There has been a lot of back-and-forth about Hillary Clinton's interview on Meet the Press this morning. I woke up early to watch her interview today (as I was out last night celebrating my birthday, this was no easy task) and the comment I was struck the most by had nothing to do with racial politics or voter disenfranchisement in Nevada. Rather, it was Hillary's explanation of her 2002 vote on the Levin Amendment to the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq.
The particular quotation I'm interested in, taken from this transcript, follows below the jump.
MR. RUSSERT: [...]I want to stay with your vote because that same day, Senator Levin
offered an amendment, the Levin amendment, and this is how the New York
Times reported it. "The [Levin] amendment called ... for the U.N. to pass
a new resolution explicitly approving the use of force against Iraq. It
also required the president to return to Congress if his U.N. efforts
failed." ... Senator Levin said, "Allow Congress to vote only after
exhausting all options with the United States." You did not participate
in that vote. You voted against Carl Levin, who was saying give diplomacy
a chance and yet you said no. You voted to authorize war. The resolution
you voted for, Robert Byrd said was a blank check for George Bush. Ted
Kennedy says it was a vote for war. James Carville and Paul Begala said
anyone who says that vote wasn’t a vote for war is bunk.
SEN. CLINTON: Well, Tim, if I had a lot of paper in front of me, I could
quote people who say something very differently, so I know you’re very
good at this and I respect it, but let’s look at the context here. Number
one, the Levin amendment, in my view, gave the Security Council of the
United Nations a veto over American presidential power. I don’t believe
that is an appropriate policy for the United States, no matter who is our
president.
The New York Times article that Russert is referring to was a magazine piece from June 3 of last year, which you can find here. The full article is worth reading, but I have replicated the most salient portion below.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 11, 2002, the Senate voted, 77 to 23, to authorize the Bush administration's war against Iraq. The result was shaped in part by the coming midterm elections. Some of the senators up for re-election did not want to appear weak on an issue that the administration had skillfully tied to America's ''war on terror.'' Clinton, having been elected two years earlier, had no such immediate worries. Even so, she positioned herself carefully.
For all the scrutiny of Clinton's vote, an important moment has been lost. It came several hours earlier, on Oct. 10, 2002, the same day Clinton spoke about why she would support the Iraq-war authorization. In her remarks on the Senate floor, she stressed the need for diplomacy with Iraq on the part of the Bush administration and insisted she wasn't voting for ''any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism.'' Yet just a few hours after her speech, Clinton voted against an amendment to the war resolution that would have required the diplomatic emphasis that Clinton had gone on record as supporting -- and that she now says she had favored all along.
The long-overlooked vote was on an amendment introduced by Carl Levin and several other Senate Democrats who hoped to rein in President Bush by requiring a two-step process before Congress would actually authorize the use of force. Senators knew full well the wide latitude that they were handing to Bush, which is why some tried to put the brakes on the march to war. The amendment called, first, for the U.N. to pass a new resolution explicitly approving the use of force against Iraq. It also required the president to return to Congress if his U.N. efforts failed and, in Senator Levin's words, ''urge us to authorize a going-it-alone, unilateral resolution.'' That resolution would allow the president to wage war as a last option.
Clinton has never publicly explained her vote against the Levin amendment or said why she stayed on the sidelines as 11 other senators debated it for 95 minutes that day. In the end, she joined the significant majority of 75 senators who voted against Levin's proposal. (A similar measure in the House also lost, though it gained the backing of 155 members.) The 75 senators were largely those who voted later that night in favor of the war authorization. Only four senators -- Feinstein, Rockefeller, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin -- voted yes on Levin's resolution and then voted yes on Bush's war authorization. If Clinton had done that, she subsequently could have far more persuasively argued, perhaps, that she had supported a multilateral diplomatic approach.
The New York Times article provides a reasonably fair overview of the Levin Amendment, the full text of which can be found here. Note also the New York Times' assertion that "Clinton has never publicly explained her vote against the Levin amendment". She provided that explanation for the first time today, to Tim Russert. To repeat from above:
"the Levin amendment, in my view, gave the Security Council of the
United Nations a veto over American presidential power. I don’t believe
that is an appropriate policy for the United States, no matter who is our
president."
This quote is troubling for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is simply not true. Let me highlight the critical provision of the Levin Amendment for you so that you can see this for yourself.
Congress--
(1) supports the President's call for the United Nations to address the threat to international peace and security posed by Saddam Hussein's continued refusal to meet Iraq's obligations under resolutions of the United Nations Security Council to accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless of its weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons-usable material, ballistic missiles with a range in excess of 150 kilometers, and related facilities, and to cease the development, production, or acquisition of such weapons, materials, and missiles;
(2) urges the United Nations Security Council to adopt promptly a resolution that--
(A) demands that Iraq provide immediate, unconditional, and unrestricted access of the United Nations weapons inspectors so that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons-usable material, ballistic missiles with a range in excess of 150 kilometers, and related facilities are destroyed, removed, or rendered harmless; and
(B) authorizes the use of necessary and appropriate military force by member states of the United Nations to enforce such resolution in the event that the Government of Iraq refuses to comply;
(3) affirms that, under international law and the United Nations Charter, the United States has at all times the inherent right to use military force in self-defense; and
(4) will not adjourn sine die this year and will return to session at any time before the next Congress convenes to consider promptly proposals relative to Iraq if in the judgment of the President the United Nations Security Council fails to adopt or enforce the resolution described in paragraph (2).
