Yesterday, this diary by Sam Wise Gingy unearthed a video that sheds light on why Senator Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq. The video is 15 minutes long, but I was so struck by its contents that I have transcribed it for easier consumption.
Interested? Follow me...
...into a conference room in the Capitol building on March 6, 2003--two weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
The setting: A group of about 50 Code Pink activists are waiting in the conference room for Senator Clinton to arrive. Code Pink is an anti-war women's organization first organized in 11/02 to protest the coming war in Iraq. It is currently protesting the coming war in Iran. While they are waiting they sing about peace; Senator Clinton arrives in time to catch the end of their song.
At about the 1:50 mark in the video, Senator Clinton thanks the group for coming and makes an icebreaker comment about everyone wearing pink, like pink tulips. Then she gets substantive:
HRC: ...I deeply respect your concerns. Obviously I disagree on an aspect of those concerns but I very much respect not only your willingness to come here, but your organizing, your trying to convey the emotional and intellectual arguments you have mustered. So let me stop here, and you know, I don't have a lot of time, because I have some other things on my schedule that I have to get back to, but let me just stop here and--I don't know if you have a spokesperson or if there is someone who wishes to speak?
The "aspect of those concerns" Senator Clinton disagrees on? This is a group of anti-war protesters; they disagree on whether to invade Iraq.
Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin thanks Senator Clinton for meeting with them and explains that they have requested meetings with President B*sh and La*ra B*sh, but were denied, and that they are grateful she agreed to meet them. At 3:15 in the video she mentions a recent trip Code Pink's founders took to Iraq. She lays out their objections to the war:
Medea Benjamin: We just returned from there and our hearts just went out to the Iraqi women who came up to us in the streets and said "Why is Bush doing this? Please do something to stop this war."
And we also had a chance to meet with the inspectors, and privately the inspectors said they felt they were getting tremendous cooperation from the Iraqi government, certainly compared to a place like North Korea where they've been thrown out. And that they felt the inspections take time--it takes a year, it takes two years--and that there was no reason to go to war.
And we all feel like we represent millions and millions of women in this country. Many of us--how many of us are mothers here? We've got a number of people who are grandmothers here.
We know from our travels around the world that the United States lost all the sympathy we had after September 11th by this drumbeat for war, and that anti-American feeling is going to reverberate against us negatively. And that if we go to war in Iraq, we are putting our children in jeopardy, we are putting our families in jeopardy. And that's why we decided to organize as women.
So its both because we care deeply about the Iraqi women and children--and we know you have talked about "It takes a village to raise a child"; WE know it takes a bomb to destroy a village. And we've seen that around the world; we don't want to see that again. So we want you to help us protect the Iraqi children, the Iraqi women, and we want you to help us protect our children.
And you also know much better than we do that every state in this nation is suffering from deficits right now. We know we need that money to go to child care, to go to health care, to fighting things like AIDS around the world. And we don't think we can afford to spend billions of dollars on killing people in Iraq. We know that you are a wonderful woman and deep down we really think that you agree with us.
Ms. Benjamin has laid out three cogent objections to the war: loss of innocent Iraqi lives, loss of American soldiers lives, and the lost opportunity to better spend "billions of dollars", which now we know will be trillions.
Ms. Benjamin then says they would prefer to give Senator Clinton a "Pink Badge of Courage" Medal for supporting their cause than a Pink Slip (like the one she is wearing), to "dramatize" the choice each lawmaker has about the war.
Senator Clinton responds (6:30 mark):
HRC: I admire your willingness to speak out on behalf of the women and children of Iraq. There is a very easy way to prevent anyone from being put into harm’s way and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm. And I have absolutely no belief that he will. I have to say that this is something I have followed for more than a decade. If he were serious about disarming he would have been much more forthcoming. There may be progress, we may be destroying the Salmud missiles, but there is no accounting for the chemical and biological stocks. And I just respectfully disagree about what the proximate cause of any action that might be taken is.
It sounds to me like Senator Clinton just said "we haven't caused this war, Saddam Hussein has". We don't bear responsibility for invading, they bear the responsibility for provoking our pre-emptive invasion. This is one of the arguments B*sh made.
HRC: Now I also believe that for now nearly 20 years the principal reason why women and children in Iraq have suffered is because of his leadership. His not only tyrannical and dictatorial leadership, but his reign of terror against women and children. And it is a very unfortunate situation for the Iraqi people that they have been so horribly misgoverned for so long. Now I do think that there are continuing discussions ongoing that I hope can make some further progress building on the success of the missile program, because that really has been the first real compliance and it was only brought about when the inspectors discovered the missiles, they were not revealed, that their length was longer than what had been prescribed under the resolutions ending the Gulf War.
And the very difficult question for all of us is how does one bring about the disarmament of someone with such a proven track record of a commitment, if not an obsession, of weapons of mass destruction. And I ended up voting for the resolution after carefully reviewing the information and intelligence that I had available, talking with people whose opinions I trusted, trying to discount political or other factors that I didn't believe should be in any way a part of this decision.
And it is unfortunate that we are at the point of a potential military action to enforce the resolution. That is not my preference, it would be far preferable if we had not only legitimate cooperation from Saddam Hussein and a willingness on his part to disarm and account for his chemical and biological storehouses, but if we had a much broader alliance and coalition. But we are in a very difficult position
right now. I would love to agree with you but I can't based on my own understanding and assessment of the situation.
There is much I could say here, but here's the bottom line: Based on her own understanding and assessment of the situation as of March 6, 2003, she cannot agree that we should not invade Iraq. We're not talking about giving B*sh a bargaining chip in the United Nations here, we're talking about the real thing: the invasion begins 2 weeks later.
