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The Hillary Divide The Gulf in American Politics It didn't even take a book. It merely took a tiny sliver of a book leak to send Washington into a tailspin of recriminations, accusations and spin. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs - already described as "memeroids" by one of her more tenacious enemies - aren't due to be released until tomorrow. But someone somewhere - presumably someone with an axe to grind - leaked some critical details to the Associated Press, and all hell broke loose. It tells you all that you really need to know about the former president's wife...

Cue the music from Jaws, or Fatal Attraction. Just when you thought the Democratic party was flailing around in its attempt to gain any political traction, a familiar and fascinating figure is haunting the sidelines. In a sign of how pitiful the Democratic talent pool seems these days, that figure is one Hillary Rodham Clinton. No, she is not running for president next year. But the former first lady has been showing signs of ramping up her steely political ambitions. Republicans are alternately salivating at the prospect and dreading it. Hillary mobilises the Republican base more effectively than an evangelical...

Anyone wanting a glimpse of how and where American foreign policy will now be directed will not have learnt much from President Bush’s speech last Thursday on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. The networks interrupted their usual coverage in a manner that suggested a clear direction for the future might be unveiled. Instead, the president invoked the memory of September 11, connected the Iraq war to the war on terror and praised Donald Rumsfeld, his secretary of defence. But apart from a tantalising mention of a “peaceful Palestine”, the rest was opaque. This was the alternative to a victory parade...

In some ways a pro-war columnist should have nothing much to say this week. Once you saw the images of liberation last Wednesday, what more could anyone add? Several images stood out: the children being led out of a gruesome prison; the statue of Saddam being dragged through the streets; the piles of Vanity Fairs in Tariq Aziz’s now-looted home. It’s really something to think of a man prepping his son for Harvard while presiding over a system that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands and harboured chemicals designed to kill millions more. Amid all the reporting, many anecdotes also...

Last week two rival opinions leapt out from the crowd of the American media. The first was from Nicholas De Genova, a Columbia University professor. He was addressing an anti-war “teach-in” at the Ivy League college, and felt comfortable in the anti-war consensus of America’s hyper-left-wing academy. So comfortable, in fact, that he blurted out what he really believes. Surveying the war, De Genova said what others only privately believe and what a third of the French now apparently hold dear. He longed for “a million Mogadishus” for American soldiers in Iraq — a million incidents in which soldiers are...

"A million Mogadishus"Those antiwar leftists who equate Bush with Saddam and cheer U.S. military setbacks bring moral squalor to their cause. - - - - - - - - - - - -By Andrew SullivanMarch 29, 2003  |  The coming weeks are going to be critical for the left in this country for a very simple reason. Legitimate, important, valid or even extreme and hyperbolic arguments before a war are one thing. But they have a different salience when they are made during a war -- especially one that has barely even begun. There are already polling suggestions that the...

Something quite simple leapt out from the Bush-Blair press conference on Thursday. It wasn’t a statement as such. It wasn’t an argument. It was merely a pronoun. This is how The New York Times described the interchange: “Both Bush and Blair addressed the lack of support among many traditional allies in war. ‘There are many people on our side, there are those that oppose us,’ Blair acknowledged. But he also said, ‘I have no doubt that we are doing the right thing, I have no doubt that our cause is just.’ Bush insisted: ‘We have plenty of western allies. We...

George Bush is accused of bringing about the showdown in Iraq, but when the twists and turns of history since the last Gulf war are examined, the finger points in an entirely different direction Whose war is this? If it succeeds, it will have many authors, as victories always do. If it fails, its architects will be restricted to the handful of leaders who are required to take responsibility regardless of merit or cause. So perhaps now is the best moment to propose the true orchestrators of this, the first full-scale invasion of the 21st century — while wet fingers...

This would be true even if Iraq were not already in violation of umpteen U.N. resolutions. It would be true even if Saddam didn't pose a genuine threat to the region and, via terrorists, to the West itself. How much more morally indefensible is appeasement when we also have complete international authority to do what must be done? I think we will look back in the future and not ask, as so many now are, how it was that diplomacy didn't get unanimity on this matter. We will look back and see the moral obtuseness of Chirac and Putin and...

Drum roll please. Clare Short has a solid American ally in her stand against disarming and deposing Saddam Hussein. Here’s what he had to say last week: “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo accords. “We charge them with deliberately damaging US relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We...

