In the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr. explore Hillary’s history with the war in Iraq.
Senator Clinton’s aides and strategists say they have worried for months that as the party’s base has overwhelmingly turned against the war, questions about her vote, and her views on Iraq more broadly, could derail her bid to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2008. The answers to many of the most persistent questions about her war record are hidden in plain sight. What those answers reveal about her approach to Iraq — her votes, her views, her political maneuvering — may provide as good an insight as we have into what sort of president she would be.
Do you want to know what her war record reveals? It reveals that she is a liar. The most obvious example of her dishonesty is demonstrated by her vote on the Levin Amendement (.pdf). The Levin Amendment was offered during the AUMF in Iraq vote (here’s the roll call). You’ll notice that Hillary Clinton voted against the Levin Amendment. Back on March 1st, Lincoln Chafee wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times where he explained the significance of the Levin Amendment.
A mere 10 hours before the roll was called on the administration-backed Iraq war resolution, the Senate had an opportunity to prevent the current catastrophe in Iraq and to salvage the United States’ international standing. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, offered a substitute to the war resolution, the Multilateral Use of Force Authorization Act of 2002…
Senator Levin’s amendment called for United Nations approval before force could be authorized. It was unambiguous and compatible with international law. Acutely cognizant of the dangers of the time, and the reality that diplomatic options could at some point be exhausted, Senator Levin wrote an amendment that was nimble: it affirmed that Congress would stand at the ready to reconsider the use of force if, in the judgment of the president, a United Nations resolution was not “promptly adopted” or enforced.
The amendment would have compelled Bush to come back to Congress for authorization to use force if he could not obtain explicit UN authority. It was essentially calling Bush’s bluff that he was serious about letting the inspectors do their jobs. Gerth and Van Natta, Jr. get to the point:
In her remarks on the Senate floor, she stressed the need for diplomacy with Iraq on the part of the Bush administration and insisted she wasn’t voting for “any new doctrine of pre-emption, or for unilateralism.” Yet just a few hours after her speech, Clinton voted against an amendment to the war resolution that would have required the diplomatic emphasis that Clinton had gone on record as supporting — and that she now says she had favored all along…
Clinton has never publicly explained her vote against the Levin amendment or said why she stayed on the sidelines as 11 other senators debated it for 95 minutes that day…
If Clinton had [voted for the Levin Amendment], she subsequently could have far more persuasively argued, perhaps, that she had supported a multilateral diplomatic approach.
Lincoln Chafee had it figured out…so did Jim Jeffords and 22 Democrats. Hillary didn’t want the president to have to return for authorization if he failed at the U.N. This vote was inconsistent with her rhetoric at the time and it is at odds with her revisionist history of the vote now.
If we want to get a better sense for where Hillary stood at the time, we have to go back to Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans and their efforts to mislead the Congress and the American people about Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda.
At the time she cast that vote, she was among the Senate’s most outspoken Democrats warning of Saddam Hussein’s dangerous arsenal. Unlike nearly all of her fellow Democrats, she even went so far as to argue that Saddam Hussein gave assistance to Al Qaeda members. Now she speaks with equal fervor about the need to bring the war to an end…
The question of whether Clinton took the time to read the N.I.E. report is critically important [ed note: she didn’t]…
In her own remarks on the Senate floor on Oct. 10, 2002…Clinton continued, accusing Iraq’s leader of giving “aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.”
Clinton’s linking of Iraq’s leader and Al Qaeda, however, was unsupported by the conclusions of the N.I.E. and other secret intelligence reports that were available to senators before the vote.
Clinton’s refusal to read the fully classified National Intelligence Estimate had another consequence, as well.
Indeed, one of Clinton’s Democratic colleagues, Bob Graham, the Florida senator who was then the chairman of the intelligence committee, said he voted against the resolution on the war, in part, because he had read the complete N.I.E. report. Graham said he found that it did not persuade him that Iraq possessed W.M.D. As a result, he listened to Bush’s claims more skeptically. “I was able to apply caveat emptor,” Graham, who has since left the Senate, observed in 2005. He added regretfully, “Most of my colleagues could not.”
On Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2002, Senate Democrats, including Clinton, held a caucus over lunch on the second floor of the Capitol. There, Graham says he “forcefully” urged his colleagues to read the complete 90-page N.I.E. before casting such a monumental vote.
Hillary didn’t listen to Bob Graham despite the fact that he was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee and despite the fact that Graham voted against the war. That might have told her something was wrong with the publicly presented intelligence, but instead she went on the Senate floor and:
She cited unnamed “intelligence reports” showing that between 1998 and 2002 “Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program.”
Back in 2002, Hillary Clinton committed all the cardinal sins. She hyped the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, she cherry-picked the intelligence on Saddam’s WMD programs, and she voted against making the president come back for a second vote if he couldn’t convince the U.N. of the need for force. Oh…and she voted for the war.
In doing these things she showed herself to be what is now known as a Liebercrat (alternatively, LIEbercrat). And it all might have been forgiven if her lieutenants hadn’t gone after Howard Dean, the anti-war movement, the blogosphere, and the netroots for the first four years of the war. But they have been unrelenting in their contempt for the people that have opposed this war from the outset.
There can be no forgiveness without remorse. Hillary has no remorse. She lied to us. She got her votes wrong. And now she wants to lie to us again about what she did. And she wants to be our nominee?
I think not.
