believing you are sincerely having a hard time understanding. Honestly, it sounds like you just don't like Hillary. Kind of like the way McCain hates Obama. Just sayin',

With suspicion and ridicule. I have Googled and read and by all accounts it was signed prior to her arrival, so i dont know what the US role was.

I'm asking for a link, not an argument.

And by the way, it's perfectly fine if you don't. It's just always best to be open about where you are coming from.

I respect and admire Hilary Clinton, but I don't "like" US policy in the ME and Egypt.

After seeing so many dead and wounded children in Gaza, the steadfast support of Israel could be said to make me "like" Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama less, but I don't view it in terms of "liking" them in a way that conflates US policy with them as a personality. It's not like an artist releasing an album, where the artist and the art are intrinsically linked. I like Hilary Clinton as a person, a public figure and a role model, but in her role as SoS, I am disappointed by the continued permissive stance towards Israel when they killed so many civilians. The same is true for Obama.

Do you approve of the job she is doing? Do you think the President should have chosen someone else? Do you generally think positively or negatively about her?

Your second to last sentence answered the question perfectly. I feel pretty much the same way you do.

Not being snarky, I mean it. You like her, but you don't like how she is handling things in this case. I agree.

Didn't think so.

Oh, and as to your question - well, don't rely on MSM sources and look up things for yourself and you might learn the truth.

It's the MSM that is giving the US credit for the ceasefire and yes I am questioning how the US gets both credit for leadership while saying Israel can do what it wants. What happened behind the scenes? I listen to Democracy Now and NPR daily, read Huff Po, Daily Kos and Democratic Underground and I DON'T UNDERSTAND the timeline of events.

I'm not looking to argue just for a link or two.

You say look up things for yourself. Well, I have done that and when I didn't find an answer, I asked here.

Is the answer that you don't know either or you just feel like sneering at me because you know so much more? What's the fucking point?

And I don't see the analogy with Susan Rice. The situation with her is that she was not a principle actor with access to independent information nor did she have an impact on what happened in Libya. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was somehow central to what happened. Clinton according to the MSM was the event rather than a relayer of a received summary of an event so the two are actually opposite or inverse scenarios.

"Can someone explain why this is being hailed as a Clinton victory? "

Who is hailing it as a victory? You gave no links to show people were doing so.

A minute at google news search turns up this:

Clinton arrives in J'lem as Gaza truce is postponed By TOVAH LAZAROFF, KHALED ABU TOAMEHLAST UPDATED: 11/20/2012 23:08 Following reports of an imminent cease-fire, Hamas official says Egyptian efforts to broker a truce held up because the Israeli government has yet to respond to proposals; CNN: Egypt has no plans to announce truce yet.

US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton arrived in Jerusalem late Tuesday night amidst announcements that a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas had been delayed by at least one day.

http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=292729

So yeah, the deal was there before but wasn't going through (and if you had listened to people like Harry Fear or followed #gaza on twitter you would have known all of this. Places like fox news though are biased and try to fool people, so try not to watch them if you do - they know a big part of the population are stupid and a bunch of rw sheep)

Of course one could also point out that Hillary also has this new invention called a cell phone and may well have been talking to the interested parties days before... "Clinton as well as US President Barack Obama have been in touch with Egyptian, Israeli and European leaders in the past days, Nuland said."

I would like to read about all this credit Hillary is supposedly getting, or claiming.

The one that says the US is coming up with more free money to Israel.

Which is fine by me. If all we can do is buy peace, then that's all we can do.

This article from Ynetnews.com focuses a lot on Obama, but of course they work together on anything like this:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4310668,00.html

I am sure she probably had something to do with things, even if she wasn't there on the ground when the draft was signed.

Often whether or not we like someone clouds the way we see things.

Getting both sides to agree - something Obama and Clinton worked on - is essential to getting the ceasefire. Here what I am most (pleasantly) surprised at is that they helped and likely kept top Republicans in tow so no one played politics here. They did a very good job where I would bet that the part we saw was a fraction of what was done.

It is true that Moursi led on the draft, but it was NOT in effect. The US, both Obama and Clinton, put pressure on Israel to accept the draft and gave Israel additional support on the "iron dome".

To be clearer, HRC and PO used the US's leverage to get Israel to accept the cease fire. HRC lent the US's weight to the agreement by appearing with both Moursi and Netanyahu. (Obviously to US viewers, she dominates in the coverage.) The MOST interesting thing here is that there was no Republican outcry here - as there would have been pre election - a sign that for a minute they are not playing politics with this.

You may then ask if the US was important. That is a harder question because it would include eliminating all the behind the scenes calls to Israel. The point is that the US did weigh in on this and acted to support the end of the hostilities. This does not fix the problem, but it is a good step.

I think if there is anyone who comes away from this with any enhanced credibility, it is Moursi. As to Hillary, she was doing her job - as was Obama. Note that no one (to my knowledge) is crediting Netanyahu for anything on this.

...allowed the SoS to get things resolved before she arrived in person. You know..."recent" technical developments like the telephone and email.

Any other questions we can help you with, or will you be extending your stay?

That's the question. This is an answer: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1883557

The timing of this "war" is confusing. There has been contradicting information about who is responsible for what. I bet a lot of people are confused. There is nothing wrong with your questions.

I wondered why Morsi/Egypt and Hillary/US got so much credit too. As far as I can tell Israel decided when they were going to bomb Gaza and Israel decided when to stop. The fact that they got into a situation where they were negotiating with Hamas is surprising to me.

For Netanyahu, he got a rally round the flag lift in the pre-Jan. 22 polls. Meanwhile, Hamas got to indulge in Jack the Giant taunter heroics. It also took the world's focus off the ongoing carnage in Syria, and gave the opposition's Saudi/GCC backers a chance to spout some anti-Israel polemics reeestablishing their credibility with the Arab Street after working with the US, NATO and Israel to bring down the Shi'ias in Damascus. For Iran, it was a chance to patch things up with Hamas after that predominantly Sunni group split over Syria.

In a word, everyone just dug in more deeply in preparation for the main act.

Deeper in the poster makes her positions alot clearer.

Sometimes on these forums its tough to know where new people are coming from or what their views are until they tell us

The only things that should matter in a debate are facts. Or opinions. Views should be irrelevant. IMO.

. . . is conducted through back channels. We are not privy to every phone call or messages dispatched through couriers, human or electronic. The President and the Secretary I'm sure used all of these means behind the scenes to influence the draft agreement. Do you actually think that there was no communications Egypt and the US and Israel and the US to help broker this?

I wonder whether they actually supplied long-rage missiles to Hamas in substantial quantities, which leveled the field a bit and made another "Operation Cast Lead" style mass slaughter too potentially costly to be feasible.

but the deal was not finalized until the US involvement. The Israeli's felt that they had no particular reason to trust the new Egyptian government. They wanted assurances that no more rockets would be sent over the border from Gaza.

Yes, Hillary (and the US) had plenty to do to get both sides to agree to a deal. Obama also worked the phones to accomplish this goal.

from fox news last week.

They had an agreement before she showed up, but waited for her arrival to start the ceasefire. Wonder if anyone died because they waited for her to show up.

So her input was important and she deserves credit. Without her there would have been a failed agreement.