Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Lost in the fog

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More from the Clinton fog machine on Iraq:

 

So far, her arguments about Iraq can be summarized thusly:

  • Her vote to authorize military force wasn't really a go-ahead for war;
  • She wanted to strengthen to President's hand for negotiations; but …
  • … Bush would have gone to war anyway; and
  • It's not like Obama has been so great on ending the war since that 2002 speech anyway.

You might note that none of these points are exactly positive reasons to vote for Hillary.

In politics, the topic of conversation can actually be more important than your position on said topic. In this case, there is simply no way for Hillary to talk her way out of her 2002 Iraq War vote, other than completely disavowing it, as Edwards, Kerry, and many other pols have done.

I think that by and large, most folks prefer to think about the future; and indeed it would be helpful to hear more about how the candidates propose to extract us from Iraq, and how they plan to mitigate the seemingly-inevitable bloody fallout. That being said, the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force was one of those bright lines of history, a true defining moment for the folks serving in Congress at the time. It was a point when a lot more courage and a lot less groupthink would have served the country well.

I like the American penchant for rehabilitation. We don't ask people who screwed up to commit hara-kiri or be banished to a desert island; we ask them to apologize, accept responsibility, and show us they've learned something. The rehabilitation must be earned. 

Hillary hasn't earned it — indeed, refuses to earn it — and in the process is calling attention to exactly the most unflattering comparison between her and Obama. She can't win this argument.

PS: I'm relieved that the campaign seems to be focused on actual issues again. They hurt; they're divisive; there may be no truly satisfying outcome or pure position; but this is the real deal. It's much preferable to the Dr. Phil politics that we saw running up to Iowa and NH.  

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  1. (1) A diary on Daily Kos quotes Hillary Clinton’s speech where she advocates voting for the AUMF. A golden oldie: Hillary’s floor speech to invade Iraq. I thought it was worth reading.

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    p>(2) A recent issue of The Nation has a long article about the foreign policy advisers surrounding the various candidates. It reports that Holbrooke, Clinton’s “heaviest” adviser, supported the war until 2005. Obama’s advisers were not so misguided. Edwards does not have so many foreign policy advisers. The Nation article made me more concerned about Clinton.

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    p>(3) A study of Senator Obama’s and Senator Clinton’s Iraq votes that I believe I saw on Talking Points Memo about 6 months ago showed that their voting has been pretty much identical.

      • Other than the Casey confirmation, and Obama voted to confirm. Wow.  I’ve heard it but I haven’t seen it compiled.  Actions and words.  Neither have done much.  But if this is Obama’s best point this is pretty damning.  

        • Votes are more tangible, of course, than who these guys hire as advisers, but the article in The Nation to which I linked above does suggest that Senator Obama’s advisers would make progressives much happier than Senator Clinton’s:

          Hillary’s campaign portrays its foreign policy team as a big tent. At the top are the troika of Albright, Holbrooke and former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Albright is very close to Hillary and a key confidante and surrogate. Berger is a skilled behind-the-scenes operative who keeps the troops in line. More on Holbrooke in a moment. Close behind are policy figures who also play a political role, like retired Gen. Wesley Clark and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who are popular with the party’s antiwar base and appear on the campaign trail; Clark appears in the campaign’s TV ads. (Clinton supporters who backed Bush’s recent “surge” of troops in Iraq, like Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, are now kept at arm’s length, although Clinton does consult with Gen. Jack Keane, an architect of the troop increase.) Following the old guard are a younger crop of less hawkish experts, like Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, who co-chairs an advisory group on terrorism, and Iran specialists Ray Takeyh and Vali Nasr, who favor broad US engagement with Iran. At the center is Lee Feinstein, a former State Department official whom Clinton plucked from CFR in July and made the campaign’s national security director.

          Holbrooke’s brand of “muscular liberalism” has come to define Hillary. He helped shape not only Bill Clinton’s but Hillary’s views on the necessity of using force in Bosnia and consulted with her frequently about her vote on Iraq.

          • Going to have to read more …. this is a bit one sided, but it does make you think.  But talk about living in a fantasy land …

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            p>

            CNN’s YouTube debate in July, when Obama said he’d meet with the leaders of countries like Cuba, Iran and North Korea without conditions. Clinton responded that she would not “be used for propaganda purposes” and later called Obama’s statement “irresponsible and, frankly, naïve.” The conventional wisdom was that Obama’s answer displayed a stunning lack of presidential gravitas; Hillary dispatched her advisers to reinforce that point. But Obama unexpectedly turned the exchange to his advantage, accusing Clinton of “continuing with Bush/Cheney policies” and painting her as defender of an outdated status quo.

