As death and misery in Iraq rise every day and 2008 nears, we cannot forget the question of accountability. You have to go back to the start and ask why and how we got into this pernicious, perfectly foreseeable quagmire. Why didn’t rational, smart people that run our government, like Hilary Clinton, do something to stop it? The June 3, 2007 New York Times Sunday Magazine had some disturbing answers. ...
The buck stops at Bush. No question about that. But Democratic Senators who voted to give him the authority to go to war, starting with Clinton, too easily cast the blame only on Bush. And their supporters all too easily buy into the rhetoric. The fact is that our Democracy depends on checks and balances, and Senators had the tools to check and balance Bush’s lies. But only a few had the courage to do so.
The New York Times Magazine cover article ("Hillary’s War") confirmed my already-strong hesitation to vote for or give money to Clinton given her record on the war, as much as I would like to see a woman President. Her handling of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s W.M.D. capabilities stands out the most:
"she has not discussed publicly whether she ever read the complete classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, the most comprehensive judgment of the intelligence community about Iraq’s W.M.D., which was made available to all 100 senators . . . [T]o get a complete picture would require reading the entire document, which, according to a version of the report made public in 2004, contained numerous caveats and dissents on Iraq’s weapons capacities."
In other words, she either (A) did not bother to get fully informed about a question as serious as an offensive war in the powder-keg Middle East (her aides, who supposedly gave her all the briefing she felt she needed to decide on her vote, did not have the clearance to read the full NIE), or (B) she did read it and for political reasons decided to ignore the serious questions it raised contradicting Bush’s rhetoric on Iraq’s WMD capabilities. If (A) is the truth, then why the hell did she not read it? Was it easier to stick her head in the sand than to oppose Bush in the aftermath of 9/11? If (B) is the truth, then just how ambitious and callous is she? These were people’s lives with which she was politicking.
An example of a Senator who did his homework:
"Bob Graham, the Florida Senator who was then chairman of the intelligence committee, said he voted against the resolution on the war, in part, because he had read the complete N.I.E. report ... it did not persuade him that Iraq possessed W.M.D. As a result, he listened to Bush’s claims more skeptically. ‘I was able to apply caveat emptor . . . Most of my colleagues could not.’"
Clinton’s negligence of the information in the NIE, willful or not, is unforgivable.
And it gets worse. Unlike most of her Democratic colleagues, Clinton went as far as to sheepishly adopt Bush’s nonsense about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
"She accused Iraq’s leader of giving ‘aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members’ . . . Clinton’s linking of Iraq’s leader to Al Qaeda, however, was unsupported by the conclusions of the N.I.E. and other secret intelligence reports that were available to Senators before the vote."
She was complicit, then, in the Bush administration’s massive campaign of misinformation that convinced two thirds of Americans about a damned lie that helped unleash so much death, so much destruction, and so much blowback that we and our children will deal with for decades to come.
The fact is that I as a lay observer, without access to anything classified, never believed Bush’s rhetoric about WMDs. There was enough public information to be skeptical, such as the fact that UN inspectors with access to suspect sights were finding nothing. Clinton had way more information to oppose Bush than I did, but she refused to do so, and even went further than most Democrats to support him. And given Bush’s loud rhetoric from the start, it is simply not credible that Clinton "expected" that Bush would try peaceful means first. That’s nonsense, and in any event her claim is belied, as the New York times points out, by her vote against an amendment to the war resolution that would have required Bush to try dialogue first.
Shame on her. Given my feelings about this war and her lack of diligence (or insurmountable cynicism) before her vote, it would actually be crazy sexist of me to vote for her just because she is a woman and I would like to see a woman President. Forget her.