Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton? I don't think so!

When President-elect Barack Obama announced Hillary Clinton as his choice for the Secretary of State, I had no qualms with his choice, that is, until I watched CNN Presents Scream Bloody Murder by Christiane Amanpour.

The program was thorough investigation into genocides across the world, namely the killing fields of Cambodia, to the Balkan conflict in which Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered by Serbian forces, the Saddam Hussein's use of American made chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq, the massacre of Tutsi minorities by Hutu extremists in Rwanda and finally the Sudan genocide in which the impotence of the United Nations was made clear - yet again.

What does these conflicts have to do with Hillary Clinton you might ask? Well I'm not going into all of them except for the Balkan war and the Rwandan genocide, two tragic conflicts that happened while Hillary's significant other, Bill was the President

First the Balkan wars. At the time of Clinton's accession, the Balkan wars were already underway, with Slobodan Milosevic, began to, shall we say, cleanse Yugoslavia of the Muslims and Croats who defile the Serbian motherland with their existence. Richard Holbrooke, a top US diplomat, pleaded for the newly elected President Clinton to employ US forces to halt the escalating situation in the Balkans. Clinton refused, leading the Serbians with a free hand to perpetuate the massacre in Srebenica. Only when the graveness of the situation in Bosnia became clear to the his administration that President Clinton sent in US forces to attack Serbian military assets. It too little, too late. The Dayton Peace Accord did not bring Milosevic to justice as should be done. Instead Milosevic was free to prepare for another war, this time in Kosovo four years later.

The Rwandan genocide presents another dark spot in Hillary's resume. The situation in Rwanda could have been resolved or at the very least, prevented the genocide of Tutsis with much less resources than the Balkan conflict required. According to Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) all that was required from the international community was 5,000 additional troops. But again, President Clinton failed to rally the international community, which instead called for UNAMIR to leave the country. The price for this failure: 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu lives.

These are just two of President Bill Clinton's failure. There was also the incident in Somalia, in which US special forces were engaged with local rebel militias, chronicled in the book Black Hawk Down. What about the CIA's plan to capture Osama bin Laden from Kabul prior to the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

These issues alone should have given President-elect Obama the justification in rejecting Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, for it questions her ability to handle a crisis in foreign hotspot. Yet, Mr. Obama wants to build a team of rivals. Whether this team would gel together is another question left for historians to decide.

As for me, do I think Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State would be good for President-elect Obama's administration? Based on the above evidences - I don't think so!