Monday, June 04, 2007
Hillary the hawk?
A couple of months ago, Michael Crowley deconstructed Hillary Clinton's history of hawkishness in The New Republic (sub. req.). The title of his essay was "Hillary's War," and it carefully examined the many instances in the past in which Hillary has revealed herself as far more supportive of military action than her party's primary voters would be. This, Crowley says, is why she has not "apologized" for her vote authorizing the use of force against Iraq.
I may write more on Crowley's essay at some future date, but I especially wanted to pass along this useful reminder that the Clinton Democrats worried about Iraq long before the "neocons" came to power, and rightly so (bold emphasis added).
But, by 2002, some Clintonites seemed resigned to the inevitability of force as a solution. Iraq had been a persistent fly in the ointment during the latter years of the Clinton administration. Few things terrified the Clintonites more than the chemical and biological arsenal they were convinced Saddam possessed. Their phobia was illustrated in 1997, when Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on television holding up a five-pound sack of sugar to illustrate how a small payload of Saddam's anthrax could kill half of Washington. Late in his presidency, Bill Clinton told one interviewer that the thought of a crop-duster spraying biological agents over the National Mall literally "keeps me awake at night." Thoughts like these led to an ever-more aggressive posture toward Saddam. In November 1998, the president signed the Iraq Liberation Act, making Saddam's ouster a stated goal of U.S. policy for the first time; a few months later, Albright toured the Middle East explaining to Arab governments that the United States was serious about "regime change." When Saddam kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors that year, Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox, a four-day campaign of bombing and cruise-missile strikes. "So long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world," he explained at the time. "The credible threat to use force, and, when necessary, the actual use of force, is the surest way to contain Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, curtail his aggression, and prevent another gulf war."
Whatever role Hillary played in her husband's Iraq policy remains a mystery. But it's clear that the Clintonites left office deeply frustrated at the unsolved problem of Iraq and perhaps believing that some final reckoning was inevitable. "President Clinton recognized, as did I," Albright writes in her memoir, "that the mixture of sanctions, containment, Iraqi defiance, and our own uncertainty about Saddam's weapons couldn't go on indefinitely."
Bush's approach was clearly blunter than what Clintonite foreign policy would have dictated. But, even as the "smell of gunpowder" turned into a stench, the foreign policy experts to whom Hillary was closest remained supportive of war with Iraq. "Most of the top [Clinton] national security team had sympathy for what Bush decided, in the broadest terms," says a Democratic foreign policy analyst.
The most hawkish among them was former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, with whom Clinton conferred that fall. "If all else fails, collective action against Saddam is, in my view, justified by the situation and the record of the last decade," Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2002. Holbrooke's standard for "collective" seemed to include only the British and perhaps a handful of other allies. And Holbrooke made clear that a war to topple Saddam was unlikely to be easy and that U.S. forces might have to spend years in a postwar Iraq. Nor was Holbrooke alone. Varying degrees of support for the Bush resolution came from the likes of Rubin, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg. And, though she raised red flags about the war's risks, Hillary's close friend Albright ultimately concluded that Bush "should have this authority." This was hardly shocking: Albright's relatives had fled both Hitler and Stalin, instilling in her a belief that dictators must be challenged. "My mindset is Munich," she once said. "Most of my generation's is Vietnam." It may have been such thinking that once led Albright to query a stunned Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" (In his memoir, Powell recalls, "I thought I would have an aneurysm.")
I was particularly interested in the allegation that Madeleine Albright had "toured the Middle East" building the case for regime change in Iraq. It belies the myth, now pushed along by many Democrats, that Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act only because he had been so weakened by the Starr investigation that he could not resist Republican pressure to look tough on Iraq. If Osama had succeeded with a domestic attack in 1998 instead of shooting at our embassies and ships and Clinton had been forced to do something about radical Islam instead of kicking the can down the road, how different would be the political contours of the war?
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Jun 04, 12:34:00 AM:
Hillary is neather HAWK nor DOVE just a VULTURE
By , at
Mon Jun 04, 01:22:00 AM:
If Osama had pulled of 9/11 in say, 1998, there would have been no difference. Clinton would have fired off a few impotent missiles at best.
He was big on talk. Short on action (besides Monica of course, and his other bimbos).
Clinton at the first sign of Combat ran away, fast and hard, in Somalia. He even set up so restrictive ROEs out of naked political fear that the Mogadishu debacle was all but assured.
Why? Because Dems are by their very nature Pacifist appeasers. They have never met an enemy that has attacked the US that they don't want to surrender to. Hell, they don't even think America worth defending.
Not since Harry Truman (and Liberals hate him too) have Dems wanted to fight for America.
Heck by 2000 Dems would have been begging to surrender to bin Laden.
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Mon Jun 04, 07:28:00 PM:
Although somewhat less virulent, I agree in the main with the post above. We had a legitimate, clear cassus belli against Iran in 1996 after Khobar Towers. The number of servicemembers killed by Iran since '79 was more than 300. The military was ready (and desired) to go to war over this.
Clinton backed out. The Saudis purposefully impeded the investigation that would have proven Iranian state involvement because they didn't want a war on their doorstep, and President Clinton wouldn't pressure them otherwise.
There is nothing in his record that indicates that he'd have done anything beyond pounding some more sand. (i.e. waste a few hundred million dollars worth of missiles against camels and tents)
Of course, tying Bill Clinton's record to Hillary simply demonstrates the wrongness of her candidacy anyway.
Nancy Reagan for President!
