Add Senator Hillary Clinton to the list of those unwilling to defend ostensibly defendable actions prior to the Iraq War.
Clinton has often been asked if she regrets her vote authorizing military action and she usually answers that question with an artful dodge, saying that she accepts responsibility for the vote and suggesting that if the Senate had all the information it has today (no WMD, troubled post-war military planning, etc. . .), there would never have been a vote on the Senate floor.
However, she has never gone as far as some of her potential rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination -- who also voted for the war -- and called her vote a mistake or declared that she would have cast her vote differently with all the facts presently available to her -- until now.
This morning on NBC's "Today" show, Sen. Clinton was asked about her 2002 vote and offered a slightly evolved answer. "Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote," she said in her usual refrain before adding, "and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."
This is still an artful dodge. Those poor senators, claiming to be ill-informed on the merits and necessity of the Iraq War. As much as these Democratic Presidential aspirants would like one, you don't get a "do-over." Just like surgery, there is really only one time when you can do it right. It would be reasonable to say that, "had it been known prior to the war that there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq then I wouldn't have voted for it." You don't get to say that "knowing now that there were no large stockpiles of WMD in Iraq I wouldn't have voted for it." And let's not talk about the memo of Carne Ross exposed last week, a memo which does not say what the reporting says it does, and which also sees things through the retrospectoscope.
Sen. John Kerry gave a speech on the floor of the US Senate which outlined the problem at the time properly, and still outlines the problem as it was understood in late 2002.
We are facing a very different world today than we have ever faced before. September 11 changed a lot, but other things have changed: Globalization, technology, a smaller planet, the difficulties of radical fundamentalism, the crosscurrents of religion and politics. We are living in an age where the dangers are different and they require a different response, different thinking, and different approaches than we have applied in the past.
Most importantly, it is a time when international institutions must rise to the occasion and seek new authority and a new measure of respect.
In approaching the question of this resolution, I wish the timing were different. I wish for the sake of the country we were not here now at this moment. There are legitimate questions about that timing. But none of the underlying realities of the threat, none of the underlying realities of the choices we face are altered because they are, in fact, the same as they were in 1991 when we discovered those weapons when the teams went in, and in 1998 when the teams were kicked out.
[...]
All those miscalculations are compounded by the rest of history. A brutal, oppressive dictator, guilty of personally murdering and condoning murder and torture, grotesque violence against women, execution of political opponents, a war criminal who used chemical weapons against another nation and, of course, as we know, against his own people, the Kurds. He has diverted funds from the Oil-for-Food program, intended by the international community to go to his own people. He has supported and harbored terrorist groups, particularly radical Palestinian groups such as Abu Nidal, and he has given money to families of suicide murderers in Israel.
I mention these not because they are a cause to go to war in and of themselves, as the President previously suggested, but because they tell a lot about the threat of the weapons of mass destruction and the nature of this man. We should not go to war because these things are in his past, but we should be prepared to go to war because of what they tell us about the future.
All of what I've excerpted above is still true today, and still eminently defendable. So defend your actions, Senators. You'll do yourselves and the country credit.
Ah, but now it's too late to defend them, having repudiated them publicly already. The country does not need a President, a leader, who blows whichever way the wind of public opinion takes him or her.
