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A myth quickly arose that the women in the administration—Clinton,
U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, and national-security aide Samantha
Power, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning book on genocide was
influential in Obama’s thinking—drove the debate. “The idea that the
girls pushed the boys into war is ludicrous,” says Anne-Marie
Slaughter, who until recently served as director of policy planning at
State. “We were dismissed for months as soft liberals concerned
about ‘peripheral’ development issues like women and girls, and now
we’re Amazonian Valkyrie warmongers. Please.” In truth, the
president, as usual, was not persuaded by anyone to change his mind.
He was always a reluctant warrior and decided to intervene only
when imminent atrocities in Benghazi made sitting on his hands even
riskier.
What the women policymakers did do was help mobilize the alliance.
Rice worked hard for the broadest possible language in U.N.
Resolution 1973, to allow maximum allied flexibility, while Hillary
made sure that China and Russia abstained instead of vetoing the
resolution.
Hillary already spends much of her life on her plane, but for six
crucial days in March she might just as well have used her seat belt as
a fashion accessory, flying nearly 20,000 miles on the Washington-
Paris-Cairo-Tunis-Washington-Paris-Washington route. On March
14 and 15, she met with Nicolas Sarkozy. The French president was
gung-ho to attack Qaddafi, who by then was reversing rebel advances
and regaining the offensive. After taking the measure of Mahmoud
Jibril, recognized as one of the leaders of Libya’s transitional
government, Hillary agreed to U.S. intervention if the U.N. backed it.
Viewing television images of the dictator’s brutality from her
quarters at the U.S. ambassador’s residence strengthened her resolve.
She took to seconding her husband’s much-repeated line that the

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