When the U.S Senate voted, in 2002, for the Iraq War resolution, in effect giving a green light and a blank check to the Bush administration to enter a total quagmire, I remember wondering how it could be that the antiwar and anti-imperialist left, with which I identified, and which did not have access to the same intelligence reports that members of the Senate have access to, could have had such foresight to want to avoid war. And in contrast, I remember being struck that our elected officials were lacking in such foresight. And as a result, the U.S committed to one of the greatest foreign policy fiascoes in its entire history. We will be paying for this fiasco for decades to come.
Many of us, then, as a result, vowed that we could never support any of those who signed off — either through ignorance and cowardice, or through an actual belief that the Iraq invasion would be a good thing — on this disaster. Many believed and still do that such fools have no place in governing our society.
And that list of fools, of course, includes our current, leading Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton has many times, after the fact and after it became clear that the Iraq war was a huge mistake, tried to backtrack and to offer reasons. What she said at the time of the vote is this:
I take the president at his word that he will try hard to pass a United Nations resolution and seek to avoid war, if possible. Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely and war less likely—and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause—I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation. If we were to defeat this resolution or pass it with only a few Democrats, I am concerned that those who want to pretend this problem will go away with delay will oppose any United Nations resolution calling for unrestricted inspections.
What she has later said, simply, is that her vote was “a mistake.’ But it seems to have taken her quite a bit of time to come to that conclusion. As late as 2008, while first running for president, she was spinning her vote, suggesting that it seemed reasonable at the time.
There have thus been numerous iterations by her about her war vote
Now, I have been attacked for calling out Hillary as a neocon, and for comparing her to George W Bush. I expect that I will be attacked again. Some who support her seem to take criticisms of her as personal attacks on her and dismiss references to her being a neocon as mere rhetoric. And to that, I will say, simply, that I am not the only one suggesting this.
For example, Paul Rosenberg, in Salon, asked the question back in December of last year of whether Hillary Clinton is a neoconservative hawk? Looking at her decision making processes on Iraq and on Libya, Rosenberg concluded that
You’ll note that there’s nothing new in the idea that invading Iraq benefited the Jihadi cause. Liberal hawks may have been mistaken, but not nearly as much as the neocons, whose trap they fell into. So has the liberal hawk position finally been fully vindicated? Is Hillary Clinton finally in the right place, at the right time?
Electorally, perhaps. But in terms of actually having a working policy? That’s a whole different story. After all, Clinton herself pushed hard for a similarly flawed regime change strategy in Libya—Conor Friedersdorf even compared her role in Libya to Cheney’s in Iraq. Hyperbolic? Yes. But he did have a point. As summarized by Joel Gillin at the New Republic, she did get carried away with questionable intelligence, over-focused on deposing a long-time U.S. bogeyman, and failed to give sufficient consideration to the depths of difficulties that would follow afterwards. All of which allowed the broader jihadi threat increased opportunity to spread.
and also
The last 14 years have seen America completely lose track of what its own core ideological strengths are. If “they hate us for our freedoms,” then fine, we’ll get rid of them. That’s been our response in a nutshell. We’ve been taken so far out of touch with our own values that it might seem like a pipe dream to turn the tables on ISIS and exploit their contradictions. But that’s exactly what we need to do. And nothing in Hillary Clinton’s record shows any capacity for engaging ISIS on those terms.
To the contrary, Clinton’s just like Bush and the neocons in fighting the last century’s wars. She’s much smarter about it, in theory at least. But we’re in a whole different ballgame now, and none of our foreign policy elites seem to have a clue about that, despite a growing chorus of experts trying to point to a different way.
And Hillary played right along with the attempts by the Bush administration to link the 9/11 attacks to Iraq, with the article noting
Clinton went along with this nonsense, accepting its lack of logic as a form of logic, because it was what elite insiders were doing at the time. As with Kerry, there’s no reason to think she would have pulled the trigger on going to war without WMDs being found—and yet, as the case of Libya (cited above) reminds us, she remains very willing to use force based on questionable intelligence, without fulling thinking through the alternatives, the long-term consequences, or the other problems facing us which ought to rank a good deal higher in our list of concerns.
There is much more in this very insightful piece, and I recommend it as something to read. It lays out, very systematically, the multiple flaws in Hilary Clinton’s decision making processes on military engagement. And yes, it does, essentially, make the comparison with GW Bush a quite valid one.
And so, with Hillary and the neocons, we see the making of a strange pair of political bedfellows. The NY Times Jacon Heilbrunn recently observed that
the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.
and
Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.
It’s easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton’s making room for the neocons in her administration. No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board.
With Donald Trump appearing to lock up the GOP nomination, it is also being observed that some of the more hawkish Republicans might have reason to join in with team Hillary. Consider, for example, these words of praise from a Bush administration official
“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump's election would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding that "he has already damaged it considerably.”
Cohen, an Iraq war backer who is often called a neoconservative but said he does not identify himself that way, said he would "strongly prefer a third party candidate" to Trump, but added: "Probably if absolutely no alternative: Hillary."
So, it seems to me that calling Hillary Clinton a neocon supporter of war, and a flawed decision maker on US foreign policy is a quite valid comparison. Hillary takes a good game about being a progressive, but it’s hard to justify that claim when you look at her hawkish track record.