At this point (10:02) a representative of the National Organization of Women speaks, apparently reading from something she is holding...
NOW Spokeswoman: We are outraged over what is happening. Our members--I speak for over 500,000 members of NOW. With all due respect, it isn't in the United States--it is not up to this government to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is up to the community of nations. [Applause]
In our opinion there is no case for this war. There is no connection with terrorism, as far as we can tell. The cost in lives, not only of the Iraqi people, but of U.S. people, most of whom in the trenches are going to be people of color--men and women of color; the expense is gonna bankrupt the economy; it's gonna take resources away; it's gonna have devastating effect on an economy that is already in the toilet--and that affects mostly women and children. We are on a reckless course, and our members and our supporters plead with you to speak out against this reckless President. His economy, his economic policies that are hurting people here, and now he is dividing the world over this issue.
Note that Senator Clinton did not include terrorism above as one of the reasons she supported the invasion of Iraq, but the NOW representative rejected it as a reason for this war. To her credit, Senator Clinton did not defend B*sh's claim that invading Iraq was part of the War on Terror.
Senator Clinton responds (11:10):
HRC: Well I have spoken out on both of those issues. Those are issues on which I feel very strongly. And from my perspective, we have to take them one at a time. And let me just answer [interrupted] no--I'm sorry. I came to tell you what I believe, and this has been an extremely difficult decision for me, and I will tell you what I believe, and I can only do that, and I respect your right to disagree.
With respect to whose responsibility it is to disarm Saddam Hussein, I just do not believe that given the attitudes of many people in the world today that there would be a willingness to take on very difficult problems were it not for the United States' leadership. And I'm talking specifically about what had to be done in Bosnia and Kosovo, where my husband could not get a Security Counsel resolution to save the Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing. And we did it alone as the United States, and we had to do it alone. It would have been far preferable if the Russians and others had agreed to do it through the United Nations. They would not. I'm happy that in the face of such horrible suffering, we did act.
And so I see it somewhat differently, from my experience and from my perspective. I agree with you 100% that even though I am willing to take a very difficult step for me to say that we have to disarm this man, that position in no way supports the disastrous economic policies this administration is pursuing. In fact, I think that this is the height of irresponsibility, and it would be far preferable to be more patient and more thoughtful and more willing to engender support with respect to Iraq. That is a decision that has to be made in the world community.
Here at home, this administration is bankrupting our economy, forcing us to make the worst kind of false choices: between national and homeland security, which they don't fund, and between security and everything else, which they don't want to fund. So you have me 100% on that.
It is wrong, it is absolutely wrong that for the first time in American history, we have a President who is talking about leading this country to war, and wanting to cut taxes at the same time. That is the height of cruel, arrogant irresponsibility.
Someone tells Senator Clinton that her time is up, she needs to leave; and that's where the conference ends.
To continue the analysis, the NOW spokeswoman has made a new arguments for Senator Clinton to answer (the world community should decide whether Saddam Hussein should be disarmed), and repeated the argument that invading Iraq would be a humanitarian disaster.
Senator Clinton answers that she has no faith in the world community's ability to make such decisions. She offers her husband's intervention in Kosovo as proof of that, and to some extent she has a point. The B*sh administration has not continued to lead in Kosovo, and violence is erupting there yet again. Today, she could make the point even more strongly by pointing to Darfur: absent American leadership on Darfur under B*sh, the world community has failed to intervene effectively. She also points to her preference to work through the United Nations, when possible. But her basic judgement is the same as B*sh's: the United Nations is incapable of acting, we must take matters into our own hands.
Her claim that the decision to be more patient and build a more effective coalition before disarming Hussein "must be made in the world community" is patently false. This is another way America could lead the world, and the way that many others were recommending instead of the AUMF. Senator Clinton recognizes the inspectors have identified wrongdoing, but believes the time to build international support has passed.
Code Pink and the NOW representative came primarily to speak out against the humanitarian costs of the war, both in Iraq and here at home. What was Senator Clinton's response to this? She claims (rightly) that the primary cause of suffering among Iraq's women and children over the past 20 years has been Saddam Hussein's rule. However, the issue Code Pink and NOW raised was what harm our invasion will do those women and children, and on that issue Senator Clinton is silent.
Bill Clinton's intervention in Kosovo ending ethnic cleansing with very little loss of life. Senator Clinton was right to argue that there was an urgent humanitarian need to end that ethnic cleansing. Her argument here is that the plight of women and children in Iraq was such an urgent humanitarian need. The plight of women and children in Iraq was hardly worse in 2003 than in many, many other countries around the world; it was not comparable in scale, urgency, or uniqueness to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. It was one of the very last arguments made for invading Iraq, not the primary concern.
What did Senator Clinton single out as "the height of cruel, arrogant irresponsibility", as if it were the overriding issue brought up in this discussion?
Going to war without raising taxes.
This was a way out of the conference. Senator Clinton had said what she had come to say; she then found an applause line, and left the crowd clapping. Politically expedient, but a poor response to the very valid concerns made by Code Pink and NOW.
UPDATE: We should also remember that the decision to invade Iraq was not made in a vacuum; the United States was engaged in a major foreign policy initiative at the time. Some call it The War On Terror, but I prefer to call it Striking Back at Al Qaeda. Neither side in this discussion (NOW/Code Pink or Senator Clinton) mentions this aspect of this issue at all, except in how it affects the domestic economy. Those who claim it was right to invade Iraq must also explain why doing so was more important than defeating Al Qaeda--especially since five years later, that task has seen very, very little progress.
play jurist was kind enough to post a copy of Barack Obama's speech in the lead-up to the war. The end of that speech reads:
I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
This is the man that I want to answer the call at 3 a.m.; the one not opposed to all wars, just the dumb ones.