In tonight's debate, Hillary Clinton repeated her claim that she only voted for the October 2002 resolution on Iraq to allow for the resumption of UN inspections. Barack Obama countered, as he has before, that this is a question of who had the right judgment at the time. But there is another argument Obama ought to make which goes directly to the question of honesty with regard to Clinton and her vote.
Hillary Clinton's public statements regarding her October 2002 vote on the war and its aftermath leave out a crucial fact:
She says repeatedly that she voted for the resolution to allow the UN inspectors to complete their inspection for weapons of mass destruction. If we take her claim at face value, then she needs to be asked the following:
When it became clear that Bush was not going to allow the inspections to be completed before launching an invasion, why did she remain silent? If she was so determined to ensure that the inspections be completed before deciding whether to go to war, then why did she not speak up at that crucial moment?
Just as a reminder, here are the facts:
On Sunday, March 16, 2003, Bush, Blair, and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar held a summit in the Azores off of Portugal. At a joint news conference following their meeting, the president said: "Tomorrow is the day we determine whether or not diplomacy can work." He made it clear that he would make a final effort that Monday to obtain UN Security Council approval for a military invasion of Iraq, and if he did not gain that approval, he would go it alone. News organizations that Sunday began reporting that the president would issue an ultimatum on Monday evening in a televised address to the nation. The following Monday morning, when it became clear that the president did not have the votes on the Security Council to approve his war, the White House withdrew its proposed Security Council resolution. UN inspectors began an immediate evacuation of Iraq. The president launched his invasion two days later.
In her recent Meet the Press interview, Clinton stated:
"...you see the vote as I saw it as opposed as how it's been characterized, I thought it was a vote to put inspectors back in, to make it very clear that Saddam Hussein wouldn't be able to go off unchecked. If those inspectors had been permitted to do the job that they were set up to do, we would have avoided war. It became clear in retrospect, Tim, once people started writing books and information came out of the administration, the president had no intention of letting the inspectors do their job. That's not what I was told by the Bush White House. That's not what we were told in constant briefings from high-level Bush administration officials. That's not what the president told the country in his speech in Cincinnati shortly before the vote. If you remember, he said this vote was the best chance to avoid some kind of confrontation."
And, yet, it actually became clear by that Sunday, March 16, 2003 (not "once people started writing books"), that "the president had no intention of letting the inspectors do their job."
Clinton is not being candid when she leaves out this crucial piece of the history. And her silence at that time undermines her claim today that she only voted for the resolution "to put inspectors back in."
Barack Obama ought to call her out on this point.