Here’s a simple quiz. Who said the following: “What if (Saddam) fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this programme of weapons of mass destruction? . . . Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal.” Full marks if you guessed Bill Clinton. It was 1998. But I...

It’s become something of a cliché among some European commentators that the reason for the US-European gap in perceptions about the coming war against Saddam is the media. In America, we’re told, the famously scrappy, independent media have gone belly-up like a puppy, desperate to have its tummy scratched by the White House. In Europe, in contrast, the independent media and television have kept their eyes on the ball and maintained the usual journalistic standards of, er, the BBC. Al Gore, with his usual ability to chew manfully on a half-truth, put it this way: “The media is kind of...

From Britain, it might well seem as if George W Bush has been having a terrible few weeks. Nato has split over war with Iraq; France and Germany have come out as de facto allies of Saddam; and Alan Greenspan has poured cold water over Bush’s economic plans. Yet the president seems mystifyingly serene and it’s only when you look at the Democrats that you realise why Bush is smiling. Suddenly, in American domestic politics, it’s the 1980s all over again. Faced with a gung-ho cowboy president who’s cutting taxes and pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, the Democrats have gone...

Watching Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council last week was riveting, not simply because of the irrefutable evidence of Saddam Hussein’s contempt for the UN inspections process, or the implacability of the French, Chinese and Russian responses. It was riveting primarily because this was Colin Powell. And this was the UN. Nobody can claim that Powell is opposed to multilateral diplomacy or to the UN itself. On the contrary, he has long been their strongest advocate. Like most military men, Powell loathes warfare. He is perhaps the man most responsible for restraining force against Saddam in 1991....

I received yet another anti-French e-mail last week. It was part of a spoof press release. It began: “Paris — in a stunning reversal of policy, French President Jacques Chirac announced today that the French government will be supporting the war on terror after all. “Five hundred soldiers from the elite French Surrender Battalion of the Foreign Legion are in the process of shipping out to Iraq where they will assist the Iraqi Republican Guard in their inevitable surrender to the overwhelming might of the American armed forces. “Chirac also announced that his government will send 3,000 advisers from the...

AMBITION:I've been thinking in the few minutes before I sat down to write how to temper my admiration for the speech I just heard. So to get it out of the way: the domestic ambitions of this president strike me as immensely expensive and clearly liable to sadddle us with at least another decade of deficit spending. But then I found myself - an unabashed small government supporter - putting some of those concerns aside. Why? Because Bush is tapping into American ambition again, which is no small achievement. And because his domestic concerns seem to me motivated by a...

It happens every few days now. Bored by asking actual politicians what they think of current events, journalists are increasingly turning to celebrities to channel popular moods and trends. With the coming war always in the headlines, the numerous celebs decrying it are beginning to clog up the newsprint and pixels. I’m not even talking about highbrow celebs like Harold “the Yanks are Coming” Pinter or Susan Sontag. I’m talking about people whose sole credential for being part of a public debate is simply that they are already famous. Some of this is inevitable. A quote from someone famous is...

<p>"And, as Time notes this week, he quietly reinstituted the practice — which lapsed under his father in 1990 — of sending a floral wreath on Memorial Day from the White House to the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, where those nostalgic for the Old South celebrate Jefferson Davis. Why on earth would the president of the U.S. in the year 2003 take the trouble to do that?"</p>

THE AIR CLEARS: Now that the European powers have tipped their hand and will do all they can diplomatically to forestall or derail war, we can at least reassess where we are. The participation of the French and Germans was never militarily significant. It would have been great to have gotten U.N. sanction for the war against terror, but given the disparate interests of the various great powers, it was always a long shot. So once again, it's the English-speaking peoples versus the despots. And there's a reason for this. Terrorism is a far greater threat to countries founded on...

I can remember the last time I was anti-American. It was 18 years ago, wincing at the vulgarity of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. I threw in the towel when Lionel Richie was a key feature of the opening ceremonies. Or was it the choreographed Elvis impersonators? I can’t remember now. The sheer crassness, commercialism and unabashed American nationalism turned this young Brit off. It was the combination of exuberance and sheer power that led me to affect disdain. But disdain for what? America? The very idea, I came to realise, is preposterous. America is many things. It is rural...