Then:
“I supported the President when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” said [Bill] Clinton in 2003 while delivering commencement remarks at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss.
Now:
“Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning,” said Clinton, “I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers.”
Clinton will explain that there is no contradiction. He supported the authorization to use military force but he didn’t support using that authorization. He’ll explain it a little better, but that’s the heart of it. It’s parsing, and it is even worse than John Kerry’s ‘i voted for it before I voted against it’. Kerry wasn’t lying or even trying to mislead. He was saying that he voted for war-funding with conditions before he voted against war-funding without conditions. His point? He wasn’t against giving the troops their body armor, he was against giving Bush a blank check. He cast a protest vote.
Clinton, conversely, is saying that he opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, when he clearly did not…as all war opponents remember with regret. For a chronological round-up of Clinton’s comments on war with Iraq go here.
As you can see, Clinton’s position shifted over time…from skeptical, to cautiously supportive, to supportive, and then back again. His best advice came in a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in June 2002.
Clinton said unequivocally that Saddam Hussein “has laboratories working to produce chemical and biological weapons.” He then asked himself — and answered for himself — a series of questions about what it all meant. “So would it be a good idea if [Saddam] weren’t there? And were replaced by someone committed to a responsible course with regard to weapons of mass destruction? Yes. Would it be a good idea if the people of Iraq weren’t siding with him, since he’s a murderer and a thug? Yes. Should we unilaterally attack him? Well, that depends.”
Elaborating later in response to a question, Clinton said: “First of all, there are all kinds of logistical problems with a full-scale military invasion if that’s what we want to do … But it clearly could be done, and it wouldn’t be that much [of a] problem if you could take the resources away from other things and you want to spend a fortune, you could do that. I just believe, looking down the road, the most important thing is to get our priorities in order. I don’t have any use for Saddam Hussein. And I’ve already told you: I think he’s got the labs up and going. And he kicked the inspectors out. So he’s in violation of U.N. rules. And they are actually doing bad things there; I’m convinced of it. But I think what you have to ask yourself is, in what order do we have to deal with this? He has no missiles to put warheads on that would reach us. The only missile he’s ever used [was] on his neighbors … and he used mustard gas on his own people … but he fired some Scuds into Israel after he was attacked in the Gulf War. So what I think is, A, let’s … make the most intense possible efforts to build a legitimate peace process and have diminishing of the violence in the Middle East between the Arabs, the Palestinians and the Israelis. B, is look at what our options are, and try to find a way to do whatever we do with as much of a coalition as possible, and not unilaterally. Without giving up the right to take unilateral action if the intelligence indicates it’s the right thing to do. That’s basically what I think we ought to do. But the most important thing I have to say is hear the right message coming out of the Arab summit, show them that we heard them, emphasize getting a peace process in the Middle East first.”
At a time when many were questioning the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, Clinton’s assurances that Iraq was actively pumping out chemical and biological weapons was distinctly unhelpful. And his comments would be used as cover, again and again, after no WMD were found in Iraq: ‘Even Bill Clinton thought that they had them.’
The whole performance was nauseating and still sticks in my craw. Clinton didn’t oppose the war in Iraq. He urged caution.
Clinton gave a speech on the legacy of Winston Churchill in England on March 8, 2003. On Iraq, he said that he thought Churchill would advise the United States not to “give up the force option … because there is a lot of chemical and biological material there. You can always kill someone tomorrow or next week or next month; we can’t bring them back to life; we can try one more time to get a schedule for disarmament.”
Eleven days later, on March 19, 2003, President Bush announced that war had begun.
In a speech the next week,” Clinton said that he expected that “this conflict in Iraq will not last long,” and that while people may have “different feelings about the facts of how it came about,” it was time to pray for the troops and the president “who has to make the calls.”
The net effect was to lend credibility to the argument that Hussein had WMD, which was not really the consensus of the intelligence community at the time. Three days into the invasion people told the Washington Post that they weren’t necessarily going to find WMD.
But in the days preceding the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, some intelligence officials had begun to acknowledge more openly their doubts about how this [Niger documents] and other information was used to support charges that Iraq has a significant covert program to produce weapons of mass destruction.
“I have seen all the stuff. I certainly have doubts,” said a senior administration official with access to the latest intelligence. Based on the material he has reviewed, the official said, the United States will “face significant problems in trying to find” such weapons. “It will be very difficult.”
According to several officials, decisions about what information to declassify and use to make the administration’s public case have been made by a small group that includes top CIA and National Security Council officials. “The policy guys make decisions about things like this,” said one official, referring to the uranium evidence. When the State Department “fact sheet” was issued, the official said, “people winced and thought, ‘Why are you repeating this trash?’ “
Why was Clinton giving cover to a bogus story? Perhaps it was because the Clinton administration had made alarmist allegations about Iraq’s WMD in order to maintain domestic and international support for the sanctions regime. Clinton was about to be exposed as a liar, too, and he wanted to look as surprised as the next guy. If that is too conspiratorial for you, it still is a long way from ‘opposing the war from the beginning’.
But the Democratic candidates can’t say anything negative about Bill Clinton or his administration. So, Bill can say whatever he wants during the primary. It’s in the general election when the Clintons’ support for the war in Iraq will prove as annoying and difficult as it was for John Kerry.
Can we just nominate someone that was against the war from the beginning for real?
