Obama and the Media Invoke Senator Clinton’s Pre-war Position By Way of Selective Memory
By David Fiderer on February 28, 2008 at 8:22 PM in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, John McCain, Mohamed El Baradei, NIE
Bio at Huffington Post, where this article was first printed: For over 20 years, David has been a banker covering the energy industry for several global banks in New York. Currently, he is working on several journalism projects dealing with corporate and political corruption that, so far, have escaped serious scrutiny by mainstream media. He is trained as a lawyer.
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“It is time for new leadership that understands the way to win a debate with John McCain or any Republican who is nominated is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq.” Senator Obama on January 30, 2008
Keith Olbermann refers to it as the “Obama rebuttal,” the argument that Senator’s Clinton’s “experience and that of Republican rival, John McCain led to their participation in the worst American foreign policy mistake in decades if not centuries, a single Senate vote in 2002, authorizing the use of military force in Iraq.”
The statement is accurate, the way a broken clock is accurate twice a day.
It looks at a single date, October 11, 2002, when both Clinton and McCain both voted for the Iraq resolution, and then ignores everything they said and did thereafter. If you look at the entire record, the pre-war positions of Hillary Clinton and John McCain were polar opposites. Any suggestion otherwise is more than a little misleading.
Clinton’s position was substantially similar to that of Hans Blix, who believed that Saddam would never allow intrusive WMD inspections without the threat of force. But once the inspections were under way, neither Clinton nor Blix saw any basis or pursuing military action. McCain’s position was like Dick Cheney’s. He didn’t care about inspectors or evidence of WMD. He just wanted war, period. He demanded as much in his speech at the Center for Strategic & International Studies on February 13, 2003, one day before Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei presented the U.N. with their initial findings - that there was nothing there. And, just like he does today, McCain justified his stance by perverting history.
Obama and the media prefer to suggest some equivalency between the pre-war positions of Senators Clinton and McCain, conflating the October 2002 vote with the decision to invade in March 2003. As I’ve explained before on HuffPost, this is less than entirely honest. Republicans and their lapdogs have been pulling this same stunt since 2004. Here was the Republican party line used against presidential candidate John Kerry:
“[L]arge stockpiles of mass destruction do not exist. Saddam may have had the intent, the interest, but they’re not there. John Kerry is obviously going to try to take advantage of it. Every time he does you hear George Bush and Dick Cheney saying, `Well, that’s interesting senator, because you voted to authorize the war.’ … [T]hus far, what President Bush has been able to say is, “Well, I believed they [WMD] were there. Former President Clinton believed they were there. John Kerry believed they were there. If it was a mistake, it was an honest mistake.” That’s his view.” Tim Russert on Today, September 17, 2004
“That’s his view,” said Russert. But what about the facts that Russert kept from NBC’s viewers? John Kerry did not “vote to authorize the war” without exhausting all other means of peaceful resolution. On October 2, 2002, John Kerry said, “The vote that I will give to the president is for one reason and one reason only, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections.” [emphasis added] Nor did John Kerry “believe” that the WMD were there at the time of the invasion. As he said, on March 14, 2003, “Nothing I have seen in the intelligence over the last years suggests to me that in terms of threat to the United States that there is, at this moment, such a compelling rationale that there is a distinction of weeks or months.” In other words, Kerry said Blix should have all the time he needed.
Back then, Russert blurred this clear-cut distinction to make the Republicans look better. Now, Olbermann and others blur that same distinction to make Hillary Clinton look worse.
Read John McCain’s speech at the Center for Strategic & International Studies to get the full effect of his verbal grandiosity and hysteria - very much at odds with that aw-shucks persona we see on television. And then compare it with Senator Clinton’s statements at the time.
“Today, new threats to civilization again defy our imagination in scale and potency. I believe Iraq is a threat of the first order, and only a change of regime will make Iraq a state that does not threaten us and others, and where a liberated people assume the rights and responsibilities of freedom.
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“Proponents of containment claim that Iraq is in a “box.” But it is a box with no lid, no bottom, and whose sides are falling out. Within this box are definitive footprints of germ, chemical and nuclear programs, and from it has come blood money for Palestinian terrorists, and support for the international terrorism of al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam.”
The evidence for these “definitive footprints of germ, chemical and nuclear programs,” from which comes “support for the international terrorism of al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam,” was nowhere in the NIE. (A “footprint” means there’s an industrial infrastructure, which is more substantial than a few suspicious trucks or aluminum tubes.) Here’s what Mohamed ElBaradei reported, with his usual 100% accuracy, on the “definite footprint of a nuclear program” one day after McCain’s speech:
“As I have reported on numerous occasions, the IAEA concluded, by December 1998, that it had neutralized Iraq’s past nuclear programme and that, therefore, there were no unresolved disarmament issues left at that time.”
