Wherever you stand on the Obama/Clinton race, one thing nearly everyone agrees on is this: She voted for the war resolution in 2002, has not apologized for that vote since -- but now says the resolution did not really authorize the war and calls the 2003 invasion a mistake. But what did she do in attempting to halt the war -- which she felt she did not authorize -- in the two weeks before it began? Apparently, nothing.
With fifth-anniversary coverage now in full swing, I probed The New York Times' online archives today from March 1 to March 23 in 2003 (the war started on March 19), looking for evidence. Numerous articles involving the junior senator from New York turned up, but most related to subjects pretty far afield from the war: from abortion to the St. Patrick's Day Parade.
The only Clinton statement about the war in the Times -- as the countdown arrived -- came in a revealing roundup of local officials' views written by Joyce Purnick. She found several top New York officeholders strongly against the war (such as Rep. Rangel), and a few okaying it. But here is her summary of Hillary's views:
The award for the most indefinite position has to go to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. When her press secretary, Philippe Reines, was asked her position, he sent a transcript of Mrs. Clinton's remarks last Friday on CNN and a news account of her comments on Monday during a visit to Watervliet, N.Y. (It seems that the senator, still a bit first ladylike, is reluctant to pick up the phone.)She said on CNN that the president ''made the right decision to go back to the United Nations''' and suggested that the country 'take a deep breath, deal with Iraq if we have to, understand exactly what we've gotten ourselves into, because in the briefings I've received, there's a lot of unknowables.'
In Watervliet, the senator said, 'This is a very delicate balancing act.' And, 'I fully support the policy of disarming Saddam Hussein.' She also urged the administration 'to try to enlist more support.'
A skeptic might conclude that Mrs. Clinton wants to appeal to her antiwar constituents in New York now, and to a broader base later -- if she runs for president. Or maybe she remains conflicted.
A little over a week later, on March 14, this letter appeared in the Times, from Susana Margolis of New York City: "It's increasingly evident that the likely invasion of Iraq is only secondarily about the variously offered objectives, from weapons of mass destruction to 'liberation.' Rather, it represents a historic change in United States foreign policy: the establishment of an American garrison to carry out policy goals in western Asia by military means.
The president should come clean on the administration's true intentions, and it is the Senate's duty to debate the issue. Yet there's not a word. New York's senators, having voted for the resolution last year authorizing the use of force in Iraq, appear to have lost their voices entirely. History will record that when the country effected a sea change in its posture toward the world, Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles E. Schumer were nowhere to be found.
Nothing else related to Iraq and Clinton turns up in the Times' archive until a week later. Skip ahead to just after the war began, to a March 23 news story: "In New York City, about 35 members of a group called Westsiders for Peace sang, prayed and protested at lunchtime outside the Third Avenue offices of Senators Charles E. Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Complaining that the senators supported the war, the protesters carried manila file folders that bore messages like, ''Who represents us if our senators aren't listening?'''
NOTE: Greg Mitchell's new book, hailed by Arianna, Bill Moyers and others, is "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq" (Union Square Press). It features a preface by Bruce Springsteen and foreword by famed war reporter Joe Galloway.
His email is: gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com
He blogs at:
http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/print/20021002-2.html
... and Clinton's floor speech at the time of the vote --
http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=233783&&
Haven't you overlooked the war criminal who LIED to Congress AND the American people AT THE TIME OF THE VOTE (right there on your tee-vee) when he claimed military action would be "a last resort" -- then promptly pulled the inspectors and invaded, actually in VIOLATION of the Joint Resolution?
Nahh... Clinton's responsible for invading Iraq -- and just in time for the primaries. When do you plan to release your research on Obama's aggressive and repeated tirades against the invasion... even before he showed up in the Senate and proceeded to vote essentially in duet with Clinton?
Thanks for the illuminating analysis.
When Clinton voted to give Bush the right to go to war with Iraq she also made a speech act. She clearly preferred renewed inspections and negotiations. She clearly was opposed to pre-emptive war. However, she voted give Bush free reign to deal with Iraq, knowing full well, as we all did since 9/11, that he was intent on invading Iraq and toppling Saddam. In her speech, she said, in effect: Saddam poses a serious, imminent threat and he has supported al Qaeda, and he must be removed, even if that requires War.
Hillary Clinton's SPEECH ACT was thus to APPROVE and SUPPORT both the Bush administration worldview of Hussein AND its right to pursue any and all means to deal with him, at its discretion.
Hillary has since attempted to rewrite history, claiming that she was voting to approve negotiations. That's nothing less than a lie. She had a chance to limit the scope of Bush's actions with the Levin Amendment. She specifically chose to give Bush free reign.
Barack Obama, on the other committed his own speech act. He INFORMED people that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat . He REMINDED people of the reasons given during the Gulf War for not invading and occupying Iraq. He WARNED that such an invasion and occupation would increase, not decrease, terrorism. He PROMOTED a focused campaign against bin Laden and al Qaeda. He PROMOTED a constructive Homeland Security program (not color-coded security alerts). He AFFIRMED the thoughts and feelings of those who knew, based on the information already available, that the War was misguided in every war imaginable.
Obama's speech performed several ACTIONS.
Running for the IL Senate, Obama had nothing to gain and everything to lose by speaking out against the War at a time when such people were vilified by the administration, the hawk-stacked choirs of media pundits and the right-wing talk radio hosts. It was the opposite of opportunism.
