OP-ED: Buy One Get One Free (The Australian)

Here is a thought experiment that does not take very much thought. Picture, if you will, Hillary Clinton facing a foreign policy conundrum. With whom will she discuss it first and most intently: with her president or her husband? (I did tell you this wouldn't be difficult.)

Here's another one: Will she be swayed in her foreign policy decisions by electoral considerations focusing on the year 2012 and, if so, will she be swayed by incoming president Barack Obama's interests or her own?

The next question, and I must apologise in advance for once again making it an unstrenuous one, is: Who else will be approaching Bill Clinton for advice, counsel and input on foreign affairs?

It appears from the donor list of the Clinton Foundation that there is barely an oligarch, royal family or special interest group anywhere in the world that does not know how to get the former US president's attention.

Just in the days since the foundation agreed to some disclosure of its previously confidential clients - in other words, since this became a condition for Hillary Clinton's nomination to become secretary of state - we have additionally found former president Clinton in warm relationships with one very questionable businessman in Malaysia and with another, this time in Nigeria, who used to have close connections with that country's ultracorrupt military dictatorship.

The Nigerian example is an especially instructive one. Gilbert Chagoury is a major figure in land and construction in that country and has contributed between $US1 million and $US5 million to the Clinton Foundation, as well as arranged a huge speaking fee for him at a Caribbean event and kicked in a large sum to his 1996 re-election campaign.

In return for this, he was received at the White House when Clinton was in power and more recently at Clinton-sponsored social events in New York and Paris.

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