Senator McCain then gave his phony analytic framework:
“For a policy of containment to work, as it did in the Cold War, four components are necessary: reliable allies; a clear goal with a consistent doctrine; the economic and military capability to enforce the doctrine; and the political will to support the demands of the policy. …We enjoy none of these assets today with regard to Iraq.
“Today, Iraq is growing stronger, not weaker, under a policy of containment. We are also dealing with a regime driven more by the unstable character of a risk-taking mass murderer than by the caution that mutually assured destruction encouraged in an enemy with a more intelligent appreciation of its vulnerability.
…“The United States does not have reliable allies to implement a policy to contain Iraq. West Germany was a front-line state in the Cold War, as Saudi Arabia is today a front-line state and key “ally” in the confrontation with Iraq. During the Cold War, West Germany welcomed the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Americans and hundreds of military installations on its soil; placed few restrictions on American forces stationed there; worked hand-in-glove with us to conduct military training and exercises; and permitted us to station tactical and theater nuclear missiles on its soil sufficient to defend Western Europe.
Except the U.S. military was stationed on land, sea and air throughout the Persian Gulf, in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, United Arab Emirates and in Saudi Arabia. Backstopping U.S. force, if necessary, were Israel’s significant military resources.
Then there’s McCain’s delusional insinuation that Iraq’s military power was ever comparable to that of the Soviet Union. McCain was ignoring that other dirty little secret, which was apparent to anybody who took a cursory look. The U.N. sanctions worked. Notwithstanding the kickbacks to Saddam, which involved skimming off the top, Iraq’s industrial capabilities had been decimated by the sanctions imposed after the first Gulf war. As ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council,
“[D]uring the past four years at the majority of Iraqi sites industrial capacity has deteriorated substantially due to the departure of the foreign support that was often present in the late ’80s, the departure of large numbers of skilled Iraqi personnel in the past decade and the lack of consistent maintenance by Iraq of sophisticated equipment.”
Senator Clinton’s position was far more prosaic, given her affinity for the facts. For her, military action was always subject to one simple question, can we avert the threat of WMD by some other means? Here’s what she announced to the media:
“Hillary Clinton tells Irish TV she is against war with Iraq,” Irish Times, February 8, 2003
“Hillary Clinton prefers ‘peaceful solution’ in Iraq,” Associated Press March 3, 2003 “[Clinton said the US] should continue its attempts to build an international alliance rather than going to war quickly with Iraq…[I]nspection is preferable to war, if it works, the New York Democrat said.”
Senator Obama, like any honorable politician, goes after his opponent by framing the past in a way that’s advantageous to him. Fair enough. But neither he, nor the media, are recounting the complete story in an entirely fair and evenhanded way.
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Superbly done, David. Thanks.
I would submit it as an op-ed to WaPo, NYTimes, Phila Inquirer, etc.
Facts don’t mean a thing in the election season, only spin and deception are the morals of this new politics!
Superbly done perhaps, but insofar as Clinton is concerned, utterly false. Regarding facts:
From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/48729/?page=entire
she ought to have apologized. Dems do forgive error. But Ritter is going a little bit too far here.
Read it again. Carefully. There was no error. And Ritter isn’t going nearly far enough. He doesn’t talk here about the sanctions, and their effects on the civil society of Iraq - the intended effects - one of which was to kill a few hundred thousand little children. Experience, yes.
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As opposed to the war we have now?
What would you have done, how would you have handled it?
You have Saddam, em>and bama’s sugar daddy, Auchi, laundering money and weapons out of Iraq, a plethora of corruption involving every government on earth, conditions you and me, the voters, can’t BEGIN to comprehend, and meanwhile, Clinton, say, has to keep Americans, and American strategic psotition, secure.
Bush can’t do it, the empty bamalama can’t even BEGIN to catch a clue as to the truth of the situation, financing himself with the same people who brought about Saddam’s sanctions, Auchi, and here you are, advocating for another MORON, voting against your own interests, for a criminal. So you’re either ignorant, a criminal, or just plain old stupid, yourself.
What is it with the bamadongs, and voting for stupid criminals, those who will screw them?
You look like an ignorant, silly fool.
Saddam was dealing with black market arms, and laundering money, for terrorists, and others.
Does this justify Bush’s approach, no, it doesn’t, but to throw this on Clinton, and others, as if there were not a threat, or problem, is either disingenuous, or wholly ignorant.
What do you think Plame was investigating?
