Reply #20: She thinks the IWR was the appropriate CONGRESSIONAL policy at the time [View All]

[Tom Rinaldo]

given what she knew then, and I think she thinks one should not apologize for supporting the right policy choice for your position at the time with the information available to you then. BUT Clinton now knows that the wrong President implemented that policy, he broke his word to Congress and the American people and he abused it instead of implementing it the way it was intended, and the way he promised it would be used. I think that is really the rub for Clinton. Hillary does say that if she knew then what she knows now that she would not have cast that vote.

Clinton puts the blame for the Iraq invasion directly on Bush because he took what appeared to her and many people at the time to be an effective tough diplomacy strategy and twisted it into an excuse to go to war. I think Hillary believes that strategy should have and would have worked exactly the way it was designed to work if Bush had not betrayed his office and disregarded the promises he made and his obligation to the American people to give peace a chance. The U.N. DID send inspectors back into Iraq. Those inspectors ultimately DID get free access to any site they wanted to inspect without notice, and they WOULD have found out that Iraq posed no threat to the world from WMD. Bush however did an end run and invaded anyway.

So honestly, I don't know if it is her pride, or just believing it would be untruthful for her to say now that, under more normal circumstances with an honest President, what Congress did then knowing what they then knew was unjustified. Her form of "apology" IS to admit that if she knew then what she knows now she would not have done it. Sometimes I wonder if in a way having been so close once to the Presidency herself, that she doesn't think more in terms of what tools of diplomacy a sane President needs to be effective more than the average member of Congress would. That might color her reasoning in a way that other Senators dealing with an issue like that would not undergo.