Saturday, February 17, 2007

The Real Issue on Hillary and Iraq

I'm intrigued by calls from various Democratic quarters for Hillary Clinton to apologize for her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq.

Clinton has said that knowing what she knows now, she wouldn't have voted the way she did. Saturday Night Live hilariously interpreted her remarks to mean, "Knowing what we know now, that you could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it."

As a matter of logic, Clinton's position has merit. Some mistakes you never should have made (unjustifiable); others, you made reasonably, based on what you knew at the time (justifiable). And even though she refuses to utter the "M" word (taking her cue in this regard from President Bush), Clinton is simply arguing that her mistake was justified based on the faulty intel she received from the White House.

But I think there's something more important going on here than whether someone made a mistake in voting to authorize the war, whether the mistake was justified at the time, and whether the mistake warrants an apology. The real issue here is judgment.

It's easy to forget that before the war, the Bush administration was hardly alone in believing Saddam Hussein had or soon would have WMD. So Senator Clinton is entitled to her position that she authorized the war based on what turned out to be faulty intelligence. But she's avoiding the harder, and more relevant question, of whether war made sense even if the intelligence had been accurate.

Kim Jung Il has long had a universally acknowledged active WMD program (which has subsequently led to an actual North Korean nuke) and is a demonstrated missile and nuclear know-how proliferator. The al-Saud fund hate-inculcating madrasses worldwide and supplied three quarters of the 9/11 hijackers. Iranian sponsorship of global terrorism is well documented. We know the Pakistani government was complicit in AQ Khan's nuclear proliferation efforts, with North Korea, Iran, and Libya as Khan's customers. Yet of all these demonstrated WMD and terrorist threats, we made war only on Saddam Hussein.

I wish Senator Clinton and others (including myself) had thought to ask: if we can live with Kim Jung Il and the al-Saud and the Iranian mullahs and Masharraf's complicity with AQ Khan, why can't we live with Saddam? And if we *can* live with him but are going to attack him anyway, what is the real motive for the attack? There might have been good, persuasive answers to these questions, but Senator Clinton didn't ask, and President Bush didn't volunteer them.

My own take: The Bush administration honestly believed Iraq had WMDs or dangerous WMD programs. But they never adequately considered alternatives short of war because the exigencies that inhibit us from going to war with North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and (so far) Iran were all absent in Iraq. Bush didn't intentionally invent Saddam's WMD, as many on the left have accused him of doing, but nor did he deal with the WMD possibility honestly. Instead, he thought, "Hussein's WMD are a threat. Yes, we could manage the threat another way, as we have with threats posed by Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia... but if we deal with the threat by invasion, we can simultaneously intimidate Iran and Syria, and possibly the al-Saud; we can rebuild Iraq's sanctions-crippled oil industry and lower the price of a barrel in the process; and we can even unleash a wave of democracy in the middle east."

I can understand the appeal of such a plan before the fact, but its implementation has been a catastrophe. Perhaps the catastrophe could have been mitigated, or even avoided altogether, if the Senate and House (and the media) had probed Bush's real objectives -- which, as the counterexamples above demonstrate, could not logically have been solely about WMD, no matter how honestly Bush or anyone else believed those WMDs to exist.

The real question, then, isn't whether Senator Clinton's mistake in voting to authorize the war was justified by what turned out to be faulty intelligence. The real question is, why didn't she ask why war was necessary even if the intelligence was accurate? Why if we could deal with so many other dangerous regimes short of war, we had to go to war in Iraq?

Hard questions like the ones above would have shown real depth of consideration and judgment -- the kind showed by, say, Barrack Obama, who spoke out against war, though as a State senator he could have kept his mouth shut and had it both ways later.

I'm afraid Saturday Night Live got it about right about Senator Clinton.

11 comments:

Willowbrook said...

Finally...after shouting this very opinion to anyone and everyone within earshot for at least two years, I get to read the affirmation I've waiting for.

Thank you, Barry.

Daniel

~ Busybooklover :D said...

Sadly it seems to end up being about plausable deniability. Reframing it later. Positional safety nets... (Referring to your Slippery Redundancy post as well.) With every word spoken, every question asked just WAITING to go into someones tell all. It makes me admire the voices of an Obama, or anyone for that matter, questioning the herd even more.

