Hillary Clinton seems to have found a way to get people from moving beyond her disastrous “dead broke” claims, but not in a way that is likely to please those voters tired of wars and military interventions. Clinton used an interview this week to criticize the “failure” of President Obama’s policies in Syria and to insist that she wanted a more interventionist military approach. President Obama was quoted responding to such criticism by calling it “horseshit.” It seemed a return to the 2008 election where Clinton campaigned on her hawk credentials in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — a mistake for many Democratic and independent voters. Recently, she changed her mind and said that the Iraq War was a mistake despite her refusal to listen to a chorus of critics of the war at the time when it was a popular political move. Despite that change, Clinton is suggesting that she would have armed the Syrian rebels and acted more aggressively to stop the Islamic State.
In the interview with prominent foreign affairs writer Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton attacked Obama’s decision not to quickly and strongly support the Syrian rebels and said that the West Wing’s foreign policy mantra — “Don’t do stupid stuff”— is “not an organizing principle.” She seemed to brush over the fact that that the same course that led us into repeated costly military campaigns or that many of the rebels at the time were found to be committing atrocities like the regime. Then there is the fact that many of our weapons have already ended up in the hands of the Islamic State in places like Iraq — as we saw in Afghanistan with Al Qaeda.
The statements were a replay of Clinton’s much maligned campaign against Obama in 2008 that she was the one who could handle the “3 a.m. phone call.” As someone who supported both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, many insisted that they did not want any more such calls.
The change in strategy and message may not be coincidental. A major poll this month by NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showing Obama’s approval rating at an “all-time low.” The interview was widely viewed as designed to separate Clinton from the declining fortunes of both Obama and the Democratic Congress.
Putting aside the timing, Clinton has repeatedly shown herself to be closer to George W. Bush than Obama on military interventions. She used the interview to reaffirm her absolute support for Israel and her credentials in committing U.S. military resources in foreign conflicts.
Nevertheless, while criticizing Clinton on the attack against Obama and interventionist drumbeat, liberal writers like Joan Walsh at Salon.com are still cited in the article below as still expecting to support Clinton for the next president. It is part of a continuing rift on the left of our political spectrum. It is not clear what are the dominant values of the Democratic Party going into this election. Civil liberties and war issues used to be a rallying point for liberals. However, those issues have been seriously undermined by the Obama Administration and the Clinton campaigns in 2008 and 2014. Clearly, some agree with Clinton’s hawkish views and others are drawn to the chance of electing a female, even one with opposing views. However, there remains a remarkably fluidity in the defining values for the party going into the election beyond the dominant blue state/red state rhetoric that the Republicans are simply worse. That narrative is clearly not working but seems to be the only theme upon which the party is advancing consistently. There is the immigration issue but that has proven extremely risky and does not appear to have paid off politically. Indeed, some black leaders and voters have publicly opposed the effort by Democratic members to push for legalizing the status of millions of undocumented individuals. We are, as the Chinese curse says, living in interesting times.
Source: Politico
Oops “poke” not “pock”
Eric, You are a bigger man than I am for fighting this battle with President Bush haters on this site. “Bush lied” I believe is one of their ten commandments and no matter how well you spell it out for them, they just aren’t going to change their religion. Their world view would crumble if you pock a hole in their core beliefs.
Eric, you keep referring people who disagree with your conclusion of the WMD question to that Learning Curve blogspot. Why do you think that anyone here wants YOU to do their thinking for them? Don’t you realize that while you are saying we aren’t thinking for ourselves, you encourage us to go to websites that agree with YOUR premise, which MOST here see as flawed. I also would like to state that those who disagree with WMDs in Iraq as a reason to invade a sovereign nation, we are no less patriotic than you are. That nonsense of disparaging someone’s patriotism because they were opposed to the Iraq war is old and tired, was worn out during the Bush years. My daughter doesn’t agree with your premise of WMDs in Iraq, she’s a service member as you know. Is she a traitor in your eyes?
leejcarroll: “the argument that the United States faced a moment of maximum peril in early 2003″
That’s not how Bush presented the situation. This is an example of why you need to read the primary sources.
Excerpt from http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2014/05/operation-iraqi-freedom-faq.html
Q: Why did Bush leave the ‘containment’ (status quo)?
. . .
Three, the pre-9/11 threat calculation for Saddam was based primarily on a conventional military-based “imminent” threat standard. The 9/11 attacks, coupled with the uncovering of an international WMD black market, shifted the threat calculation to a “grave and gathering” threat standard with a focus on Saddam’s unconventional capabilities, such as the IIS and terrorist ties.
