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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 Élysée 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

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