Apologists for Hillary’s Iraq war vote on this website are maintaining that she was only trying to get Saddam to comply with the need for thorough inspections – and that she was betrayed when, despite the failure of the re-admitted inspectors to find any WMDs, or indeed confirm any of the claims made by the Bush administration in this regard, Bush pushed forward to invade anyway.
My recollection is that John Kerry did indeed feel betrayed by this, and protested when the invasion occurred. That’s one reason why I managed to reconcile myself to Kerry’s candidacy in 2004.
But I had no such recollection regarding Hillary. And so I looked around on the web and found Prof. Stephen Zunes’ pertinent essay published in 2007:
http://www.antiwar.com/...
Note in particular this passage:
In March 2003, well after UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to return and engage in unfettered inspections and were not finding any WMDs, Senator Clinton made clear that the United States should invade Iraq anyway. Indeed, she asserted that the only way to avoid war would be for Saddam Hussein to abide by President Bush's ultimatum to resign as president and leave the country, in the apparent belief that the United States had the right to unilaterally make such demands of foreign leaders and to invade and occupy their countries if they refused.Said Senator Clinton, "The president gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid war and the world hopes that Saddam Hussein will finally hear this ultimatum, understand the severity of those words, and act accordingly."
When President Bush launched the invasion soon thereafter and spontaneous protests broke out across the country, Senator Clinton voted in favor of a Republican-sponsored resolution that "commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President . . . in the conflict against Iraq."
In other words, Hillary fully endorsed Bush’s agenda of regime change – even as inspections were showing that the WMD claims against Saddam were overt lies.
And Hillary voted against the Levin Amendment, which would have required a final vote in Congress to initiate war, in the event that Saddam failed to cooperate with the inspections; in other words, she wanted Bush to have carte blanche.
Zunes also makes the point that Hillary was the only Democratic senator to believe – or pretend to believe – all of the claims that the Bush administration was making against Iraq - including claims that were inherently absurd to anyone with half a brain, such as the canard that Saddam was collaborating with his Al Qaeda enemies to foment terrorism against us.
And Hillary totally blew off the urging of Senator Graham that she read the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding Saddam's transgressions - she evidently had made her mind up that supporting the invasion would be politically popular, facts be damned. She also refused to meet with Scott Ritter, the UN weapons inspector who knew as well as anyone that the Bush administration's claims about WMDs were wholly bogus.
I welcome Hillary apologists to prove that Zunes was wrong, and that Hillary did indeed protest Bush’s invasion at the time. Absent this, I will continue to view Hillary as a War Criminal who deserves, like Bush, Cheney, Condi, and numerous others, to be spending the rest of her life in a jail in the Hague.
And I rather suspect that the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who lost their lives thanks to this invasion - and the several million who were rendered homeless - would agree with me.