DES MOINES, Iowa (AFP) — Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are raising new questions over her White House rival Barack Obama's experience, warning perilous national security decisions loom for the next US leader.
The Clintons' one-two punch comes four days before Iowa's closely fought caucuses open the US presidential nominating season, and are the latest bid to paint Obama as too green to serve as US commander-in-chief.
"I think that my experience is unique, having been eight years in the White House, having, yes, been part of making history," Clinton told ABC News, four days before Iowa's caucuses open the 2008 presidential nominating season.
Clinton said she had unsuccessfully urged her husband to intervene militarily to halt Rwanda's genocide in 1994, and then traveled to Uganda to say sorry to the victims of the atrocity.
"I personally apologized to women whose arms had been hacked off, who had seen their husbands and their children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies," she told ABC.
Last week, a New York Times report said Clinton had not attended National Security Council briefings or had access to classified intelligence while as first lady.
"I had direct access to all of the decision-makers, I was briefed on a range of issues, often provided classified information," she said, adding she was accompanied by top US security officials on the road.
On Saturday, former president Bill Clinton made a pointed reference to the September 11 attacks in 2001, arguing that the next president had to be ready for sudden, national security challenges.
"You have to have a leader who is strong and commanding and convincing enough ... to deal with the unexpected," he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post in New Hampshire.
"There is a better than 50 percent chance that sometime in the first year or 18 months of the next presidency, something will happen that is not being discussed in this campaign.
"President Bush never talked about Osama bin Laden and didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina. And if you're not ready for that, then everything else you do can be undermined."
Clinton's comments were reminiscent of the Bush administration's successful gambit of framing the 2004 campaign against John Kerry as a question of who was most fit to lead a global war on terror.
The issue of experience has taken on even stronger importance in recent days, as candidates brandished foreign policy credentials after the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The former first lady also said that the ex-president would not have a formal role in her White House -- despite his eight years behind the Oval Office desk -- but would act as an close personal advisor.
But John Edwards, pushing Clinton and Obama hard in the Democratic race laughed that it was "complete fantasy" that the former president would keep out of White House policy.
"You watch him out on the campaign trail and he spends an awful lot of time talking about his views and not as much time talking about Senator Clinton's," he said.
Hillary Clinton has contrasted her years traveling the world and Obama's single term in the Senate, saying America needs someone ready to lead from "day one."
But Obama, locked in a dead heat with her and John Edwards in Iowa polls, argued Sunday he had more experience in global affairs than Bill Clinton did when elected in 1992.
"When Washington gets challenged with respect to change, then their immediate response is you haven't been in Washington long enough," Obama told NBC News on Sunday.
"I would simply point out that the same arguments that are being made about me were made about him back in 1991 and 1992."
Clinton's comments on Rwanda appeared to be a new jab at Obama, who last week said his multi-ethnic background and childhood years abroad meant he was more in touch with the world than someone who had taken tea with US diplomats.
Shortly afterwards, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright recalled how Clinton had traveled to scores of remote villages and refugee camps.
Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