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            p>Really that happened?  Obama came out well?  Ummmmmmmm, no!

      • Barack Obama has voted for funding the war a number of times even though he campaigns as if he is against the war.  I really wonder how he would have voted on the Iraq resolution in 2002 if he had been in the Senate back then. And before I get hammered, I know, I know, he gave a speech back in 2002 in which he said he was against the war.  But he has been saying he was against the war in speeches while campaigning for President and yet, when he now votes in the Senate, he votes to support it.  So, I wonder how he would have voted back in 2002, if he actually had had to vote back then.

        • I don’t agree with it, but I can live with it.  However,  I do mind him explaining that anyone voting against it is just an insincere bluffer

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          p>

          no lawmaker “wants to play chicken with our troops,” Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday.

          “My expectation is that we will continue to try to ratchet up the pressure on the president to change course,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t think that we will see a majority of the Senate vote to cut off funding at this stage.”

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          p>Do you ever see McCain or Graham say that Republicans will never follow through on their promise to shut down abortion clinics coast to coast?  From war funding to social security to attacking other Democrats as racists to the separation of church and state, it’s amazing how many times Obama has burned his own party in his 36 months in the Senate.

  2. I was enthralled in a sort of joyous rapture in parsing over the “news” from sources way outside channels 5,6 or 7.

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    p>Sibel Edmonds revelations, US sponsored nuclear proliferation, even bigger than Iran-Contra

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    p>A recount demand for the NH primary
    And a Google search on Japanese Diet+911

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    p>But then perusing the normal sites all things “Hillary” on all major boards return a bazillion hits, it is the proverbial Britney Spears phenomena of the “progressive” left.  Where am I going you might ask.
    Well OK, this is Massachusetts and most here agree with the society norms prevalent in this area.  We agree that Huckabee is an entity to be smitten.

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    p>With that in mind I present this.  It is a co-ordinated media effort demographically studied and promoted to it’s target audience,rural America.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

  3. She’s exactly right.  It’s all fair game, but this also includes her positions. Also, what’s her plan for the future and why is it better.  That’s what we all want to hear and we’ve been waiting for a long time to hear it debated.  

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    p>Plus, I want to see how Obama reacts to the heat.

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    p>Hopefully we’ll have a good next debate.

  4. This is a different segment on Meet the Press in which Hillary Clinton explains why she voted the way she did.  (I am not sure why this segment was not included above instead of the one that was included.) The authority to invade Iraq was needed to convince Saddam that he had no choice but to let the UN inspectors back into Iraq, and it worked.  I think anyone who wants to make up their own mind, should watch this segment and not listen to spin, even when it appears on BMG.  Towards the end of the segment Sen. Clinton says, “I would not have given President Bush the authority if I knew he would deliberately misuse and abuse it,” i.e, by invading even though the inspectors had been allowed back into Iraq.
    This is consistent with the speech she made at the time of the vote.  

    • hundreds of thousands of Americans knew exactly what was at stake. Those of us who were against the war and who marched in the streets and flooded Congress  with phone calls knew precisely what a “yes” vote meant. It was a major step towards military confrontation with Iraq. Hillary Clinton was on the wrong side of this issue. She now promotes herself as having, all along, been the champion of a diplomatic solution. We protesters were wrong for not having seen the courageous and level-headed thinking that was behind her vote. What a slap in the face to those of us who have known all along that this war has been an unmitigated disaster! And she wants our vote?

      • but I agreed with the vote.  I marched because the U.N. inspectors had been let in and the use of force was unnecessary.  Maybe you will answer this question for me because no one who has attacked Senator Clinton on her vote has answered it.  If the President had not been given the authority to use military force in the event that the U.N. inspectors were not allowed back into Iraq, what do you think Saddam would have done?

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        p>Better yet, how would Barack Obama answer that question?
        He either thinks Saddam would have let the inspectors in anyway (an improbability and really naive) or he thinks that the United States should have just walked away from Iraq no matter what the consequences.    

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        p>

        • to think that the President wouldn’t use this vote as support for his invasion of Iraq. Only naive people thought that he had any respect whatsoever for the inspection process. Maybe that was you and Hillary.

    • If things had been different, then things would have been different. That phrase about the president misusing power merely shows how little critical thinking was applied to the president’s actions back then, how much of a total blank check the Dems gave him. Pathetic.

