2016 Postmortem

portlander23

(2,078 posts) Mon Oct 26, 2015, 03:40 PM Oct 2015

What's Missing From Hillary's Iraq Apology

What's Missing From Hillary's Iraq Apology
The Atlantic
July 2014

Among the biggest news from Hillary Clinton’s largely newsless new book is her blunt apology for voting to authorize war in Iraq. “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had,” she writes “And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong.”

This represents a change. In 2008, her advisors feared that if she called her Iraq vote a mistake, Republicans would savage her for flip-flopping, as they had done to John Kerry four years earlier. So even after John Edwards apologized for his Iraq vote, she refused to. In their book, Her Way, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. quote Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, as insisting that, “It’s important for all Democrats to keep the word ‘mistake’ firmly on the Republicans.”

Although many liberals assumed that in her heart Clinton was as dovish as them—and thus must have been insincere in her vote to authorize war—the evidence suggests that her experience during her husband’s presidency made her more hawkish. For better or worse, her behavior as secretary of state—where she championed the Afghan surge, aid to Syria’s rebels, and the war in Libya—suggests that she still is.

But if Clinton’s claim that “I had acted in good faith” passes muster, her assertion that she “made the best decision I could with the information I had” does not. Prior to Clinton’s October 10, 2002 speech from the Senate floor explaining her Iraq vote, the Bush administration sent over two documents to the Senate for review. The first was a 92-page, classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The second was a five-page, unclassified version.

Despite a partial dissent from the State Department’s intelligence arm, the unclassified NIE declared that the intelligence community possessed “high confidence” that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs.” It’s hard to know exactly what was in the longer, classified version, since even when the Bush administration released it in 2004, it whited out 78 of its 92 pages. But it went into more detail about the objections raised by the State Department, and especially the Department of Energy, to claims that Hussein had a nuclear-weapons program. According to Senator Jay Rockefeller, “the NIE changed so dramatically from its classified to its unclassified form and broke all in one direction, toward a more dangerous scenario.”

Using logs of who entered the secure room where the classified NIE was kept, The Washington Post reported that only six senators read it. When The Hill newspaper later polled senators, 22 said they had.

Clinton has never claimed to be among them. When asked directly on Meet the Press in 2008, she sidestepped the question, declaring, “I was fully briefed by the people who wrote that.”

Still, Clinton’s failure to read the document means her book’s claim that she “made the best decision I could with the information I had” is probably untrue.

How could someone renowned for doing her homework have failed to do so on the most important vote of her Senate career? Clinton’s Iraq apology notwithstanding, it’s a question worth asking if she runs for president again.