~ Busybooklover :D said...

Jeez. My point exactly! *rolls eyes* PlausIble* ANOTHER reason why people don't take risks. The humiliation factor.

Anonymous said...

This topic concerning Senator Clinton only touches the tip of the iceberg concerning her political decisions in the past. Why everyone is only focusing on the issue of the war in Iraq, seems a very shallow query. She has been on several committees in the past that were ineffective and costly. Every time I see her on TV, her opinions have changed on everything from education to how she refers to various people/groups in her speeches. Why no one is questioning her other decisions causes me great alarm.
I am also going to throw this idea out here. Meant only to provoke thought and discussion. Europe is quickly becoming a neo-muslim nation, much in the way America is home to Mexico. However, the lifestyle of the muslim community tends to be more extreme, religious, and cliquish. The number one name in England last year for new borns was Muhammed. France has an unemployment rate of 35%. Why would people work a minimum wage job when welfare pays a pretty penny? Perhaps, a reason for entering Iraq was because Saddam was easy propaganda, and the US and those who are interested in our protection might like to see a safe, secure country for Muslims to flee to rather than become a drain on Europe's social economy, as well as secure our interests in the Natural resources Iraq has to offer. These are just a few thoughts. Currently, it seems we are still trying to react rationally to the irrational.

Sandra Ruttan said...

These are shrewd and important questions to consider. Perhaps by thinking about them now future mistakes will be avoided.

I've thought about the decision to to to war a lot. In particular, why did Canada choose to stay out of it? I'm left with three main options:

a) It was 100% politics - the government at the time realized the population would kick their ass over it and fear of the voting public was greater than fear of Bush,

b) The Canadian government was more discerning and cautious than some other governments were,

or

c) We were broke and it just worked out well for us.

Of course, we know how it would be spun today, if the same party was still in power here. But at the time, there was one thing that went through my mind over and over again: If Bush had proof why wasn't he sharing it with the allies he was criticizing for not supporting him? Whatever the real reason behind my government's choice at the time, that was the one hard question that kept coming to me, and the hesitation of my government left me uneasy.

The other thing that stays with me is what my husband said the minute Gore conceded to Bush:

There'll be another war in Iraq.

I'm still left to wonder how my husband could see that coming, but one thing he's proven repeatedly is that he's an astute judge of character. He's never yet been proven wrong about someone he's told me to stay away from, whether he's met them in person or only read their blog online.

You don't want to know what he thinks of Hillary.

And - right or wrong - we've lived with far worse than Hussein. Let no one delude themselves into thinking most wars are fought over principles alone - the principles are the excuses used once the government has decided that the threat is too great or that they believe they can win. The US got involved in WW2 after they were attacked, not before, and Hollywood would have us all believe the US saved the world.

If only principles had counted a hell of a lot sooner. Many more lives could have been saved. Reality is, most wars are fought on a very real threat or for gain.

Barry Eisler said...

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Ken, you saw the NYT link, right? "Various quarters" felt like fair shorthand to me, especially because the calls for an apology aren't really the point, as I went on to argue.

I'm not trying to pick on Senator Clinton; I have no more axe to grind with her than I do with President Bush. Her judgment was bad; so was McCain's. McCain now claims he always said the war would be tough... except, oops! He was on Larry King at the time, saying “I believe that the operation will be relatively short,” and “I believe that the success will be fairly easy.” So much for the Straight Talk Express...

So I don't think I'm holding Clinton to a higher standard; rather, the same standard to which I hold all our elected leaders, and the same standard to which I hold myself. And I don't think anyone who reads HOTM would accuse me of letting the Executive Office skate!

As for the honesty of Bush's mistake, I guess reasonable people can differ; it seems both sides have evidence that can be cherry picked. In some ways, though, again, I believe the honesty issue can become a distraction. Whether the Bush administration really believed there was a WMD threat or whether it was lying, it's clear to me that the decision for war wasn't really motivated by WMD, otherwise, again, how is it we can deal with other WMD regimes short of war? If we put the "honesty" issue aside, we can focus more dispassionately on judgment, or lack thereof. I find that a focus on apologies and honesty, while certainly not irrelevant, tends to cause heated arguments that obsure these more fundamental issues.

