Roger Franklin: Knowing when to keep quiet puts Hillary among winners

NEW YORK - If you overlook the diehards fighting a lost cause, the inevitable car bombings and acts of destabilising terror yet to come, the Iraq war is all but over. That means it's time to name the big winners.

There is President George W. Bush, of course, who once again has confounded those who persist in underestimating him. One day, although not perhaps any time soon, the same people who find it so satisfying to paint him as dumber than a doorstop will realise that the man is no easy mark.

Taking the White House with fewer votes than his opponent, bullying his first tax-cut package through Congress, leading his party to an unprecedented midterm landslide, defying the United Nations and getting away with it - Bush has achieved all those. Not a bad record for a moron.

Then there is Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who seemed to be on the ropes two weeks ago, when the war appeared to have bogged down. Now the generals who fought him have embraced silence as the best career option. When he launches his next round of reforms, few voices at the Pentagon will dare to criticise his vision of a more agile, adaptable, aggressive military.

Also in the winners' circle is Rupert Murdoch, whose stridently partisan Fox News Network thrashed rivals in the TV battle for eyeballs. When the US$6 billion deal he struck last week for DirecTV comes up for approval on Capitol Hill, he will find even more Republican friends than usual.

And finally, there is that other big winner, the recent toast of the Plattsburgh Chamber of Commerce, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hers may seem a strange name to include in such an illustrious list, given that her party is in exile and her comments about the war have been few and much hedged. But when the dust settles, Clinton will emerge clean, fresh and ready to serve, perhaps even in the White House.

In many ways, her past promised to make her war even more difficult than Rumsfeld's. Throughout her years as first lady, the future senator represented something of a refuge for the hopes of the left, which found her husband a terrible disappointment. If only she had been president, they said, there would have been no sex scandals to fuel the Republicans' rise, nor any of the perceived betrayals of principle that galled so many Democrats.

She wouldn't have targeted welfare recipients, scaled back social programmes, or blitzed Iraq with cruise missiles in 1998, when President Saddam Hussein ejected UN weapons inspectors. Her mere presence mollified true believers and eased the heat on her husband.

Then the votes in the 2000 election were tallied, the first lady became the Empire State's junior senator, and her circumstances changed. While Bill interviewed interns for his Harlem office, her new gig demanded that she actually take a stand. She obliged, to a point.

We know, for example, that she is a great admirer of North Plattsburgh's industrious burghers, because she waxes rhapsodic on her website about the no-horse town. Similarly, it is no secret that she wants to name a government building after a dead environmentalist, that she supports commemorative plaques honouring suffragettes, and that she opposes Sars.

But even with as many as two press releases a day tumbling from her office, constituents still don't know with any certainty where she stood on the war or her opinion about how best to sort out the mess that surely lies ahead.

True, she voted to support military action in October, but silence and equivocation have been the order of the day ever since. After Bush gave his State of the Union address and all but announced that war was coming, she bolted from the chamber before reporters could elicit her opinion. If cornered, her tack was to back Bush in one breath and the UN the next.

And that's why, alone among 2004's possible and declared Democratic contenders, she had by far the best war. Four hopefuls bet on military failure and lost badly. Meanwhile, the rest fudged, but with less skill than Clinton.

Take Senator John Kerry, the early front-runner for the nomination. After voting to send in the troops, he stumbled with an off-the-cuff quip about regime change being as desirable in Washington as in Baghdad.

Even editorial writers opposed to the Administration decried his divisiveness - a reminder that candour is a big mistake in politics.

By contrast, Clinton hasn't put a foot or a word - wrong. The only flack she has encountered came from a women's group that last month presented her with a frilly pink slip as a symbol of girlish subservience to Washington's testosterone-poisoned warmongers.

With the polls showing 80 per cent of Americans now supporting the war, the harridans' invasion of her office probably boosted her standing in the polls.

To veterans who watched her husband's rise, it's all rather familiar. Asked on the 1992 campaign trail about his attitude to Gulf War 1, he explained it this way: while he supported the war, he still agreed with the arguments of its opponents.

Soon, it may be Mrs Clinton's turn to wear the same straight face as she cheers the returning troops on their march up Broadway. If the projections are correct, Bush the Younger will face much the same sour economy that confounded his equally victorious dad in 1992.

Al Gore is gone, the Democratic Party is overseen by Clinton loyalists her husband installed before leaving office, and she raises more money than any other US politician. If she wants to run in 2004 - and she has never absolutely ruled it out - surviving the Iraq war unscarred puts her miles ahead of the pack. The only trap after that would be to underestimate the moron.

Herald Feature: Iraq war