Some thoughts on Hillary Clinton and the Iraq War

Interesting article today in the Times on the trouble Iraq is giving Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, and conversely how Barack Obama's consistent opposition to the war is at the moment looking like a huge advantage in the battle for the Democratic nomination. Interesting also to note that though he merits several mentions in this story, John Edwards doesn't really figure in here; he is chiefly invoked to cite the precedent of a politician publicly acknowledging that their vote to authorize Bush to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein was indeed a mistake. The question, therefore, is why hasn't Hillary done the same; in other words, gone for the cathartic mea culpa with the possible effect of galvanizing her candidacy among the Democratic base.

Perhaps she privately believes that she made the right decision in the circumstances, and that her vote was indeed not a mistake. That, of course, would be a perfectly plausible explanation for why she has not gone the Edwards route. She may believe that the threat posed by Saddam in October 2002, based on what most of the West’s intelligence services believed at the time, justified aggressive moves aimed at disarming him, and that a resolution authorizing force was warranted. At the time, she may have believed that the Bush Administration was not hell-bent on war, and that a Congressional resolution could play a role in convincing members of the UN Security Council to agree to highly intrusive inspections. If that was what she believed, then on the first count she would have been dangerously wrong, and on the second she would have been generally correct. She would certainly have realized that the resolution would make it far easier politically for Bush to go to war if he did come to that conclusion; yet in October 2002 the political climate heavily favored conservative hawks, and Democrats were under pressure to demonstrate solidarity with a very popular Commander-in-Chief.

Regardless, Hillary might certainly have believed that the Bush Administration would handle the invasion’s aftermath with a baseline level of competence. Her rhetoric at present is heavily focused on blaming the Bush Administration for the all-around miserable handling of the war, from conception to what is now looking like a bloody endgame, and while I happen to believe that she is correct in taking this approach, it does have the added benefit of minimizing the significance of the support of moderate Democrats like herself at the outset.

It is also quite possible, perhaps even likely, that she does privately believe her vote was a mistake. There is of course an enormous distinction between wars of necessity and national survival and wars of choice. The Iraq War, even to its most fervent supporters, was always an example of the latter; indeed, it was embarked upon in part in a misguided attempt to demonstrate that the U.S. could fight wars of choice pretty much at will. Yet even in the first year after 9/11, it had to have been clear to Hillary Clinton that Iraq would be a war of choice, and furthermore, had her husband still been president at the time, it would not have been a war of his choice. He might have threatened force to gain resumed inspections, but that would have been the scope of the policy. Indeed, there must have been something about this war of choice and its particular architects that would have proved quite troubling to Hillary Clinton in late 2002. Al Gore, nursing his wounds in political exile, nevertheless sensed it: it seemed unwise to put such trust in a president and his advisors who wished to divert resources from a job still unfinished in Afghanistan to carry out what seemed suspiciously like an old vendetta. What did this instinct say about the prospects for an orderly post-war occupation?

Hillary, however, perhaps because she believed strongly from her years as First Lady, based on the intelligence Bill (and she) had been privy to, that Iraq still possessed a stock of WMDs and fielded a weak army, perhaps out of political expediency, and quite possibly for both reasons, chose to ignore that feeling of unease and give Bush her support. In retrospect, it is quite obvious he did not deserve it; but at the time Hillary Clinton and many others ignored or rationalized the multitude of warnings.

If that is the case, however, then why hasn’t she co-opted the base by going the route of John Edwards?

I think that the answer lies in the particular political calculus Hillary is utilizing as she charts her delicate course. The most potent challengers in the Democratic primary (at the moment, Obama and Edwards) look to be coming at her almost exclusively from the left; yet to win the general election she will be forced to appeal to the Reagan Democrat types that rejected John Kerry in 2004 but deserted the Republicans in droves this past November. These voters emphasize a strong national defense, and most, like Hillary, supported Bush on the road to war (Sen. Jim Webb is the exception that proves the rule). Yet they, like her, have by and large soured on it and its inept civilian leadership. In short, Hillary Clinton’s Iraq position is actually the most mainstream of any of the major candidates in either party at the moment, far more so than those of McCain, Giuliani and Romney.

She is also mainstream in her focus on the challenges of the present and future rather than re-fighting the battles of the past. Most Americans are far more concerned with how to get our troops out of Iraq while preventing states across the Middle East from mobilizing for war. Quite a bit of the Democratic base, however, seems most interested in cathartic admissions of past misjudgment from those leaders who are seen to have erred most grievously. Having been right about Iraq, or at least being able to admit one was wrong, may be evolving into the litmus test of the 2008 Democratic primary.

For Hillary to call her vote a mistake would of course be taken to represent honesty, and might give her a boost among the base. Yet it would also do two potentially highly negative things: first and most importantly, it would send a message to the moderate and conservative voters who will be decisive in the general election about who calls the shots in the Hillary campaign; and secondly, it will reverberate across the entire Democratic primary field, truly becoming the litmus test for serious consideration and having a chilling effect on debate about the serious foreign policy challenges that confront us in the future and may in the final recourse have to be dealt with by force. A primary that has as its foreign policy keystone a disavowal of the entire American effort in Iraq, no matter what other rhetoric accompanies it, will have the effect of convincing a plurality of Americans that the Democratic Party as a whole impulsively shies away from using force to defend national security.

In the case of Iraq, this was the right decision. It is also presently the case in Iran. But in the future it may not be, and at present it is absolutely the wrong posture for the Democratic Party if it wishes to retake the White House. Hillary Clinton understands this; Barack Obama has never been anything other than consistent in his opposition to the Iraq War, and I think he understands it too. Intellectual heterogeneity has always been a great strength of the Democratic Party, and hopefully activists in the base will understand that.