Cheers,
Barry

Oblivious to oblivion said...

“Intelligence in 2001/2 and the beginning of 2003 stated that the sanctions were working, WMD programs had been disbanded, and that the inspectors were actually quite thorough.”

Really? Because I have worked in the intelligence community for almost 23 years and I do not recall seeing any intelligence within the IC that indicated any of that. I would like to know who your intelligence sources are.

“The real question is, why didn't she ask why war was necessary even if the intelligence was accurate? Why if we could deal with so many other dangerous regimes short of war, we had to go to war in Iraq?”

Let me say this much, the ‘decision makers’ are much more well informed about matters of national security than average Joe Public. There are teams and teams of analysts who specialize in specific areas and countries who form opinions – educated opinions – on what a specific country or individual is capable of and what true viable threat they pose. And there is an enormous amount of redundancy in the IC, so that you never have one analyst going off on some unrealistic tangent. CIA, DIA, NSA, DoD, and the other twelve intelligence agencies all have analysts looking at the same thing. These people keep the ‘decision makers’ informed.

It pains me so that the IC has taken such a bad rap on this War, really it does. During the Clinton years, as you may know, “we had to do so much with so little for so long that we got to be able to do anything with practically nothing.” The Intel was there – we had so much corroborated information coming in from so many different directions that we knew Saddam and his boys were up to something. Hell, I’ve got a report from early 2001, from the DEA no less, which showed that Columbian drug runners were using their routes and mules to smuggle enriched uranium to the Middle East – the primary buyer? I’ll give you three guesses and your first two don’t count.

So the comments like “…voting to authorize the war was justified by what turned out to be faulty intelligence,” really cuts deep at times. So, you ask, where the hell is the WMD? Can’t say. But I know a bunch of folks who could make a pretty good SWAG at it. Small country to the west – rhymes with hysteria. But let me also put a little bug in your ear, if Saddam and his boys hid their nuclear materials out in the desert somewhere for safe keeping, would it be in the US Military’s best interest to NOT make any of their searches and/or findings public when there are 75,000 insurgents running loose throughout the country? Wouldn’t you be concerned, just a tad bit, about who might find that nuclear cache first? Wouldn’t it make sense to keep that and everything to do with that quiet? Seriously.

As for how they all voted: A sickeningly common theme asserted by media members and liberals around the country is that Iraq is “Bush’s war,” and that Democrats who voted for the resolution in October 2002 have no responsibility because they were supposedly misled by a president from a different political party.

Well, a fascinating event transpired on Sunday’s “Chris Matthews Show” as one high-ranking media member – the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward – fervently refuted this disingenuous media myth. And, maybe more shocking, CBS’s Gloria Borger agreed with him.

The panel was discussing the recent nonbinding resolutions voted on in Congress, when Bob Woodward said something that few in the media would dare utter with cameras rolling:

“One of the things that we forget as we’re caught in the heat of the current debate: this is a legal war. The Congress three to one in 2002 said, gave Bush the right to go to war. He decided to do it. So, you know what really amazes me is that Bush, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid don’t get together and say, “We’ve got to come up with a bipartisan strategy and consensus on this.” We’re all in to a certain extent in this war. And we owe it to the troops.”

Matthews then asked: “Do you think the Democrats are willing to be party to this war, or they’re trying to get disengaged from it?”

Woodward shockingly responded: “They are a party to this war. They voted for it.”

Borger then said something maybe equally astounding: “They don’t want ownership of this war, Chris. I mean, I think the Democrats are trying to have it both ways. If you definitely cut off funding, then you have ownership of what comes next.”

Moments later, the following remarkable discussion ensued:

Woodward: “If everyone’s thinking about politics and not the troops on the ground. Those people are our surrogates, and we owe them everything, and we can’t even reach political consensus in this country.”

Matthews: “But what happens when you have a country that is so divided if you just poll regular people about this war, so much against this war, but yet the commander-in-chief is for the war. How do you reach a consensus between a majority who don’t want the war, and a president who wants one? How do you do it?”

