Hillary Clinton made a surprise visit to The Colbert Report last night and it was amazing. Hillary absolutely killing it in a name dropping contest with Colbert is today’s must-see video.
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By Lesley Clark, McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — It was arguably one of the most important decisions she’s made in public life. Now Hillary Clinton says in the most emphatic terms ever that her vote to authorize war in Iraq was flat-out wrong.
“I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had,” Clinton wrote in her new book, Hard Choices
Indeed, while it’s hard to tell in the clarity of hindsight about a war gone bad, Hillary Clinton was squarely in the mainstream of her Democratic Party in voting to authorize war when she was a senator from New York.
A solid majority of Democrats in the Senate — 29 out of 50 — voted in October 2002 to authorize military force against Iraq and dictator Saddam Hussein. Among them were some of the party’s top voices on foreign policy, including Joe Biden, then a senator who was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and now the vice president; John Kerry, also a senator who later chaired the same committee and now the secretary of state; and Dianne Feinstein of California, now the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
There were voices of dissent, most notably then-Illinois state Senator Barack Obama and former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who was then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Also, Knight Ridder, later purchased by McClatchy, reported that there was no support among the CIA’s professional class for the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
But those who dissented or raised questions were drowned out.
Democrats such as Clinton believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat, a belief they said was fed by their own research beyond the word of the Bush White House, all of which later proved to be wrong.
Clinton said in the book that she’d voted to authorize war “after weighing the evidence and seeking as many opinions as I could inside and outside our government, Democrats and Republicans alike.”
Biden said in March 2002 that there was “overwhelming support for the proposition that Saddam Hussein should be removed from power.” But he noted “incredible division” about how it would be accomplished.
Two months before the vote, Biden said during an interview that “Saddam either has to be separated from his weapons or taken out of power.”
As the war vote approached, Biden teamed up with then-Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) to propose an alternative that would have given President George W. Bush the authority to use force only after securing a United Nations resolution.
But the effort died when Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives and the Democratic-led Senate accepted the White House’s proposal.
Biden voted in favor of the war authorization, saying, “I find myself supporting this resolution but worried that the rationale for supporting this resolution will get us in some real trouble.” He’s since said he regrets his vote.
In early 2002, Kerry told The Boston Herald that “there’s no question in my mind that Saddam Hussein has to be toppled one way or another.”
He voted for the resolution, but he called on Bush either to seek a diplomatic solution to avoid war or to gain international support for U.S. military action.
“If we do wind up going to war with Iraq, it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent — and I emphasize ‘imminent’ — threat to this country,” Kerry said during the debate.
By the time he ran for president in 2004, Kerry had turned solidly against the war, accusing Bush of “colossal failures of judgment” on Iraq.
“The time has come for decisive action to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” then-Senator John Edwards (D-NC) said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies days before the vote. “Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave threat to America and our allies — including our vital ally Israel.”
He also later said he regretted the vote.
Two weeks before the vote, Feinstein stood on the Senate floor, decrying Saddam as an “evil man” and saying she believed it was possible for him to acquire nuclear weapons.
Feinstein warned at the time that it was “not sufficient reason to pre-emptively attack another sovereign nation — for the first time in this nation’s history — without first being provoked by an attack against our homeland.”
But she voted for the war authorization.
“Many senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them,” Clinton wrote in the new book. “As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake (became) more painful.”
In addition to the belief that Saddam had or could get weapons of mass destruction, many Democrats were keenly aware of the political pressures.
The country was still reeling from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and worried about another strike.
Americans had enormous faith in Bush at the time, who was warning that Iraq was a danger. (His approval rating at the start of October 2002 was 67 percent.)
And members of Congress were weeks away from midterm elections, with many of their jobs on the line. (Clinton was not up that year.)
“It was pretty simple,” said Jennifer Duffy, who tracks the Senate for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “There weren’t a lot of reasons not to support the war.”
“Given the political climate, the prudent thing was to vote in favor,” said Gary C. Jacobson, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, who’s written about the politics of the war.
Democrats thought that “if it turned out it was a big success and we were welcomed as liberators . . . that it would be good to be on the right side of that,” Jacobson said. “If it turned out badly, well, you’re just going along with President Bush; he gets the primary blame.”
AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski
Washington (AFP) – Russia’s Vladimir Putin remains “fixated” on reviving the Soviet empire, China’s Hu Jintao was “aloof” and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “bellicose peacock,” Hillary Clinton dishes about key world leaders in her new book.
The former secretary of state presides Tuesday over the closely-managed rollout of her new memoir, Hard Choices
After visiting 112 countries in her four years as top diplomat, Clinton sheds light on her dealings with power players at the heart of some of the world’s intractable problems — and how her ties with them often set the tone in negotiations.
“The personal element matters more in international affairs than many would expect, for good or ill,” she writes.
Among her most difficult relationships as America’s top diplomat was with Putin, with whom she had rocky ties after the failed U.S.-Russia “reset” at the outset of the Obama presidency.
“He’s always testing you, always pushing the boundaries,” she writes of Russia’s president, whom she described as an autocratic leader with an “appetite for more power, territory and influence.”
In criticizing the Kremlin’s takeover of Crimea this year and its aggression in eastern Ukraine, Clinton warned such moves could backfire against a country already saddled with a sputtering economy.
“Think also of the long-term strategic interests Russia could pursue if Putin weren’t fixated on reclaiming the Soviet empire and crushing domestic dissent,” she writes.
China’s President Hu Jintao, meanwhile, was less directly combative and more “scripted” and “polite,” Clinton writes in her 635-page tome.
With the United States and China the world’s two largest economies, the “predictability (and) formality” from leaders like Hu made sense to Clinton. But she stressed that Hu lacked the “personal authority” of predecessors like Deng Xiaoping.
“Hu seemed to me more like an aloof chairman of the board than a hands-on CEO,” she explained, citing her trips to Beijing where she often held more fruitful meetings with lower level dignitaries.
“How in control he really was of the entire sprawling Communist Party apparatus was an open question.”
She reserved poignant criticism for Iran’s Ahmadinejad, whom she described as “a Holocaust denier and provocateur who… insulted the West at every turn.”
The Iranian leader showed himself to be a “bellicose peacock strutting on the world stage,” and unwilling to thaw the chilled relations with Washington enough to engage in meaningful negotiations over Tehran’s controversial nuclear program — a stubbornness which contributed to Washington slapping sanctions on the Islamic republic.
“President Ahmadinejad’s second term was a disaster, and his political standing at home had collapsed.”
Clinton wrote that her years of knowing Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu helped ease their occasionally strained debates over the Mideast peace process and Iran’s nuclear program, which she said Netanyahu believed “was a bigger and more urgent threat to Israel’s long-term security than the Palestinian conflict.”
“I learned that Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered, but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance you could get something done.”
Among other U.S. allies, few appeared to hold as much sway for Clinton as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom she described as “the most powerful leader in Europe.”
“She was carrying Europe on her shoulders,” she said of Merkel, whom she first met back in 1994 when Hillary and her husband, then-president Bill Clinton, traveled to Berlin.
With leaders like Merkel quiet and reserved in person, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy proved the opposite, often offering “rapid-fire, almost stream-of-consciousness soliloquies” on foreign policy that sucked the oxygen out of a room.
“He would gossip, casually describing other world leaders as crazy or infirm,” she said. “One was a ‘drug-addled maniac’; another had a military ‘that didn’t know how to fight’; yet another came from a long line of ‘brutes.'”
But Clinton insisted that “despite his exuberance, (Sarkozy) was always a gentleman.”
AFP Photo/Eva Hambach
