In her first interview with the foreign media since she announced that she was running for president, Hillary Clinton tells Denis Stauntonin Washington about her plans to repair relationships damaged by the 'arrogance and indifference' of the Bush administration. And there might be a job for Bill, too.
Hillary Rodham Clinton's private office in the Senate Russell Building is a small corner of quiet amid the roar of a political life that has just gone into overdrive. Outside, a group of schoolgirls is snapping pictures while smartly dressed staffers are dealing with wave after wave of constituents, all of them hoping that the junior senator from New York can boost their business, promote their organisation or address their grievance.
The offices are so cramped that four meetings are going on in the tiny waiting room and another is happening in the hallway while two secretaries answer an uninterrupted stream of phone calls.
In the middle of it all is Clinton herself, looking quite unruffled as she sits down for a rare newspaper interview, her first with a foreign news organisation since she announced in January that she is running for president. Neatly dressed, compact and energetic, Clinton, who turns 60 this year, laughs easily and maintains eye contact as she talks. Unlike many politicians, she also listens.
She has just returned from a Democratic caucus meeting about Iraq and, two hours earlier, made a major policy speech on improving care for wounded soldiers. The previous day, she received a thunderous reception at a rally for Irish undocumented immigrants and later spoke to South Carolina Democrats about her campaign for the presidency. She arrived at the South Carolina event in a blaze of camera flashes, moving through jostling television cameramen as she shook a hundred hands and exchanged dozens of hugs. Everyone wanted a picture with her or an autograph or a few moments of attention from the most famous woman ever to run for public office in America.
With the first Democratic primaries almost a year away, Clinton faces hundreds of events like this, thousands of miles of travel each week and constant media scrutiny.
"It just is such an intense amount of effort that you have to put forth, because there's no time when you're out of the spotlight once you decide you're going to run for president," she says. "It's a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week effort here. I knew that going into it because I had prior experience with my husband and I've been in the Senate now for six years . . . You try not to overextend yourself so that you lose track of what day it is or what time it is or where you are. But it's also very reinforcing. You know, there's a lot of energy coming back at you."
CLINTON IS ONE of a handful of public figures so famous that, like Oprah or Elvis, she is almost universally referred to by her first name only; her campaign literature, posters and website identify her solely as Hillary. Americans know more about her private life and her marital troubles than they know about most of their friends, yet Clinton acknowledges that she may be the most famous person in America who nobody really knows.
"I think it's in part because I haven't really had the opportunity to spend time working on an ongoing basis for people across the country the way I have in New York," she says. "I have only really in New York been able to establish my own political identity and I have to go and do that in the rest of the country. So it's going to be an unfolding of my interests and my hopes and ambitions for the country. I think as people get to know me they'll feel more comfortable in saying what they like or don't like but it will be based more on fact as opposed to caricature and propaganda that has been basically aimed at me for a long time."
Doubts about Clinton's electability have diminished in recent months, but some Democrats still fear that too many Americans have made up their minds that they don't like her. Most people who meet Clinton in person say they like her but I suggest to her that she might have a problem projecting her personality to a mass audience.
"I don't feel that," she replies. "Because I faced the same challenge in New York where I was 100 per cent known and where people thought they had made up their minds one way or the other. And I saw people's minds change. I saw people being open to new information that gave them a better idea of who I was and what I was trying to do.
"So I'm extremely confident that that's exactly what's going to happen here. In fact, I'm already seeing it as I go to Iowa and New Hampshire and other states. People will say to me, 'you know, I like you much more than I thought I would', or 'you're not what I thought you were like'. And that's music to my ears because it means that if one person is actually saying it to me there are many more who are also feeling it."
Once demonised by the right as a dangerous liberal and a radical feminist, Clinton now faces criticism from the left on account of her 2002 vote to authorise the use of force in Iraq. Unlike other Democratic senators who voted for the war, including her presidential rival John Edwards, Clinton has refused to apologise for her vote or to say it was a mistake.
The debate over Clinton's failure to apologise, which has dominated much of the US commentary on her campaign, obscures the fact that her thinking on Iraq has developed significantly in recent months. Once one of the more hawkish Democrats on the war, she has moved deftly into the centre of the party's consensus and is fully behind the Senate leadership's strategy for ending the war.
"We want to protect and support our troops," she says. "The mission has to change in Iraq. We have to begin withdrawing our troops. We want to have combat troops out by the end of March 2008, which is what the Iraq Study Group had said. That's a goal, that's not a deadline. But we're going to try to get enough votes to force the president's hand on this . . .
"Certainly this president is very dug in and will try to avoid being held accountable. He'll use his veto, most likely. So we have a long road ahead of us to try to rein him in.
"But I think it's important to just keep doing it as much as we can, month after month after month, and to marshal public opinion."
Amid revelations that some wounded soldiers returning from Iraq have been housed in filthy apartments with mould on the walls and mouse droppings on the floor, most Americans now say the Iraq war was not worth fighting. And, whatever she says about her own vote, Clinton clearly believes the war has harmed the United States.
"I think it has been damaging," she says. "I'm an optimist, so I believe it's damage we can recover from with new leadership. Which is one of the reasons why I want to be president in January 2009, to begin to repair our relations and to send a signal to the world that the American arrogance and indifference that has marked our policy and, frankly, the lack of reality that has been this president's characteristic in dealing with many of these issues, is not America. This is an aberration. We will defend our interests. We will stand up for what America needs to represent around the world but we want to start building alliances and restoring friendships again and looking for people to be on our side in these global challenges, whether it's against terrorism or HIV/Aids or global climate change."