Woodward: “I think that people have to rise above politics and party here. And, think, I’ve talked to these people who have come back from Iraq, and in communication with some there, and they wonder: “What the hell is going on in America? What? You know, we’re here, they sent us here. And we’re talking about cutting off funding?”

Here’s the REAL question folks, “What the hell is going on in America?”

Barry Eisler said...

Marcus said, "the ‘decision makers’ are much more well informed about matters of national security than average Joe Public."

My sense is to the contrary, although I haven't done a scientific study. But did you catch the recent interview with (IIRC) the head of the Select Committee on Intelligence? The guy didn't know whether AQ was Shiite or Sunni. I suspect that if you quized President Bush, you'd be apalled at his level of knowledge. But I haven't done so, so this is just my opinion.

Regardless, information is only one part of the story. Judgment matters at least as much. After all, you could offer the same amount of information to two people and still have two different opinions. So even if I bought the "the decision makers are better informed than you" argument, the conclusion -- that I should therefore trust their decisions -- still wouldn't logically follow.

"It pains me so that the IC has taken such a bad rap on this War, really it does. During the Clinton years, as you may know, “we had to do so much with so little for so long that we got to be able to do anything with practically nothing.” The Intel was there – we had so much corroborated information coming in from so many different directions that we knew Saddam and his boys were up to something. Hell, I’ve got a report from early 2001, from the DEA no less, which showed that Columbian drug runners were using their routes and mules to smuggle enriched uranium to the Middle East – the primary buyer? I’ll give you three guesses and your first two don’t count.

"So the comments like “…voting to authorize the war was justified by what turned out to be faulty intelligence,” really cuts deep at times."

Understood. It's never my intention to insult anyone. In this case, I was trying to articulate Clinton's position. In fact, I think she used the phrase "false intelligence," which I think is insulting, inflammatory, and inaccurate.

"So, you ask, where the hell is the WMD? Can’t say. But I know a bunch of folks who could make a pretty good SWAG at it. Small country to the west – rhymes with hysteria."

I've heard this theory, usually advanced by supporters of the White House. Which is strange to me: if we fought the war to secure Iraqi WMD, then the war was a disaster whether the WMD didn't exist or whether we failed to prevent its transfer to Assad.

"But let me also put a little bug in your ear, if Saddam and his boys hid their nuclear materials out in the desert somewhere for safe keeping, would it be in the US Military’s best interest to NOT make any of their searches and/or findings public when there are 75,000 insurgents running loose throughout the country? Wouldn’t you be concerned, just a tad bit, about who might find that nuclear cache first? Wouldn’t it make sense to keep that and everything to do with that quiet? Seriously."

I don't buy it. First, there are plenty of ways the insurgents could find this stuff without our help. Second, we could present the findings without being that specific. Third, if we had the specific intel, surely we would have made some attempt to secure the materials ourselves, rather than let Assad keep it all or transfer it further (otherwise, what was the point of the war in the first place?). Finally, IME politicians care more about reelection than they do about substance, and would gladly take a chance on material falling into insurgent hands if it meant keeping the House and Senate.

"A sickeningly common theme asserted by media members and liberals around the country is that Iraq is “Bush’s war,” and that Democrats who voted for the resolution in October 2002 have no responsibility because they were supposedly misled by a president from a different political party."

Congress authorized the war. Since then, the Bush administration has been prosecuting it. If you borrow the family car and then get drunk and drive it into a tree, is your dad responsible for the accident because he gave you the keys?

“One of the things that we forget as we’re caught in the heat of the current debate: this is a legal war."

I've never contended otherwise, at least with regard to the US system of authorizing war.

"...what really amazes me is that Bush, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid don’t get together and say, “We’ve got to come up with a bipartisan strategy and consensus on this.” We’re all in to a certain extent in this war. And we owe it to the troops.”

There's the Biden plan. There's the ISG plan. It may be that when the two parties fundamentally disagree, bipartisanship is impossible. But that doesn't mean Democrats haven't offered alternatives.

"Borger then said something maybe equally astounding: “They don’t want ownership of this war, Chris. I mean, I think the Democrats are trying to have it both ways. If you definitely cut off funding, then you have ownership of what comes next.”

That's certainly true, and shameful, as I've pointed out in previous posts.

