Most of the Clinton supporters with whom I interact on a regular basis become unresponsive when I suggest that her vote on the war against Iraq (vehement support) and her policy with respect to Libya (she and Obama got it blown up) speak poorly of her foreign policy chops, which are widely believed to be awesome.
(Just ask her friend and adviser Henry Kissinger, her
idealist predecessor in office and a “two-faced, deceitful, callous, paranoid, duplicitous, devious, lying, conspiratorial, amoral megalomaniac who caused untold human suffering,” according to one
biographer. Big shoes to fill!)
Lately, though, I've been hearing from Clinton supporters who say she had to support the Iraq war because she represented New York, which was still traumatized by 911. Why she had to vote for it and help get some of her constituents and a whole big fuckton of Iraqis killed, not to mention pretty much destroying the country and destabilizing the whole region (the outcomes Clinton now blames on something like a
deus ex machina in reverse), instead of enlightening her constituents by explaining that Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda and that the evidence of his mass-destructive capabilities seemed a tad ... thin, I'm unsure.
But apparently that’s what she was forced to do, to protect her reelection prospects in 2006. That is to say, in the scenario advanced by the Clinton supporters in question, she lied for the sake of political expediency rather than because she was snookered, leaving the storyline of those awesome foreign policy chops intact but perhaps contributing to the opposing storyline that she's not entirely honest about stuff (to which I do not by and large subscribe, with the notable exception of her position on the TPP).
To review: Clinton, in the scenario preferred by several of her most evangelical supporters, was lying from political expediency when
she said that “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Al Qaeda, nukes, missiles, bioweapons ... all undisputed! Everybody knew it! You'll no doubt recall the unanimity, if you were around back then. Of course had the politically expedient version of Clinton voted her presumed conscience, she would have been thoroughly vindicated by the (predictable and predicted) disaster the war had become by the time her reelection rolled around. She won in a landslide anyway despite the formidable challenge from whoever that was, the aggrieved mother of an indicted former city council member in Olean, I think.
But bygones. I am told to let it go because I don't understand politics. I do understand that the expedience theory is a marginally less fraught alternative to saying that she was bamboozled by George W. Bush, of all people, and followed up that display of brilliance by helping to orchestrate the destruction of Libya as Secretary of State, creating yet another front in the endless war (one to which President Obama intimates he’ll be sending troops anon).
Anyway, I looked up the votes of the New York delegation to the House and found that despite facing reelection in less than two years rather than four years down the line,
11 of the 19 Democrats voted with the majority of congressional Democrats against the AUMF-Iraq. The uncaring fools! how could they have betrayed their constituents so, and risked their own political futures? Yet they did. Shame.
In the Senate, Clinton was joined in her support for the war by her New York colleague, the unassailably upright Charles "Chuck Money" Schumer, and a majority of the other, equally clueless--or weaselly, take your pick--Democratic senators in supporting the war.
That’s worth something, isn’t it?