America has enemies, period. I’m a FLAMING liberal, and I know this.
And G, I didn’t necessarily mean you, I apologize, but the Obama democrat doesn’t seem able to acknowledge the very real threats we face, either out of ignorance, or fear.
They will not begin to be effective, or realistic, until it is understood what is happening, in terms of the middle east.
The war was the wrong approach, but I can certainly see how some Congresspeople might have thought it could work. Maybe. From what I have read, drugs and weapons dealing in the Middle East, and elsewhere, is it’s own parallel world economy.
But in the hands of the empty headed little narcissistic twat that runs Washington, right now, this problem will never be solved, it has been capitalized on, for profit, at horrific expense for the politically voiceless. And if OPEC does give Bush, and Cheney, and Obama their marching orders, well, the men of the middle east aren’t capable of winning, and /or governing, not a one.
Real winners: Russia, and China.
So now what?
THIS is what needs to stop.
One of the things that has pissed me off about Obama’s followers on Dkos is their inability to actually sift through that moment in history in a fair way. Blix did want to get back in. And inspections were justified. They could only be maintained through the threat of force. That was what the Democrats were signing on for.
It’s very dangerous to toy with the historical record the way that certain fanatics have and certain cynics have encouraged over there. If you dick around with the reality of what happened you are setting up a mnarrative that will only get worse.
Obama can make a nice clean argument with his rebuttal, but he can’t govern by rebuttal, and he certainly can’t be a CinC if he’s got dickhead Senators riding him as they rode clinton in 1998 Kosovo.
Distorting the reasons for the Democrats going along with IWR can only hurt America and the Democratic Party in the end.
i can’t express it better than this letter to
NYT editor:
…………………………………..
To the Editor:
Re “Begrudging His Bedazzling,” by Maureen Dowd (column, Feb. 27):
Ms. Dowd says Hillary Rodham Clinton is lame for accusing journalists of treating her campaign differently than they treat Barack Obama’s, and applauds the “open-mindedness of the press” in its treatment of Senator Clinton.
Here are the words she uses in association with Senator Clinton: “desperate,” “primal scream,” “clanging,” “churlish,” “discombobulated,” “gloomy,” “flipping,” “begrudging,” “whining,” “experience,” “pea green with envy,” “Sybil,” “cascading,” “dizzying,” “unsettling,” “struggling,” “tartly,” “peevishly,” “pointlessly,” “sarcasm.”
And here are the words she uses for Senator Obama: “golden child,” “sunny,” “consistency,” “bedazzling,” “confidence,” “excitement,” “exceptionally easy in his skin.”
If Ms. Dowd wants to make the point that she doesn’t like Senator Clinton, then she’s made it. If she wants to make the point that the press treats Mrs. Clinton fairly, contrary to what the senator may believe, then this column, alas, has made Senator Clinton’s point.
Donna Lawlor
Brooklyn, Feb. 27, 2008
http://tinyurl.com/2u86st
Dowd’s amusement value expired about the same time that Sorkin’s star started to soar. I am NOT a believer in Coincidence.
Just beautiful. But how does Dowd manage to avoid seeing what she is writing for what it is? The pysychological term for this is ‘cognitive dissonance’, a condition that appears to be contagious as so much of the media shows symptoms. You’ve pointed it out clearly and factually. I love your letter.
If this is what her vote was for, then she could have voted for the amendment that would have put a lock on military action if the inspectors were succeeding. She didn’t.
If this is what her vote was for, she could have spoken out in 2003 when Bush took her vote and used it to invade Iraq, as you say she did not intend it to be used.
She did not.
If her vote was a craven act of political opportunism, it was a miscalculation on its own terms.
If her vote was because she truly believed Bush was going to use it only to get inspections, she was a fool and she did not act (as I stated above) in accordance with her position.
If she voted because she felt going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do but she is now backpedaling because it is not politically viable, she is wrong on the merits and does not show the courage of her convictions.
Under no circumstances is her vote defensible and I’m sorry that you think that it is. I voted against John Kerry in the 2004 primary for the same reason, so he is no defense to me.
Senator Kerry made the same mistake, yet it did not keep him from the nomination in 2004 and the enthusiastic support of Democrats.
Obama might want to remember that it was not until 7 April 1967 that Martin Luther King denounced the Vietnam War
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
A little humility, please.
[...] Pre-war Position By Way of Selective Memory (by David Fiderer at The Huffington Post, thanks to No Quarter) Clinton’s position was substantially similar to that of Hans Blix, who believed that Saddam [...]
“Senator Clinton’s position was far more prosaic, given her affinity for the facts.” David Fiderer.
Qualities that will make her a great president.