I have wanted to write this for a while and I hope that everyone who vilifies Hillary for her vote and praises Barack for his early opposition will read this.
This diary is about what Hillary actually means when she says, "I voted to give President Bush the authority to use force and to put the inspectors back into Iraq and is the President who has misused that authority." It is easy to look back and demonize all of the people who were at all associated with the Iraq War and the events leading up to it. Americans in general and Democrats in particular, however, have been surprisingly myopic in their assessment of Hillary Clinton's vote for authorizing the use of force in Iraq. But before you malign her for her vote, it might be useful to carefully consider what led to it. When she says she voted to give Bush the authority to go in and he misused it, it is not fancy political footwork. It's actually true. This is not a defense of the Iraq War. We all know what a mistake it is and was. This is an explanation of reasoning behind Hillary's vote.
Read the diary and if you want to rip my head off, you're welcome to do so in the comments. And you can go ahead and Troll Rate me immediately, but this diary is only trying to further the debate about the war and the resolution authorizing the use of force.
The real drum beating for war with Iraq came out of a number of things.
One, evidence came to light that Saddam Hussein had corrupted the Oil for Food program so that he was being paid large under the table premiums on top of the money collected collected under the program. Furthermore, the contracts under the program were being given to French and Russians who then lobbied their governments for lifting the U.N. sanctions on Iraq.
Two, all credible intelligence suggested that Saddam was restarting his weapons program. Yes it was wrong. Very wrong. There were no WMD. There are some mitigating factors to that point though. The U.S. intelligence agencies believed it, the British believed it, the rest of the European intel agencies believed it. Saddam tried to project that he had them. He was more afraid of Iran than the U.S., believing that the U.S. would never invade and so he had nothing to fear by making the international community believe he had weapons. He thought he would have something to lose if Iran thought he didn't have them, because then he feared they would invade him. So pretty much everyone thought he was rebuilding his program. No one was arguing that at the time. But this is not a diary about intelligence failures, it's about Hillary's vote. Yes, Hillary did not read the hard intelligence report. She did, however, consult with Senators she and everyone else thought - and still think - credible. The authenticity of the intelligence at the time were not at issue. Believing that Saddam was restarting his program, the U.S. had three choices.
- Let him get nukes and switch to a policy of deterrence much like we did with USSR.
- Unilaterally invade.
- Work through the U.N. and make the sanctions work and disarm him.
Definitely no on option one. Saddam had invaded other countries seven times in the last twenty years. There's no intelligent person who would advocate letting him have the ability to nuke Tel Aviv or the Saudi oil fields or give them to terrorists. Yes, yes. There were no links. We know that. That doesn't mean he couldn't establish links faced with a dire and compromised position vis-a-vis the U.S. or Israel.
Option two very bad as illustrated by what actually happened. Three is much better. Yes it ended up happening and that was catastrophic, but that wasn't the expectation of those supporting using option three.
Three is obviously the most attractive. Work through the U.N. to disarm the weapons that we and everyone else think he has and that he is projecting like he has. The problem is that we called on him and urged him and strongly urged him a zillion times to let the inspectors back in and make sure he is in compliance with the U.N. resolutions and the Nonproliferation Treaty. He has continually defied us. Another nonbinding, no consequences resolution is meaningless. This time, however, we need him to comply because otherwise he gets nukes and then we are presented with a fait accompli and there's nothing we can do about it. The only option we have is to coerce him by making him think that this time, if he doesn't comply, we will use military force to enforce the provisions of the resolution. To do this, we need to pass a U.N. Security Council Resolution authorizing the use of force if he doesn't comply by X date.
So why didn't we do that? Well we tried. But not only are the French and Russians blocking this in the Security Council, they're actually proposing the alternative: lifting the sanctions. China is voting no because of the implications for Taiwan. They have said, however, that they would have voted for it with French and Russian support. So what do we do about the French and the Russians who are blocking our security council vote to put the pressure we need to on Saddam?
We have to use some kind of leverage to make them come around. But how do we do this? We have to make them think that if they don't approve it, we will go ahead and do it ourselves. This would completely squeeze them out, diminish their power, and rule out the possibility of renewing their precious oil contracts - the reason the corrupt U.N. officials are fighting for lifting the sanctions in the first place. The only way to put pressure on them is to signal that if they don't pass a binding resolution enforcing Saddam's cooperation and threatening the consequence of military action, we will enforce the resolution by ourselves. That was the meaning of the resolution giving Bush the authority to go into Iraq. That was why Hillary voted for it. It was not a vote for war. It was a signal to the French and Russians to enforce the myriad resolutions the Security Council had already passed.
Hillary voted to give Bush that authority. She never voted for it with the intention of going to war with Iraq. The meaning of that vote was to give the White House a tool to make a cooperative effort in the U.N. work. It was not the expectation that Bush would go off and get crazy with his authority and do it in such an incompetent way. It was a tool. You can criticize the post war planning, the intelligence, pretty much everything about actually going into Iraq, but that vote was not made with the intention of all those mistakes. Just ask members of the Senate who voted for it. I have interviewed them. Hillary did not vote for a war, she voted for a tool to put pressure on the international community to enforce a resolution just about everyone in the world supported unanimously.
It is easy to sit back and criticize Hillary now that Iraq is a total debacle, but that was not the meaning of that vote. Plus a solid segment of those tearing her head off probably supported it in the beginning too. There's a good chance, presented with the actual vote, that Obama would have voted for it as well. At the time, many Senators were assured that it was not a vote for war.
That being said, I do like Obama and I predict he will get the nomination. From foreign policy standpoint, however, it is important to understand what Hillary means when she says "I voted to give Bush the authority to use force and the reentry of inspectors. I didn't know he was going to misuse in such a bad way."
You can tear me apart now.