"Woodward: “I think that people have to rise above politics and party here. And, think, I’ve talked to these people who have come back from Iraq, and in communication with some there, and they wonder: “What the hell is going on in America? What? You know, we’re here, they sent us here. And we’re talking about cutting off funding?”

Woodward's call to action is so general it's meaningless. As for his discussion with troops, I've talked to troops, too, and have heard contrary opinions. There are 130,000 US troops in Iraq... how many did Woodward base his conclusion on?

"Here’s the REAL question folks, “What the hell is going on in America?”"

Again, more general than I can respond to...

Thanks again for comments, Marcus, it's great to have some political balance here!

-- Barry

Oblivious to oblivion said...

(And now for some more political balance...)

Okay, let me caveate this by saying that this youtube video is from Hotair.com and is so far right - - that it almost ruins the message. Almost. Ms. Clinton asked for a conversation... this is a Video Response. You're familiar with those. Even though you may feel uncomfortable with the inferred politics of the folks who made this video, why not give it some attention?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgB1KiOpbRc

Oblivious to oblivion said...

You know - I would like to point out that it wasn't just Bush's decision to go after Saddam - -
From: http://www.slate.com/id/2159572/

The record is very plain and easy to look up. Here is what [Hillary Clinton] said in her crucial speech of October 2002:

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001."

Notice what this does not say. It does not say that she agrees with the Bush administration on those two key points. Rather, it states these two claims in her own voice and on her own authority. A man like John Edwards can back away from his own 2002 vote easily enough by suggesting that he was deceived by Republican propaganda, but he was barely in politics before 2000. Sen. Clinton, however, was not just in politics. She was in the White House. That's why she had to speak of "the four years" that had elapsed since the relationship between the United States and Iraq went critical once more. As the preceding paragraph of her speech said:

"In 1998, the United States also changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change and began to examine options to effect such a change."

Indeed, it was on the initiative of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, both of whom delivered extremely tough speeches warning of another round of confrontation with Saddam Hussein, that the Senate passed the Iraq Liberation Act that year, making it U.S. policy to remove the Baathists from power. It was the Clinton administration that bombed Sudan, claiming that a factory outside Khartoum represented a chemical-weapons link between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. And, as Sen. Clinton reminded us in the very same speech, it was "President Clinton, with the British and others, [who] ordered an intensive four-day air assault, Operation Desert Fox, on known and suspected weapons of mass destruction sites and other military targets" in Iraq. On its own, this is enough to make childish nonsense of her insinuation that an "obsession" with Saddam took root only after the Bush-Cheney victory in 2000.

After speaking to the U.N. General Assembly meeting of 2006, President Jalal Talabani of Iraq found himself in a room with President Bush and former President Clinton. He embraced them both. "Thank you," he said to Clinton, "for signing the law that called for the liberation of Iraq. And thank you, Mr. Bush, for being the one to implement it." To rat on this would be one thing if you were, say, a Dennis Kucinich fan who had opposed all engagement with Iraq from the beginning. But for Sen. Clinton to do so would be a bit more than just re-ratting. It would be more like ratting pure and simple.

At stake, then, is not just the credibility of an ambitious New York senator who wants to be the next President Clinton. At stake, rather, is the integrity of the last President Clinton and of those in his administration who concluded that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was neither desirable nor possible. If the subject was less important, it might be amusing to watch Hillary Clinton trying to "triangulate" her way out of this and find a way of impugning the Bush policy that did not also impugn her husband's own consistent strategy. But the thing cannot be done and can't really even be attempted without raising the suspicion that a major candidate for the office of the presidency is, on the main issue of the day, not just highly unprincipled but also completely unserious.

** There seems to be more than enough "poor Judgment" to go around. I think that the thing that frustrates me more than anything is the liberal selective, and/or apparent lack of, memory. Why not stop pointing fingers at one group or another (or one President or another) and come to the realization that we are in a war of our own making - and that it is our responsibility to carry it thru to the bitter end? It’s too late to debate whether we should have gone to war at all, this war has been in the making for quite sometime, so why not do our best to be the victors? **

Anonymous said...

The only Americans who went to war against Kim Jong Il were Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Bless them.