Contrary to giving the United Nations a dictate over US foreign policy, the Levin Amendment explicitly reaffirms the United States' sovereign right to use military force -- albeit in self defense, rather than for preemption. More importantly, it says that if the United Nations fails to adopt or enforce an authorization to use force against Iraq, the remedy is not that the United States is prohibited from instigating action against Iraq, but rather, that the President should go back to Congress to persuade them that unilateral action is justified.
So, the Levin Amendment gives the Congress veto power over the unilteral use of force in Iraq, while authorizing the use of multilateral force subject to international law and the decisions of multilateral bodies. It says, in essence, that we should use not a false multilateral pretext for a unilteral action. Why the importance of the distinction? Well, Clinton herself makes the case:
MR. RUSSERT: The title of the act was The Authorization For Use of
Military Force Against Iraq resolution.
SEN. CLINTON: But, you know, Tim, that was exactly what would happen if
we weren’t successful with the diplomacy and if we weren’t successful in
persuading Hussein to do something. And let me just add here that when we
were moving toward the preemptive war that George Bush decided to wage,
the inspectors were in Iraq, we were getting information, finally, that
would give us a basis for knowing. I believe if the inspectors had been
allowed to do their work, we would’ve learned that what Saddam Hussein
had constructed was a charade. It could’ve very well brought him down by
his own people.
This is exactly why the Levin Amendment was important. Because the AUMF (without this amendment) did not distinguish between a multilateral pretext and a unilateral pretext, the United States had no incentive to see the UN process through. On the other hand, if President Bush had known that he would need to go back and persuade Congress to pass a new, unilateral resolution in the event that the UN findings were negative, the whole process might have played out very differently. As Lincoln Chafee argues:
As someone who was in the Senate at the time, I have been struck by the contours of the debate. The situation facing the candidates who cast war votes has, to my surprise, often been presented as a binary one — they could either vote for the war, or not. There was no middle ground.
On the contrary. There was indeed a third way, which Senator James Jeffords, independent of Vermont, hailed at the time as "one of the most important votes we will cast in this process." And it was opposed by every single senator at the time who now seeks higher office.
A mere 10 hours before the roll was called on the administration-backed Iraq war resolution, the Senate had an opportunity to prevent the current catastrophe in Iraq and to salvage the United States’ international standing. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, offered a substitute to the war resolution, the Multilateral Use of Force Authorization Act of 2002.
Senator Levin’s amendment called for United Nations approval before force could be authorized. It was unambiguous and compatible with international law. Acutely cognizant of the dangers of the time, and the reality that diplomatic options could at some point be exhausted, Senator Levin wrote an amendment that was nimble: it affirmed that Congress would stand at the ready to reconsider the use of force if, in the judgment of the president, a United Nations resolution was not "promptly adopted" or enforced. Ceding no rights or sovereignty to an international body, the amendment explicitly avowed America’s right to defend itself if threatened.
An opponent of the Levin amendment said that the debate was not over objectives, but tactics. And he was right. To a senator, we all had as our objectives the safety of American citizens, the security of our country and the disarming of Saddam Hussein in compliance with United Nations resolutions. But there was a steadfast core of us who believed that the tactics should be diplomacy and multilateralism, not the "go it alone" approach of the Bush doctrine.
Those of us who supported the Levin amendment argued against a rush to war. We asserted that the Iraqi regime, though undeniably heinous, did not constitute an imminent threat to United States security, and that our campaign to renew weapons inspections in Iraq — whether by force or diplomacy — would succeed only if we enlisted a broad coalition that included Arab states.
***
The second reason that Clinton's statement is so important is not because of what it says about her judgment at the time, but rather what it says about her foreign policy doctrine going forward.
the Levin amendment, in my view, gave the Security Council of the
United Nations a veto over American presidential power. I don’t believe
that is an appropriate policy for the United States, no matter who is our
president.
When couched in the right-wing frame that Clinton has adopted, this sentiment seems fairly prudent. She has conjured up an image of Presidents Putin and Jintao and Sarkozy sitting in a smoke-filled room and exercising "veto power" over the United States' foreign policy.
But what is Senator Clinton really saying? That the United States is not bound by international law? That it will not be a good-faith participant in the United Nations? That it is free to violate the decisions of the Security Council as it so chooses? Those seem to be fairly reasonable conclusions.
I would argue that the single overriding foreign policy challenge for the next President is not simply to end the war in Iraq, but rather to restore the United States' position as a member in good standing of the international community. When she voted against the Levin Amendment in 2002, Mrs. Clinton seemed to mimic President Bush's disdain for international institutions. Judging by her comments today, that is not something which has changed.