In terms of substantive differences between Clinton and Obama, everything is chicken feed compared to Iraq--by which I mean Iraq 2003 rather than Iraq 2009+. In fact, to the extent that Obama's campaign claims or implies differences about Iraq 2009+, it's because they say that Clinton can't be trusted because of 2003, which is a fair point to raise and it's up to Clinton to parry it.
Iraq 2003 is pretty clear: Obama opposed the war, Clinton supported it. The war has been a disaster. Point Obama, not to trivialize things! But apart from the obvious advantage of being vindicated by events (and I'll have a P.S. about that), the way it's gone down has left Obama in a weird and enviable position: he just has to say that he opposed it, and he's done. In this diary I'm not going to claim, as some anti-Obama diaries have recently and falsely claimed, that Obama really wasn't an opponent of war after all; that's just silly. However, I am going to dig a little deeper about what his opposition to that "dumb war" meant then, and means now.
That would, of course, be after the jump.
At what point, if ever, would Obama have supported war? The Kucinich answer, of course, would be "never, except if attacked." If Obama's not there, and I don't think he is, then where is he? In other words, to use his famous phrase about not opposing all wars, just dumb wars, what makes a non-dumb war, short of a Pearl Harbor scenario? We haven't heard much about that.
By the way, the famous Obama 2002 speech:
http://www.barackobama.com/...
Were the two US mini-wars in the former Yugoslavia dumb? Kucinich has said yes, for the obvious reason that Serbia didn't attack us and would never do so. Clinton, presumably, approves of her husband's wars. How about it, Senator Obama? It's worth remembering that those wars didn't have UN approval--they were NATO operations, against a country that wasn't in NATO.
Let's go back further. How about Gulf War I? Clear aggression, against a US ally but we didn't have a treaty relationship with Kuwait. Good war or bad? We know the Kucinich position and the Clinton position. That leaves Obama. I don't think it's fair or appropriate to go back before that war, but I would like to know about those three, which are scenarios that many future possible war-or-peace decisions will resemble. Again, my assumption is that Hillary Clinton would "go to war" in all three of those scenarios, just so you don't think I am being coy.
Back to Iraq 2003: You don't have to be a Republican "freedom fries" nutcase to know that France, China, and Russia were unalterably opposed to all military action against Iraq under any conditions, short of an outright Iraqi attack on its neighbors, which was not going to happen. Therefore, to defer to the UN's authority would have been a renunciation of war as an option under any circumstances--including, for instance, permanent expulsion of weapons inspectors, or the actual discovery of WMDs. Is Obama comfortable saying that he would never have gone to war with Iraq, regardless of the outcome of inspections? Again, this is something he has never had to discuss, since he's just invoked his opposition to the war vs. the disastrous results of the war, and it's been a pretty short discussion. That's not enough, in my opinion. (Clinton hasn't said enough either--"I was misled" is pretty weak shit to bring into America's house, if you want to be president.)
The other angle here is humanitarian. War is not good for living things, thus speaketh the bumper sticker. UN sanctions weren't too good for vulnerable people in Iraq, especially children, either. Would Obama have continued those sanctions indefinitely, as an alternative to war? Again, he apparently has never been asked, and if you're going to do Iraq Body Counts, that is a relevant question. Likewise it's relevant to ask whether Saddam Hussein deserved, as an ethical matter, to be overthrown. I'm with the now-reviled Tony Blair on this: yes, of course he did. Clinton has been a fool not to invoke this, which was a real consideration for pro-war radicals like Hitchens here and Ann Clwyd in the Labour Party. This is something that will face the next president, in Darfur and perhaps other places as well. UPDATE: THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH IS WRONG! THANKS TO TWCOLLIER FOR POINTING IT OUT! SEE COMMENTS THREAD (Note, by the way, that in the 2002 speech linked above, Obama only mentions human rights abuses in Egypt and Saudi Arabia--not Iraq.)
In short, I'd like to hear from Obama about (a) other recent wars, (b) whether there was any scenario in which he would have supported war against Iraq, as opposed to just opposing that particular scenario at that moment, and (c) whether there are, in more abstract terms, any scenarios in which he would use the military against a country that had not attacked us. Clinton clearly would, and Kucinich (obviously no longer a candidate, but just to give a real-Democratic-politician example) never would. That leaves Obama undefined.
PS: Personally, I'm with the 1% around here (not even that?) who think the only bad thing about the war was that it was a disaster. I don't think it was illegitimate and I don't think it was illegal--because I don't think the Iraqi government had any claim on legitimacy or continued existence. I'm undecided about whether the war had enough probability of success to justify it pragmatically.