President Bush explained the changed threat calculation in the 2003 State of the Union:
Citing to his own experience with the Iraq enforcement, Clinton endorsed Bush acting to resolve the heightened threat:
and
This Duelfer Report finding illustrated the “grave and gathering” danger of the broken ‘containment’:
Each of those violations by itself justified OIF, and the IIS was, of course, Saddam’s regime arm notorious for working with terrorists and carrying out Saddam’s in-house black ops. Saddam was ready to secretly produce weapon for covert precision attacks, whether in league with terrorists like al Qaeda or by his own means.
rafflaw: “the only lie that has been spread is the lie that thee were weapons of mass destruction”
What is it do you think HW Bush and Clinton’s ceasefire enforcement and UNSCOM was doing with Iraq?
leejcarroll,
The primary sources are on-line. The decade-plus law and policy trail for OIF is thick in the Office of the President, Congress, and the UN, and much of it is on-line.
Do your own work. Like I said to Annie, this isn’t the Pentagon Papers anymore. You can do your own thinking.
To get you started, the basic essentials for understanding OIF in the proper context include the 1990-2002 UNSC resolutions for Iraq (at minimum, see UNSCRs 687, 688, and 1441), Public Law 107-243 (the 2002 Congressional authorization for use of military force against Iraq), President Clinton’s announcement of Operation Desert Fox (the penultimate military enforcement step that set the baseline precedent for OIF), President Bush’s remarks to the United Nations General Assembly and excerpts from the 2003 State of the Union, the March 2003 UNMOVIC Cluster Document (summary) that triggered Bush’s final decision for OIF, and the Iraq Survey Group’s Duelfer Report.
Links here:
http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2014/05/operation-iraqi-freedom-faq.html#furtherreading
slohrss29: “Saddam was useful in that he was a rival to Bin Laden’s growing authority. Like Bismarck says, we should encourage them to fight each other, not us. To pick a side is possibly to pick a winning side today, but ultimately a losing side in the passage of time.”
That formula doesn’t work for Saddam.
One, although bin Laden rose to an industry leader, he did not have a terrorist monopoly. Saddam was plugged into a terrorist network wider than al Qaeda. Curing Iraq’s guilt on terrorism was among the ceasefire mandates.
Two, that option didn’t exist for Clinton and Bush. From the moment KSA chose America to help with the Saddam problem over bin Laden’s offer, whatever ‘rivalry’ Saddam and bin Laden might have had switched to neutrality in the face of their common priority enemy.
Three, the Saddam-bin Laden ‘rivalry’ is overstated. They had differences. Saddam was pan-Arab while bin Laden was an Islamic supremacist. Saddam didn’t trust bin Laden because bin Laden had horizon designs on the whole region, including geopolitically critical Iraq. Perhaps if the US had not intervened in 1990-1991, they might have eventually clashed. But under the circumstances, their broader differences didn’t rise to an enemy relationship. While bin Laden offered to help Saudi Arabia with Iraq, he also offered to help Iraq with the US-led UN intervention. While Saddam was wary of bin Laden, al Qaeda and IIS (ie, the regime arm with the “large covert procurement program [and] undeclared chemical laboratories” – Duelfer Report) were conducting on-going diplomatic contacts. bin Laden was seeking material assistance from Iraq. It doesn’t appear that Saddam agreed to provide it, but their on-going diplomacy, shared interest (ie, us), and evolving relationship was a deep concern.
Again, Saddam didn’t need bin Laden to do terrorism. Saddam had his own network and means. As well, they had mutual colleagues. If Saddam placed weapon on the WMD black market, bin Laden could have procured it through a 3rd party, with or without Saddam’s intent.
Four, take care not to retroactively rehabilitate Saddam in death. Keep in mind Saddam was a large enough problem in his own right to compel us to intervene with Iraq in the first place. In fact, we tried for a long time to rehabilitate Saddam in order to keep him in power.
Excerpt from http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2013/03/10-year-anniversary-start-Operation-Iraqi-Freedom-thoughts.html :
The cornerstone of my perspective on Operation Iraqi Freedom is that President Bush had, like President Clinton before him, only 3 choices on Iraq: maintain the toxic and crumbling ‘containment’ status quo indefinitely (default kicking the can), free a noncompliant Saddam, unreconstructed (out of the question), or give Saddam a final chance to comply under credible threat of regime change (resolution).*
Whenever I debate OIF with anyone, I challenge that person to step into President Bush’s shoes in the wake of 9/11 and defend their preferred alternative for resolving the Iraq problem. Most will refuse and, instead, double-down on criticizing Bush and OIF in hindsight. For those who have the integrity to try defending an alternative in context, it becomes apparent that Bush’s decisions regarding Iraq were at least justified.
