Recently, Hillary Clinton has been flaunting her foreign policy experience in the bid for the Democratic nomination. Among recent claims of a life and death, sniper fire situation in Bosnia, Clinton claimed to have had an "instrumental role" in the Good Friday Agreement which brokered peace between the IRA, Sinn Fein and the British government in 1998.
Paul Bew had this to say about such ideas, "Calling her instrumental is silly....I can't think of anything to be said for the case that she had a major role." I wasn't necessarily ready to take his word as fatal until I came across Bew's credentials. "[Bew] is a prominent--perhaps the most prominent--historian of Northern Ireland. A professor at Queen's University Belfast, he last year published Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, a much-acclaimed work, which is part of the Oxford University Press's Modern Europe series. Bew was once an adviser to David Trimble (the former First Minister of the Northern Ireland) and he was appointed to the House of Lords in 2007, in recognition of his own contributions to the Good Friday Agreement.
Hm.
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