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      p>She lacked judgment. She made the wrong decision. Every historical tidbit that comes forward only reinforces the basic point.

      • If the President had not been given the authority to use military force in the event that the U.N. inspectors were not allowed back into Iraq, what do you think Saddam would have done?  Do you think Saddam would have let the inspectors in anyway (an improbability and really naive) or do you think the United States should have just walked away from Iraq no matter what the consequences.   What would Barack Obama’s answer to this question be?    

        • The authority to invade Iraq was needed to convince Saddam that he had no choice but to let the UN inspectors back into Iraq…

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          p>The US and others, at the approval of the UN, had maintained no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq without Iraqi permission.  All that the UN inspectors in 2002 needed to do was to waltz into Iraq and go wherever they wanted.  If Saddam tried to impede their inspections of certain areas, then the US could have fired a couple of cruise missiles at the areas that they had wanted to inspect.  It didn’t require an AUMF to do that, since it would have been in support of the UN’s mission.

  5. This strikes me as a load of bull when trying to compare to Obama.

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    p>

    Hillary hasn’t earned it — indeed, refuses to earn it — and in the process is calling attention to exactly the most unflattering comparison between her and Obama. She can’t win this argument.

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    p>Barack Obama walked away from his words, he removed them from his web site and voted along with Hillary when his “actions” mattered.  It’s nice to give a speech on something you are not voting on, as we’ve seen since he himself deleted it.  How is this being a leader again?  That’s why this is a load of BS.  Vote for her on not, like her or not.  Obama and Hillary are the same.  What I want to focus on is who will deliver what we want from the problem in Iraq.  The more I look at it the more I see this a a bunch of politicians acting  like …. well, you know.  I see absolutely nothing in Obama’s actions that shows any trait that’s better than Hillary.  His motivations were purely political.  I don’t see who anyone can see it differently.  If you do, please explain each action and how, so this whole nonsense about “earning” something is something that hasn’t been backed up in this post.

    • What I want to focus on is who will deliver what we want from the problem in Iraq.

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      p>Of course that’s what you want to focus on.  Unfortunately, 2002 is still the very recent past, and her opinions at the time, and her vote at the time, matter.

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      p>And the problem with Hillary’s argument about Obama (and yours, and the Hillary supporters that accosted me with this argument last night – talking points, anyone?) is that the worst thing you can say about the Other Guy, is that he’s just like Hillary.  That’s a double edged sword, isn’t it?  “Don’t vote her him!  He’s just like her!”

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      p>Except he’s not.  What Hillary and her supporters don’t get is that it’s not just the Iraq vote.  If she’s taking him apart for too brief a track record, then she’s getting assailed for too long a track record.  Hillary care.  The bungling of the Whitewater investigation.  The “massive right-wing conspiracy.”  The Iraq vote.  The failure to be a liberal leader in the senate.  

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      p>And maybe Obama hasn’t been any better on the last point.  But if you’re going to say “experience matters,” I’m going to ask “HOW does it matter, when your argument is that Hillary and Obama are the same?”  

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      p>For all of her “experience” and her outstanding resume, she was still essentially wrong so many times.  

      • I’m not advocating for Hillary, I’m responding to the post which singles out one candidate while not addressing the other, I didn’t start it.  I’m just responding to it.  Obama in my opinion doesn’t grade much higher than Hillary on the Iraq conflict.  Tell me his actions and how you come to that conclusion.  Including his voting record, walking away from his words and not being a leader when it was a difficult time to do so.  That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to vote for either one of them, that means spare me the Obama BS and discuss what’s really going on and convince voters about their plan is the best.  

  6. One is the issue of what to do in Iraq moving forward: I think all the Democrats have shown to be basically on the same page on what to do, end the occupation as quickly and as carefully possible. I don’t think there is a significant difference between Clinton and Obama and Edwards on how to do this. This an important issue, and there’s a consensus of our party’s position.

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    p>But the issue of actions before the invasion are symptoms of a much larger issue of foreign policy judgment. This an issue that does divide our candidates and reaches much further than the by comparison short-scale issue of how to get out of Iraq, but the long-scale issue keeping us out of further problems and dealing with the world in an intelligent way. Clinton has not shown herself to be strong in this area, based on her Iraq and Iran votes, and it’s her responsibility to show that she has the judgment to be president. Attacking Obama for also funding the troops on the ground does nothing to address the issue of judgment.

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