Hillary Clinton's "Profiles in Courage" moment came and went with the Senate resoulution authorizing the Iraq War. Clinton chose capitulation over courage and disassociated herself from those who knew the truth and sought to prevent the war. This was a definitive moral failure far more serious than any committed by her husband. It should disqualify her from any national office--let alone the presidency.
Like a slick lawyer, Hillary Clinton is now excusing her Iraq War vote on grounds of due diligence. On Wednesday Mrs. Clinton said:
No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade.
Ms. Clinton's rationale is not that different from that offered by George Bush in November, 2005:
While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Unfortunately, it is Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Bush who are busy rewriting history. The plain fact is that in 2003 it was possible not only for senators but for ordinary citizens to know that the Bush administration was offering a bogus case for war.
For example, almost four years ago, on April 1, 2003, I sent a message to a Golden, Colorado politics and culture Yahoo group. Writing as an ordinary citizen in a small town in a (then) red state, I was fully competent to decode the disinformation eminating from the Bush administration as it sought to justify its rush to war. For information I had the local NPR station, the Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, and the Guardian on the internet. I quote my message to the listserve in full not to prove some special prescience on my part but simply to show what it was possible for an ordinary person to be aware of in the run up to the war. I have no doubt that my fellow Kossaks can refer to their own records from early 2003 and supply more and better examples to illustrate the same point.
War
Hi Folks-
I'm also one of the 30%. The reasons the Bush administration gave
for going to war were not good enough.
First, while the president often likes to mention 9/11 and Iraq in
the same breath and while polling indicates that most Americans
belive that Saddam was responsible for the WTC attacks, there is no
credible evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. In fact, the French and
Germans repeatedly stated that they opposed the second UN resolution
in part because the US had failed to provide evidence linking Iraq to
9/11. If such information was available, it's hard to imagine why
the US would not have shared it with its NATO allies.
Second, the claims that Iraq had massive stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons and that it had a nuclear weapons program have yet
to be substantiated. In fact, documents supplied to the UN
purporting to show sales of yellow cake (a form of uranium) to Iraq
by an African country were exposed as forgeries. It was big news in
Europe but barely reported in the US. Currently the provenance of
the documents is under investigation my the FBI. UN inspectors were
unable to substantiate reports of chemical and biological weapons,
and the commencement of hostilities foreclosed any possibility of
confirming such reports. Other "intelligence" provided the UN by the
US and Britain turned out to have been plagiarized from trade
journals and a dissertation. Again, it's hard to imagine why the US
would not have shared potentially damning information with its NATO
allies, France and Germany, had such information existed.
Third, the doctrine of preemption is at odds with 1500 years of just
war thought in the west. One should not go to war on the basis of
what a prospective enemy might do any more than one executes
someone for a crime they might commit. During the Cuban Missile
Crisis, for example, hawks in the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested
that President Kennedy order an attack on soviet missiles before they
became operational. When Bobby Kennedy heard about the scheme he was
livid: "I'm not going to let these b--ds turn my brother into
America's Tojo." Moreover, suppose other nations start using the
preemption argument to go to war. Would we really like India to
declare preemptive war on Pakistan, for example?
Fourth, I don't accept the new military humanism (NMH) argument. The
NMH says that by going to war the US will remove a really bad
dictator bring peace and prosperity to the prosperity to Iraq.
Setting aside wisecracks about shagging for chastity, the argument
would seem to be credible only if it were applied tout court.
(That's French for "across the board.") Yet I don't see the US
preparing to invade Burma, a country where the populace is arguably
more oppressed than in Iraq. It would seem that "liberation" (I
suppose this means installing a pro-American government) of Iraq's
populace will be a possible byproduct of a war undertaken for some
other motive (oil?). I should point out that the US record on regime
change over the years (Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, Greece) has not been
especially encouraging.
Fifth, wars aren't like class plays: they're not good just because
our kids are in them. If the US goes to war for bad reasons, the
resulting war will likely be unjust. One of the best ways to support
our armed forces is not to ask them to do ignoble things in our name.
On a personal note, I'm tired of hearing the pro-war forces repeat
misinformation, mouth simplistic platitudes, and carry on as if they
had a lock on God, patriotism, moral decency, and the recipe for
apple pie. Seventy percent of the country may be living a collective
illusion, but I'll be damned if I'm going to. Former Secretary of
State James Baker called this a "discretionary war." I suppose that
means that Mr. Bush is dealing out discretionary suffering and death.
Shame on him and shame on any of us who give ourselves over to
unreflective militarism and uncritical patriotism.
Opposing the Iraq War in a small town in a bastion of GOP certainty was not an easy thing to do. Some of us organized a small early-morning protest at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We made signs that said things like, "WHAT IF IRAQ HAD LOTS OF BROCCOLI?" and offered arriving workers coffee and doughnuts for developing peaceful forms of energy. The Jefferson County Sheriff's department was on hand to photograph us as if we were criminals.
Later, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004. I put a bumper sticker on my pickup that read, "TORTURE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE." Now I found myself cleaning spittle from my windshield, and one Saturday morning my wife and I woke up to find chalk body outlines on the street beside our vehicles and the words, "GO BACK TO UNAMERICA YOU UNAMERICANS." Again, I'm sure that many of my fellow Kossaks have more painful stories than my own.
On the national scene, however, Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats remained silent, presumably hoping to peserve their political viability. When they were most needed, they were absent, and we were left alone and marginalized.
The plain truth is that in the early days of the Iraq War Ms. Clinton and her ilk faced the one significant test of their public lives, and they failed it. In a dark time Mrs. Clinton had the choice of courage or political expediency. She chose expediency.
The Divine Comedy was as much about the political fauna of its day as it was about heaven and hell, and Dante was well aware of of those whose public lives were, like Hillary Clinton's, about careerism rather than principle. Such beings are fit neither for heaven nor hell.
Dante wrote:
These are the nearly soulless
whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise....
They [were] neither for God nor Satan,
but only for themselves. The High Creator
banished them from heaven and its perfect beauty,
and hell will not receive them because the wicked
might feel superior to them.
The Inferno (John Ciardi, trans.)
So much for Hillary Clinton. While she may be the first woman to mount a major presidential campaign, she has already failed as a human being.