Some of the loudest opposition to OIF is from the IR realist school that believes Saddam should have been kept in power in order to check Iran. I think they’re stuck in 1980, with the Shah only just replaced by the Ayatollah, and Baathist Iraq, led by then-new President Saddam Hussein, thought to be the lesser of 2 evils. The faulty premise of IR realists is Saddam could be trusted, yet Saddam acting out of control, destabilizing, and against US interests is the reason for the US intervention with Iraq in the first place.
We tried to allow Saddam to stay in power as a check on Iran. But we needed to address the dangerous behavior of Saddam’s regime. Our two conflicting objectives with Saddam proved to be an impossible balancing act.
The IR-realist balancing act was the guiding principle of our cautious, comparatively favorable view of Iraq of the two combatants in the Iran-Iraq War. It was also the guiding principle of our conflicted Gulf War strategy in 1991 with which we reacted to Saddam’s realized threat when Iraq invaded Kuwait but then stopped short of the logical and normal conclusion of regime change in order to retain Saddam as a check on Iran. We only suspended the Gulf War with a strict set of weapons and non-weapons mandates that would assure Saddam could be trusted with the peace.
We wanted Saddam’s regime to check Iran. But we needed Saddam to rehabilitate and stop his destabilization and threat to the region. The Gulf War ceasefire was an IR-realist balancing act intended to retain the former and achieve the latter with a compliance and disarmament process meant to rehabilitate Saddam.
The problem is Saddam refused to comply, disarm, and rehabilitate. If anything, Saddam’s behavior and judgement became worse during his defiance of the ceasefire. At the point of Operation Desert Fox, the Gulf War ceasefire had degenerated from the initially planned rapid compliance and disarmament process into an indefinitely stalemated, toxic and broken ‘containment’. By the time President Clinton made regime change for Iraq a legal mandate in 1998, the risk/reward, cost/benefit calculation of allowing Saddam to stay in power to check Iran had tipped over due to Saddam’s “clear and present danger”.
IR liberals understand that by the time of the Bush administration (either one works), the Iran-Iraq conflict was a cause of the region’s problems, not a stabilizer. More importantly, given our thoroughly toxic relationship with Iraq by the end of the Clinton administration, our total distrust of Saddam, and his track record, I’d like to hear the IR realists explain in detail just how they would have negotiated a reliable settlement with a noncompliant Saddam. They’re effectively proposing Hitler should have been propped up in order to serve as a regional counter to the Soviet Union. Hitler + USSR = the worst of World War 2, not peace in our time. The IR realist belief that after 9/11 we should have trusted and empowered a noncompliant Saddam to deal with Iran on our behalf is madness.
By the same token, I’m disturbed by the plastic morality of OIF opponents who radically revamped Saddam’s reputation in death into some sort of stabilizing force for peace within and outside of Iraq. The claim that Saddam was the antidote for the post-war violence is incredible given the humanitarian crisis caused by Saddam’s regime that was a primary focus of the Iraq enforcement. Saddam and his loyalists were the original cause and major driver of the insurgency that attacked the Iraqi people much more than our soldiers. Saddam loyalists adapted their terroristic governance to the terroristic insurgency, yet OIF opponents actually cite the insurgency to argue Saddam’s ruling SOP of rape, torture, show executions, etc., is the best way to govern Iraq. The logic escapes me for the claim that the way to cure abuse is handing over victims to their abusers. Having the worst criminal and his gang in charge of a community is not normally considered the recourse for security and stability. Saddam, his sons, and their loyalists were not people who should hold authority over any civilized society.
True that (:
Leej, it would be hard to tow with one’s toes. 😀
Annie, you got me. Think it is what we keep being accused of, toeing the party line. (never know if that is towing or toeing. Both seem to work ((*_*)))
Leej, very interesting. Yet Eric and Spinelli continue pushing the lie, why I wonder?
well heck last one I promise;
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-inspections-fast-facts/
…February 6, 2004 – President George W. Bush names a seven-member commission to investigate the nation’s intelligence operations, specifically to study the information about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction.