Imagine if Hillary, as the celebrity Senator she is, spoke the words that Obama did. She would be having an entirely different campaign. Imagine if a few other dozen Senators and Congresspeople spoke what they knew to be true. It might an entirely different country. By ceding, as she and so many others did, to the power lords of false patriotism and seeking political cover, she has suffered. And so have we.
Lack of Decisiveness is her hallmark and no consistency.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Former Sen. Lincoln Chafee, the lone Republican senator to vote against the Iraq war, calls Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton one of the "Democratic Bush enablers" who failed to stand up to the president.
In a new book, Chafee, who is backing Clinton rival Sen. Barack Obama, skewers Clinton and other Democratic White House hopefuls who said they were duped by Bush into voting for the war.
"Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill," Chafee writes. "They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career- ending lapse of judgment, in my view."
Chafee says top Democrats put their political ambitions first in the fall of 2002.
"They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post- September 11 world, and when they acted on that political self- interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom," he writes.
Last year, Chafee changed his party affiliation and became an independent. He recently endorsed Obama, who spoke out against the war in 2002 as an Illinois state lawmaker.
Chafee's hopes for a second full term in 2006 were dashed by Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. Clinton was among leading Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who campaigned in Rhode Island for Whitehouse.
Chafee's book is titled "Against The Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President." He succeeded his father, the late Sen. John Chafee, in the Senate in 1999 after the elder Chafee's death.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VFALNO0&show_article=1
I wonder if you split up the deaths between everyone that voted for it, evenly, HOW MANY DEAD CHILDREN WOULD BE IN HER PORTION!
MAYBE JUST A COUPLE DOZEN LITTLE GIRLS HERE AND 20 OR SO LITTLE BOYS THERE.
BUT "THATS OKAY! YOU CANT BLAME HER FOR ALL OF THEM" RIGHT?!
And yes even some of Obamas supporters should be included in that but at least they apologized for their mistake. NOT LIKE THAT COWARD CLINTON!
All of you that support her share in her bloodguilt.
The question is whether Hillary Clinton has learned from her 2002 vote in the way Ted Kennedy learned from his 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution vote. Hillary hasn't apologized for it and she voted for that Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran. Doesn't look like she's learned anything. As far as I know Hillary is pledging to pull out troops now because that's the way the political winds are blowing, just as she voted for the war out of political expediency.
"The message is that there are no 'knowns'. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say, well that's basically what we see as the situation"
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, June 6, 2002 .........kinda similar to the deceitful gibberish we are getting from candidate Clinton these days.
Maybe the Prez wannabe Hills, should have been reading the 2002 NIE ( National Intelligence Estimate, which she admits NOT reading!) prior to her shilling for the Bush/Neocon efforts for war in Iraq, and voting FOR THE WAR, and years later voting for the Kyle-Lieberman amendment re IRAN.
Hillary has been forced to remain silent, assuming her morality would have her speaking out at all, on issues of war and military adventurism, because she "has to look tough", and the influence over her by the pro-Israel at any cost lobby. She did not speak out against this mind boggling disaster for OUR nation (not to mention Iraq) of a needless and devastating war. She does not support a ban on anti-personnel land mines or a ban on cluster munitions (both anti-civilian weapons favored by Israeli forces), and she remained silent during Israels recent cowardly bombing of of Lebanon's civilians and civilian infrastructure. Candidate Clinton has a history of pro-violence and military solutions for social problems/conflicts. Hillary, as well as the other New York Senator, Chucky Schumer and many of our other Representatives and Senators, I believe, by their votes cast, have been subverted by the Israeli lobby in America as presented in the Walt/Mearsheimer Report http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011 and the book by ex-Prez Jimmy Carter; Lobbyist organization like AIPAC, AEI, PNAC and JINSA exert influence on EVERY candidate or elected rep, whether Dem or Republican. Hillary's stand on America's involvement in wars that "favor" Israel and Israeli extremist goals, as well as that of the other co-opted members of our Congress, have been strongly influenced and subverted by the Israeli lobby to our national shame.; and that includes her vote for war and the deliberate destabilization of Iraq (and potential war w/Iran via Kyle-Lieberman) that will cost our nation trillions as well as the loss of our national honor and the deaths of 4000 of our military sons and daughters to date, and the maiming of over 25,000, as well as, by some estimates, up to half a million Iraqi's killed.
This is NOT the record of a person who should be making policy for our nation!
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2535310,00.html
http://www.viewzone.com/dualcitizen.html
http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html
http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html
These people are so over. When will Democrats wake up????
UK Guardian,
The fact remains that the president asked the Senate for the authority to wage war on Iraq, and Clinton voted to give him that authority. What's more, on March 17, 2003, George W. Bush gave a nationally-televised address signaling his intention to use the authority Clinton granted him in order to wage a unilateral preventive war against Iraq. "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours," the president said.
"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler, Frankly, I would not listen to anyone who seriously talked about such a thing."
Dwight David Eisenhower
Perhaps you should practice what you preach in the listening before accusing department.
NYT, "Senator Clinton found herself adopting the same argument that was being aggressively pushed by the administration. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials had repeated their claim frequently, and by early October 2002, two out of three Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to the Sept. 11 attacks."
There was no intelligence suggesting this so Hillary must have taken this lie directly from the Bush administration. She was an active Bush aide for war.