Informed Speculation

The sinking-ship effect is taking its toll on Hillary, says our man Christopher, but she’s got a problem too big to wipe away with progressive-powered pandering:

On her campaign visit to New Hampshire this weekend, she was asked by an audience member to describe her 2002 vote as a mistake “right here, right now, once and for all, without nuance.” Until “we hear you say that,” the questioner went on, “we’re not going to hear all these other great things you’ve said.” Not for the first time, she declined to oblige. Instead, she took refuge in the softer claim that she couldn’t know then what she knew now, and in the following rather bizarre view of the Bush administration’s policy:

From almost the first day they got into office, they were trying to figure out how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I’m not a psychiatrist; I don’t know all of the reasons behind their concern, some might say their obsession.

If she continues in this vein, then someone is going to remind her of how truly agonizing an effort to ride two horses can be. The record is very plain and easy to look up. Here is what she said in her crucial speech of October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

Notice what this does not say. It does not say that she agrees with the Bush administration on those two key points. Rather, it states these two claims in her own voice and on her own authority. A man like John Edwards can back away from his own 2002 vote easily enough by suggesting that he was deceived by Republican propaganda, but he was barely in politics before 2000. Sen. Clinton, however, was not just in politics. She was in the White House. That’s why she had to speak of “the four years” that had elapsed since the relationship between the United States and Iraq went critical once more. As the preceding paragraph of her speech said:

In 1998, the United States also changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change and began to examine options to effect such a change.

Indeed, it was on the initiative of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, both of whom delivered extremely tough speeches warning of another round of confrontation with Saddam Hussein, that the Senate passed the Iraq Liberation Act that year, making it U.S. policy to remove the Baathists from power. It was the Clinton administration that bombed Sudan, claiming that a factory outside Khartoum represented a chemical-weapons link between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. And, as Sen. Clinton reminded us in the very same speech, it was “President Clinton, with the British and others, [who] ordered an intensive four-day air assault, Operation Desert Fox, on known and suspected weapons of mass destruction sites and other military targets” in Iraq. On its own, this is enough to make childish nonsense of her insinuation that an “obsession” with Saddam took root only after the Bush-Cheney victory in 2000.

Oh, how I wish that every person who says Bush “lied” about WMDs to get us into this war would revisit the record of Bill Clinton, who so often, and so unequivocally, spoke of regime change and an ongoing WMD program.

Then again, there’s a certain tendency on the part of Bush opponents to be rather selective in their review of the record.  Ignorance can be combated, but not willful blindness…