Realism about Hillary and her vote
Media Matters has a good review of exactly what Hillary Clinton’s vote was, and exactly what she said about it at the time and later. As you will note from the article, right-wingers will try hard to characterize her vote as being “for the war,” in order to pull out the flip-flop or insincerity card once again. Considering the substantial possibility that she will be the Democratic candidate, it is extremely stupid in my opinion for Democrats to provide the ammunition for them with information that is (a) not even accurate – voted “for the war” – and (b) reconstructed history as to how obvious it was in the second week of October 2002, over five months before the invasion, that war was certain -- that Bush was lying -- and that Saddam did not have either a nuclear weapons “program” or any other weapons of mass destruction.
Besides the dire and specific warnings of the highest officers of the Administration and the CIA (warnings that had not yet degenerated into obvious talking point mantras but very soon would), the “realist” and presumably influential foreign policy establishment, including Scowcroft and Kissinger, was clearly concerned with the consequences of such a war (and saying so loudly). It was not yet public how thoroughly GW was disassociating himself from that establishment, and Bush with his 80-plus approval ratings was issuing public and private re-assurances that war was not inevitable if Saddam complied with the UN resolutions.
In a formal sense, the vote was not “for war” but for the President to have the authority to wage it if Iraq did not comply with those UN resolution. Since he actually did not have any such weapons, Saddam came into compliance when he finally let the inspectors do their job as they saw fit without any hindrance. Then, within a few months compliance could have been verified – with the combination of the inspectors’ expertise and the utter discrediting of every specific claim that Powell made at the UN providing virtually air-tight public cover – and war avoided. In that case, the Democrats who voted for the resolution (all the potential Presidential candidates did, obviously recognizing correctly how totally the Administration had the entire media establishment under control), having forced Saddam back into compliance without war but with tough talk tough, would have come out smelling like roses.
On the other hand, continuing to look at this as the situation existed at the time, if Bush either were to violate the resolution as he actually did – that is not an arguable point -- or to follow the resolution with much more international support if Saddam still refused to let in the inspectors, and in either case if he had then completed Phase I as he did, and left within a few weeks as Rumsfeld suggested, with a new, functioning and friendly government in place confirming the defector-fed declarations that our troops would be greeted as liberators – the “Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead” strategy -- and if the Democrats en masse had refused to give the President the authority to force the issue even though, in fact, Saddam was in violation of the UN resolution, the Democratic Party would have been completely discredited on national security matters and arguably would have been dead for a generation, if not destroyed forever.
Those would have been grave consequences for the country, too. It’s easy in hindsight to say it should have been an easy vote. It was not.
Besides the dire and specific warnings of the highest officers of the Administration and the CIA (warnings that had not yet degenerated into obvious talking point mantras but very soon would), the “realist” and presumably influential foreign policy establishment, including Scowcroft and Kissinger, was clearly concerned with the consequences of such a war (and saying so loudly). It was not yet public how thoroughly GW was disassociating himself from that establishment, and Bush with his 80-plus approval ratings was issuing public and private re-assurances that war was not inevitable if Saddam complied with the UN resolutions.
In a formal sense, the vote was not “for war” but for the President to have the authority to wage it if Iraq did not comply with those UN resolution. Since he actually did not have any such weapons, Saddam came into compliance when he finally let the inspectors do their job as they saw fit without any hindrance. Then, within a few months compliance could have been verified – with the combination of the inspectors’ expertise and the utter discrediting of every specific claim that Powell made at the UN providing virtually air-tight public cover – and war avoided. In that case, the Democrats who voted for the resolution (all the potential Presidential candidates did, obviously recognizing correctly how totally the Administration had the entire media establishment under control), having forced Saddam back into compliance without war but with tough talk tough, would have come out smelling like roses.
On the other hand, continuing to look at this as the situation existed at the time, if Bush either were to violate the resolution as he actually did – that is not an arguable point -- or to follow the resolution with much more international support if Saddam still refused to let in the inspectors, and in either case if he had then completed Phase I as he did, and left within a few weeks as Rumsfeld suggested, with a new, functioning and friendly government in place confirming the defector-fed declarations that our troops would be greeted as liberators – the “Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead” strategy -- and if the Democrats en masse had refused to give the President the authority to force the issue even though, in fact, Saddam was in violation of the UN resolution, the Democratic Party would have been completely discredited on national security matters and arguably would have been dead for a generation, if not destroyed forever.
Those would have been grave consequences for the country, too. It’s easy in hindsight to say it should have been an easy vote. It was not.
posted by KISSWeb | 1:35 PM
2 Comments:
Kissweb, I agree with much of what you say, but you overlook something I think. By the time this vote took place, it was pretty clear that Bush was an utter jerk and would use the vote as an excuse to go to war no matter what. That's what I think some of us worry about when it comes to Hillary's judgment. You don't hand your car keys to a known car thief.
I think that's wrong as far as the timeline is concerned. That's exactly what I think is the revisionist history. This is one year after 9-1-1. That did not become really clear until a few weeks later: first, the mantra-like quality of the shift from identifying specific fears to saying only "weapons of mass destruction." To me, I think the first really clear sign was the trashing of Blix and the French by the neo-conservative pundits like Krauthammer. I think that only began in about the end of November or early December. But end of September-early October, Bush and Cheney were still riding high on the "fact" that Saddam had "re-constituted his nuclear weaons program" and concerns about smoking guns becoming mushroom clouds. Suspicion? plenty, but nothing to support it. It was not clear yet that Cheney, once respected as a moderate at time of Gulf War I, was so utterly lacking in scruples that he would flat-out lie through his teeth like that. I cann ot recall anyone doing it so blatantly about a matter of public policy, rather than for personal protection.
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