Clinton has failed to justify her Iraq vote

Let us repeat it like a mantra, because the cluttering of different media narratives makes it easy to forget.

The most important issue for Democratic voters to consider when deciding between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for president is the Iraq War. Yes, still.

We have covered this ground before, some think. Clinton voted for the authorization of the war while Obama was an outspoken critic of an overthrow of Saddam Hussein and an occupation of Iraq before the war was even waged. Yet, the rationale that Clinton has used to justify her vote to authorize the war in Iraq, as well as the argument that Obama made against the war in 2002, remain the biggest issue to consider before we take part in California’s primary on Tuesday.

The most important decision a U.S. president will ever make ““ one that requires unwavering principles that go far beyond partisanship ““ is the decision to go to war.

We can talk about health care and the economy, but the valuation of human life is the most revealing of all litmus tests. Every candidate owes it to the voters to take a moral stance on the Iraq war, considering the more than 3,900 Americans and over 1 million Iraqis that have been killed for a highly controversial cause. Obama has made his moral plea to voters, but Clinton has not.

This much was clear from watching the Democratic debate last Thursday, when Obama argued that he was always against the invasion of Iraq because it was “conceptually flawed,” while Clinton gave a stammering description of the megalomania of Saddam as a justification for her vote.

It would be fair, and politically courageous, if Clinton defended her vote by making a humanitarian case for the removal of Saddam and what liberal hawks would call the liberation of Iraq. It would be acceptable if Clinton maintained that she held a left-interventionist view when she voted for the war in 2002, but has since been swayed by the horrific violence and utter chaos that has followed the U.S. military invasion. But she has never justified her vote by taking any of these stances.

Conversely, Clinton’s defense is rather that she did not vote to go to war but to give President Bush the authority to do so if Saddam rebuked the U.N. weapons search yet again. Clinton delivered her speech on the senate floor in 2002 to explain why she was voting “yes” on a bill called, “A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq.” It is impossible to accept that someone as intelligent and experienced as Clinton would not understand the consequences of her vote. Also, Clinton voted against Sen. Carl Levin’s amendment, which would require further U.N. weapons searches before a unilateral invasion of Iraq.

Clinton voted no on an amendment that actually represented the voting stance she now claims to have upheld.

And it is not as if Obama or anyone else who opposed the war were simply naïve, left-wing peaceniks who ignored the intelligence the country was given at the time. 23 senators voted against the authorization of the war, including Sen. Levin, the 73-year-old chairman of the Armed Services Committee. The most notable vote against the war came from Sen. Daniel Inouye, a World War II veteran who knows all too much about the reality of a brutal yet just war .

So, how long are we going to hold Clinton’s vote against her?

As long as she cannot produce a principled defense for it.

Clinton wants to be elected based on superior experience and judgment. The reality is that the most important political decision that she has ever made enabled the biggest U.S. military blunder since the Vietnam War. So much for her sound judgment.

However, Obama has been very clear with voters, telling them that he thinks the Iraq war was immoral and irresponsible. Consider this excerpt from an anti-war speech Obama made in Chicago in 2002 during the lead-up to the war: “I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

Obama’s words now seem so prescient it is almost disturbing.

E-mail De Jong at adejong@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.

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