The 5 Worst Excuses for Hillary Clinton’s Vote To Invade Iraq

[Karmadillo]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18813/the-five-lamest-excuses-for-hillary-clintons-vote-to-invade-iraq

The 5 Worst Excuses for Hillary Clinton’s Vote To Invade Iraq
Clinton supporters want Democratic voters to forgive their candidate’s support for the most disastrous foreign policy decision in decades. They shouldn’t.
BY STEPHEN ZUNES

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Here they are, in no particular order.

1. “Hillary Clinton’s vote wasn’t for war, but simply to pressure Saddam Hussein to allow UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq.”

At the time of vote, Saddam Hussein had already agreed in principle to a return of the weapons inspectors. His government was negotiating with the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission on the details, which were formally institutionalized a few weeks later. (Indeed, it would have been resolved earlier had the United States not repeatedly postponed a UN Security Council resolution in the hopes of inserting language that would have allowed Washington to unilaterally interpret the level of compliance.)

Furthermore, if then-Senator Clinton’s desire was simply to push Saddam into complying with the inspection process, she wouldn’t have voted against the substitute Levin amendment, which would have also granted President Bush authority to use force, but only if Iraq defied subsequent UN demands regarding the inspections process. Instead, Clinton voted for a Republican-sponsored resolution to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing.

In fact, unfettered large-scale weapons inspections had been going on in Iraq for nearly four months at the time the Bush administration launched the March 2003 invasion. Despite the UN weapons inspectors having not found any evidence of WMDs or active WMD programs after months of searching, Clinton made clear that the United States should invade Iraq anyway. Indeed, she asserted that even though Saddam was in full compliance with the UN Security Council, he nevertheless needed to resign as president, leave the country, and allow U.S. troops to occupy the country. “The president gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid war,” Clinton said in a statement, “and the world hopes that Saddam Hussein will finally hear this ultimatum, understand the severity of those words, and act accordingly.”

When Saddam refused to resign and the Bush administration launched the invasion, Clinton went on record calling for “unequivocal support” for Bush’s “firm leadership and decisive action” as “part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.” She insisted that Iraq was somehow still “in material breach of the relevant United Nations resolutions” and, despite the fact that weapons inspectors had produced evidence to the contrary, claimed the invasion was necessary to “neutralize Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

2. “Nearly everyone in Congress supported the invasion of Iraq, including most Democrats.”

While all but one congressional Democrat—Representative Barbara Lee of California—supported the authorization of force to fight al-Qaeda in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a sizable majority of Democrats in Congress voted against the authorization to invade Iraq the following year.

There were 21 Senate Democrats—along with one Republican, Lincoln Chafee, and one independent, Jim Jeffords—who voted against the war resolution, while 126 of 209 House Democrats also voted against it. Bernie Sanders, then an independent House member who caucused with the Democrats, voted with the opposition. At the time, Sanders gave a floor speech disputing the administration’s claims about Saddam’s arsenal. He not only cautioned that both American and Iraqi casualties could rise unacceptably high, but also warned “about the precedent that a unilateral invasion of Iraq could establish in terms of international law and the role of the United Nations.”

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, stood among the right-wing minority of Democrats in Washington.

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[MisterP]

1. 1. is literally the Republican argument

2. she LED the dirty 29 Senators in a Senate with 48 "yea" votes: a whit of party discipline and it wouldn't have passed: they WANTED it to happen
3. the speech was, what 22 minutes?
4. everyone crunched the numbers: the "yea" Senators lost at twice the rate of "nay" Senators; the cultists just insisted that that just proved that they'd been in more conservative states than had been believed before. Like New York
5. she knew

[Nye Bevan]

2. If Obama can make Joe Biden his VP despite Biden voting for the IWR,

I think I can support Hillary in spite of her voting for the same thing.