HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024978.jpg

21 biggest mistake of his presidency was doing nothing to prevent genocide in Rwanda. Hillary’s personal connection to Sarkozy helped cement the coalition. In 2010, Sarkozy had gallantly steadied her after a shoe had come off her foot as she climbed the stone steps of the Elysée Palace. (“I may not be Cinderella but you’re certainly my Prince Charming!” Hillary inscribed a photo, which sits in his office.) Now, over mixed fruit and chocolate, the French president took the normal diplomatic flattery a step further in their “bilat’” (diplo-speak for bilateral talks). “Hillary, I always like being with you,” he told her. “You are tough. You are smart. You are a good person.” From Paris, on the 15th, she went with some trepidation to Cairo, where many young protesters still angry about her support for Mubarak refused to meet with her. Others vented to her face in a Four Seasons conference room before the mood changed and they talked about democracy building. Her 10 to 15 minutes in Tahrir Square the next day (where she was greeted cordially) and drop-by in Tunisia on March 17 left her small security detail jittery; the local authorities, her guards felt, had no clue what they were doing. She arrived back in Washington early on March 18 before heading across the Atlantic again. She arrived in Paris at six a.m. on March 19 and set to work rounding up support from other allies. The rollout of the “kinetic military action” (the ridiculous euphemism used to avoid the word “war’) was botched and misleading. Hillary had little warning before Sarkozy announced that French planes were in the skies over Libya. At her Paris press conference she made it seem, with her frequent references to “they” and “them”—with the U.S. providing “assistance”—that someone else was leading the intervention. Hillary was safely on her plane en route back to Washington on the evening of March 19 when the world would learn that the core of the attack—112 cruise missiles directed at Libyan HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024978