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Hillary’s War [1]

['Michael Crowley']

Date: 2007-04-02  

To be sure, policy and politics have always been inexorably intertwined in Clintonland, and, while some close to Hillary made a principled case for supporting the war, others clearly billed it as a political winner. Among them was surely her pollster, Mark Penn, who has been a member of the Clinton inner circle since 1995. The disheveled, Harvard-educated Penn has long been obsessed with the political center. After September 11, he fixated on foreign policy, repeatedly warning Democrats that they needed to show voters that, as he put it in one essay, they are “capable of managing national security issues.” For Penn, supporting the Iraq war was a fine opportunity to demonstrate this. In the 2004 Democratic primaries, he attached himself to a candidate who believed likewise, joining the ill-fated campaign of Joe Lieberman. According to one former Lieberman adviser, even as Iraq slid toward chaos Penn believed war supporters would be vindicated: “Penn was telling Lieberman he would be right about the war.” It hardly seems a stretch to assume he told Hillary Clinton the same thing.

Of course, no Clintonite likely held more sway with Hillary than Bill himself, whose war position has never attracted the same scrutiny. Indeed, befitting the man who said of the 1991 gulf war debate that he “agreed with the arguments of the minority,” but “would have voted with the majority,” Bill’s views on the second Iraq war remain murky. When talk of a confrontation with Iraq first began brewing in 2002, he seemed wary about a possible distraction from the pursuit of Al Qaeda. “I don’t have any use for Saddam Hussein,” he said in a speech that June. “But I do think you have to ask yourself in what order do we have to do this.” But, as the war drums grew louder, he grew increasingly supportive. While he stressed the importance of diplomacy and arms inspections, he seemed to value them more as a way to legitimate an invasion than to avoid one. On October 27, for instance, Clinton said in another speech that “I do think it would be better if we can go through the U.N. and try the inspections, even though if past is prologue, they’ll fail.” Though he regularly warned against acting without broad support, this, too, seemed less a critique of Bush administration aggressiveness than of U.N. timidity. In a mid-February speech, he told a Texas audience that Bush “deserves a lot of credit for saying we can’t just ignore [Iraq] forever; it’s time to deal with this again,” before going on to argue that the credibility of the United Nations was at stake and urging recalcitrant European countries to show that they were serious about Iraq.

More strikingly, Clinton even seemed to embrace the neocon notion that, by toppling Saddam, the United States might reshape the Middle East. “[I]t’s going to take years to rebuild Iraq,” he said.”If we do this, we want it to be a secular democracy. We want it tobe a shared model for other Middle Eastern countries. We want to do what a lot of people in the administration honestly want, which is to have it shake the foundations of autocracy in the Middle East and promote more freedom and decency. You’ve got to spend money and work hard and send people there to work over a long period of time.” These could have been the words of Paul Wolfowitz. But, to Bill Clinton, this wasn’t a blinkered fantasy--it was a legitimate and realistic U.S. foreign policy objective.

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/64828/hillarys-war

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