IN A SPEECH to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last October, Clinton called for a renewal of internationalism and a marriage of idealism and realism in American foreign policy. She says that more active and creative diplomacy is essential if the US is to pursue its interests effectively, but also argues that the world needs a new institutional architecture to deal with contemporary challenges.
Clinton often talks about the need for the US to remain true to its values of liberty, justice and the rule of law. But how does the detention without charge of hundreds of people in Guantanamo Bay or the practice of extraordinary rendition fit in with those values?
"Well, I don't think that they are a good fit," she says. "I think that there's always a balance between security and liberty and certainly under our constitution the pendulum has swung back and forth . . . We've got to get back to striking that balance in a more thoughtful way than we have been doing under the Bush administration. And it's not easy. I'm not going to sit here and say it's self-evident exactly how to strike it. But certainly the imbalances, the rather extreme reactions that we've seen out of the Bush administration to some of the real threats we face and the desire to protect us against those threats, I think can be recalibrated more in line with our values. And that's what I would like to see."
Last year, Clinton voted against a bill that authorised the use of military tribunals to determine the status of Guantánamo Bay inmates because it denied the prisoners habeas corpus rights. She will not, however, promise to close Guantánamo if she becomes president.
"I think that's the kind of tactical decision that has to be considered, depending on what the real facts are at the time," she says. "Obviously, I feel that the administration has misfired in the way that it has refused to expedite the treatment of the individuals down in Guantánamo and frankly relied on unreliable, hearsay evidence. We need to clean up the processes and then we can get to the point of what will we do with the people once we have totally considered them on the basis of legitimate concrete steps to determine whether they should be held or released. Then we can deal with the actual facility issue. That's not the real problem. The real problem is the processes we've used."
US OFFICIALS SAT down this week with representatives from Iran at a conference to discuss Iraq's future. The meeting marked an important departure for the Bush administration, which has long insisted that it will not talk to Iran until the Islamic state suspends its nuclear programme. Clinton has long advocated talking to Iran but insists that Tehran must not acquire a nuclear weapon and has said that the US must not rule out any options in dealing with that threat.
"When I said no option should be off the table, I also meant talking shouldn't be off the table, which until recently it has been in this administration," she says. "I don't think you go into any negotiations ceding any points. We have some very serious differences with Iran and I don't know whether any kind of process of engagement will lead to anything positive. I don't think we know that. One of the reasons I've been advocating it for more than two years is, let's test it, let's see what we can find out.
"We don't even have good intelligence about Iran. We're sitting here speculating about what we should or shouldn't do vis-à-vis Iran and I don't think our intelligence is adequate for making such decisions.
"I believe we can gain valuable information by being engaged with Iran, just as we did for all those decades with the former Soviet Union. They actually did have nuclear missiles pointed at us in the thousands. They had leaders who said they wanted to bury us. They ran proxy wars against us. We never stopped talking to them."
With the Soviet Union, conventional nuclear deterrence was effective in preventing a nuclear conflict, so why should the same deterrence not work with a nuclear-armed Iran? "Well, we just don't know. The fear is that a country which supports suicide terrorists, a country which funds terrorist militias and organisations, a country which sent thousands of little boys to their deaths across the border and told them all they'd be in Paradise the next year may not be deterrable on the same terms as the Soviet Union was. I'm not drawing a conclusion. I'm just saying that there are certain factors that one has to consider in order to reach that point of understanding."
No international issue distinguishes public opinion in the US and Europe as sharply as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Clinton is a committed supporter of Israel and backed last summer's Israeli offensive in Lebanon. She opposes dialogue with Hamas until the Palestinian group rejects violence and recognises Israel's right to exist.
IF, HOWEVER, PRESIDENT Bill Clinton could grant Gerry Adams a visa in 1994, before the IRA declared a ceasefire and long before it accepted the constitutional status of the North, why should the same logic not apply in the Middle East?
"I think it was a very smart decision for my husband to grant that visa, withstand the criticism which he got here and from certain quarters in Ireland and Great Britain," says Clinton. "But we could never on our own, as the United States, have injected ourselves into the Northern Ireland situation without the support and full co-operation of the British and Irish governments.
"Here, the Israeli government has to make a certain set of decisions about what is in its best interests. Because they're the ones on the front lines, they're the ones that are dealing with the rockets coming from Gaza and the suicide bombers and the threat of Hizbollah and a regime in the Palestinian territories that won't even acknowledge their existence. So I think we need to get back to a process where we can once again be assessing what the Israelis think is in their interests and their long-term security and stability and what the Palestinian Authority in the person of their President, Abbas, is thinking before we have any idea about how we're going to deal with Hamas."
Clinton argues that the US must improve on the "sporadic engagement" the Bush administration has shown in the Middle East and make a sustained commitment to the peace process there. Such a commitment would require an envoy with unusual diplomatic gifts and international authority. Clinton may not need to look too far for a candidate.
"Well I'm very high on using former presidents," she says. "So when I'm president, I will certainly call on the first President Clinton to be involved in a lot of these very difficult issues around the world."