Saturday, February 02, 2013

In Behind-Scene Blows and Triumphs, Sense of Clinton Future - NYTimes.com

In Behind-Scene Blows and Triumphs, Sense of Clinton Future - NYTimes.com:
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Backstage Glimpses of Clinton as Dogged Diplomat, Win or Lose

Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton behind President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan during a meeting in Germany in 2011.

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK LANDLER

Published: February 2, 2013 117 Comments

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WASHINGTON — Last summer, as the fighting in Syria raged and questions about the United States’ inaction grew, Secretary of StateHillary Rodham Clinton conferred privately with David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. The two officials were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance.

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The idea was to vet the rebel groups and train fighters, who would be supplied with weapons. The plan had risks, but it also offered the potential reward of creating Syrian allies with whom the United States could work, both during the conflict and after President Bashar al-Assad’s eventual removal.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus presented the proposal to the White House, according to administration officials. But with the White House worried about the risks, and withPresident Obama in the midst of a re-election bid, they were rebuffed.

A year earlier, she had better luck with the White House. Overcoming the administration’s skeptics, she persuaded Mr. Obama to open relations with the military rulers in Myanmar, a reclusive dictatorship eager to emerge from decades of isolation.

As she leaves the State Department, the simplest yardstick for measuring Mrs. Clinton’s legacy has been her tireless travels: 112 countries, nearly a million miles, 401 days on the road. Historians will point to how she expanded the State Department’s agenda to embrace issues like gender violence and the use of social media in diplomacy.

“We do need a new architecture for this new world: more Frank Gehry than formal Greek,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech last week that served as both a valedictory and a reminder of why she remained the nation’s most potent political figure aside from Mr. Obama.

And yet, interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials also paint a more complex picture: of a dogged diplomat and a sometimes frustrated figure who prized her role as team player, but whose instincts were often more activist than those of a White House that has kept a tight grip on foreign policy.

The disclosures about Mrs. Clinton’s behind-the-scenes role in Syria and Myanmar — one a setback, the other a success — offer a window into her time as a member of Mr. Obama’s cabinet. They may also be a guide to her thinking as she ponders a future run for the presidency with favorability ratings that are the highest of her career, even after her last months at the State Department were marred by the deadly attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“Secretary Clinton has dramatically changed the face of U.S. foreign policy globally for the good,” said Richard L. Armitage, deputy secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration. “But I wish she had been unleashed more by the White House.”

In an administration often faulted for its timidity abroad, “Clinton wanted to lead from the front, not from behind,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former State Department adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan who is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Mrs. Clinton made her first official trip to Asia, a choice that spoke to her diplomatic ambitions as well as her recognition from the start that many big-ticket foreign policy issues in the Obama administration — Iraq, Iran and peacemaking in the Middle East — would be controlled by the White House or the Pentagon.

In Afghanistan, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton hungered for a success on the order of the Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian War. But when her special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, who had negotiated that agreement, fell out of favor with the White House and later died, those dreams died with him.

Then came the Arab awakening, a strategic surprise that eclipsed America’s shift to focusing on Asia, and it plunged Mrs. Clinton into a maelstrom. It tested her loyalty to longtime allies like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and reinforced her conviction that anger at decades of stagnation, fueled by social media, would sweep aside the old order in the Arab world.

After Britain and France argued for intervening to defend Libya’s rebels against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mrs. Clinton played an important role in mobilizing a broad international coalition and persuading the White House to join the NATO-led operation.