolution, as President Clinton recognised when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998”;

2005: Mrs Clinton rejects calls for a rigid timetable for exit from Iraq; and

2007: She claims that “this is George Bush’s war and the troops should come home”. She moves to de-authorise the war and to repudiate all of her earlier votes.

When she feels that it’s politically expedient, she flags her distrust of the military. The US military that is. She comes to Iraq and belittles the US effort. In so doing, just what message to the world is she sending on foreign affairs? What is she telling Iraqi Prime Minister Noori al-Maleki? Prepare to be raped, pillaged, occupied and slaughtered by the Iranians and their Syrian brothers?

Her two radically opposing positions on Iraq beg the question: was Hillary Rodham Clinton lying in the past, or is she lying now?

Unfortunately for Hillary Rodham Clinton, more and more Americans are realising that her political influence is not necessarily proportional to her political worth, especially in the age of celebrity and the phenomenon known as Obamania. Mrs Clinton knows, consciously or unconsciously, how to claim the first while unsuccessfully stressing the second.

The tragedy is that in order to do so, she had to demonstrate what an impostor she is: rewriting history with every stroke of her pen.