October 6, 2004 – The final Iraq Survey Group report is released. The report concludes that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
December 2005 – U.S. inspectors end their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
March 31, 2005 – The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction reports that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” in its assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities before the U.S. invasion.
June 29, 2007 – The U.N. Security Council adopts resolution 1762, terminating the United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission’s (UNMOVIC) mandate.
and one more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20562-2004Oct9.html
But the argument that the United States faced a moment of maximum peril in early 2003 from Iraq has been greatly weakened by the release last week of the comprehensive report of chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer. The report found that the 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons capability, leaving it without any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein hoped to someday resume his weapons efforts, the report said, but for the most part there had been no serious effort to rebuild the programs.
Even Bush regretted his decision and explanation for the Utaq war.
George Bush, in a rare moment of reflection ahead of his departure from the White House, last night admitted that the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein on the basis of flawed intelligence was the biggest regret of his presidency.
The acknowledgment marks the first time Bush has publicly expressed doubts about his rationale for going to war on Iraq. In the run-up to the war, the White House adopted a position of absolute certainty that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, basing its arguments on intelligence that has since been exposed as flimsy and wrong.
“The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq,” Bush told ABC television in an interview scheduled for broadcast last night. “I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
But he followed that moment of candour with an attempt to try to deflect charges that the White House misled Congress and the public to build a case for war, arguing that there had been widespread belief that Saddam had a nuclear arsenal.
“It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington DC, during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/02/george-bush-iraq-war-regrets
President Bush’s Iraq War justifications have changed several times since the invasion in 2003. Here, see how the reasons for keeping the US at war in Iraq have shifted from year to year
http://terrorism.about.com/od/wariniraq/a/IraqWaronTerror.htm
Darren,
I respectfully disagree with your take on Hillary Clinton. She has been a member of war club in the Senate for a long time. Check out her votes. She is running for President now and she is trying to distance herself from what she and her campaign sees is a weakness. Maybe she will be more successful with this plan than the idea that she was poor.
Eric,
the fundamental truth is that the only lie that has been spread is the lie that thee were weapons of mass destruction and that the mushroom cloud could be headed here if we don’t attack Iraq. While too many Dems got caught up in the fervor, it was a lie spread by the Republican administration.
slohrss29: “You present a great argument, but I will always challenge the certainty of your conclusions. I know of much, much simpler things in life, and rarely do they work out to plan. There is no way we can calculate all the variables.”
Thanks. I’m still non-plussed that Annie would refute primary sources (Cluster Document, Duelfer Report) that are dispositive of Saddam’s weapons-related noncompliance with a tertiary source (Charles Lewis) whose thesis is based on false premise and brazen obfuscation. Whether or not we all agree with OIF on the actual merits, we should all be in agreement as fellow Americans that the Democrats should not infect the body politic with a fundamental lie that has led to multiplying, compounding harms.
As far as everything after “You present a great argument, but “, that’s just the nature of endeavor.
You’re not an isolationist – you want the US out there in global economic engagement. But economy neither displaces nor replaces war; eg, EU v Russia. War is competition. War is politics by other means. Most of all, war is in the context of everything else and economy is the closest thing we have to an everything else. Economy is a dynamic global forest of roots and vines that wrap around everything, including culture. That’s not to say its relation to war makes economy malevolent. It’s just the competitive nature of the world.
Your premise is that we’ve electively disrupted the international community heedless of unintended consequences. However, the normative international community is not mankind’s natural state, disrupted by American interventions and enhanced interrogations. Rather, the normative international community is the best way we, as modern leader of the free world, know how to mitigate a naturally unstable, competitive world that is ever ready to break out in World Wars, Soviet and Maoist Communism, Taliban and ISIS, and the rest.
From day one, the US-led Iraq enforcement was an immune response in the context of the normative international community.
See the world before modern American leadership. See the world outside the reach of modern American leadership. See the world as modern American leadership has slipped its grip. Like I said to John Oliver, the handler’s switch is not why the tiger growls.
I have said here many times I love our new Pope. He has issued a statement applauding the US bombing raids, saying they comport w/ the rules set down by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
Eric,
You present a great argument, but I will always challenge the certainty of your conclusions. I know of much, much simpler things in life, and rarely do they work out to plan. There is no way we can calculate all the variables.
Saddam was useful in that he was a rival to Bin Laden’s growing authority. Like Bismarck says, we should encourage them to fight each other, not us. To pick a side is possibly to pick a winning side today, but ultimately a losing side in the passage of time.
WordMess is eating comments for breakfast.