For Democrats trying to decide who to vote for in the primaries, there are lots of questions to ask but none is more important than this: Which candidate would make better foreign policy decisions as president, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?
They say the past is usually the best predictor of the future.
As you may recall, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003, there were numerous public protests and rallies opposing the Bush policy. Literally millions of people in the U.S. participated — and perhaps tens of millions worldwide. But among those who currently hold office as U.S. Senators, there are only two who joined in those protests: Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama. Here you can find a transcript of the speech Obama delivered in October 2002 at a rally in Chicago. If you haven't read it already, please take a moment to do so now. I think you'll have to agree, his assessment of complex issues was spot-on and his prediction of how things would turn out was prescient.
Just 9 days after that speech by Obama, Hillary Clinton voted in the Senate in favor of the Iraq War Resolution (its actual title is the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002").
Hillary has said all along that she only supported the resolution in order to give President Bush some diplomatic leverage and bargaining power with the U.N. Security Council. However, there's one fact which doesn't quite square with that explanation: She also voted against the Levin Amendment, which would have restricted Bush to carrying out exactly the policy she claimed was her motivation. When all was said and done, the only amendment she supported was one that merely required Bush to report back to Congress in a year.
You may also recall that there was tremendous political pressure back then on anyone who didn't absolutely toe the Bush-Cheney line. Those were the darkest days of our nation's We The Sheeple fear and conformity following 9/11. Politicians who showed the least hesitation to kick some Iraqi ass received scathing public scorn and were in danger of quick ends to their careers. So some have suggested that the real reason Hillary didn't join 23 other Senators in opposition to the bill had more to do with political expediency than complex foreign policy considerations.
(The list of those opposing the resolution includes Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Robert Byrd, Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy, Paul Wellstone, Lincoln Chafee; the full list is here.)
Of course, the war in Iraq hasn't turned out nearly as well as those who sold it to us promised it would. By December 2006, both John Kerry and John Edwards had publicly apologized for their 2002 votes authorizing the war. But Hillary steadfastly said that she had no regrets about her votes and would cast them again even with the benefit of hindsight.
Then in May 2007, after declaring herself a candidate for president and under increasing pressure from Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan, and MoveOn.org, Hillary revised her version of history. She still stubbornly refused to use the word "mistake" but began saying that if she had known then what she knew now, she would have voted differently. Apparently, it was all Bush's fault for having tricked her. Never mind that there were 23 senators who weren't tricked, who realized that the Bush-Cheney sales pitch was a scam. In Hillary Clinton's version of reality, she was a hapless victim. This is the explanation she still holds to.
If this were all there were to the story — a naive junior senator being tricked by the brood of vipers running the Bush White House, followed by her reluctance to admit the embarrassing truth — I wouldn't hold it against her. I would assume she'd learned her lesson and give her my support. But, unfortunately, Hillary Clinton's foreign policy misjudgments didn't end with the Iraq War Resolution in 2002.
Fast forward to September 2007. Just five months ago. Five years have passed since her embarrassing Iraq War vote. She now essentially concedes that it was a mistake, even if she can't quite bring herself to actually say the word. But, surely, Hillary has now learned her lesson and "won't get fooled again." Right?
Wrong.
You may recall that September 2007 was when the neo-con war drums for an attack on Iran were beating the loudest. Bush-Cheney and the rightwing talk show lunatics were working overtime to redeem their failed foreign policy by starting a new war.
At the peak of all this saber rattling came the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which was a first step in authorizing the use of military force against Iran. Senator Jim Webb called it, "Cheney's fondest pipe dream," and said:
It could be read as a backdoor method of gaining congressional validation for military action, without one hearing and without serious debate. ... This isn't our present policy of keeping the military option on the table. It is, for all practical purposes, mandating the military option.
Senator Chris Dodd said:
[It] could give this president a green light to act recklessly and endanger U.S. national security. We learned in the run up to the Iraq war that seemingly nonbinding language passed by this Senate can have profound consequences.
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer, Robert Byrd, Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, Chuck Hagel, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Patrick Leahy, Jim Webb, and several other senators, mostly Democrats, opposed it. But not Hillary. On September 26, 2007, the bill passed with 76 votes, one of them being Hillary Clinton's.
An op-ed piece in the New York Times offered the following explanation for her vote:
[S]he has already shifted from primary mode, when she needs to guard against critics from the left, to general election mode, when she must guard against critics from the right. That means she is trying to shore up her national security credentials versus Republican candidates like Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney, and is trying to reassure voters that she would be a tough-minded commander in chief. By supporting the bill ... Mrs. Clinton is also solidifying crucial support from the pro-Israel lobby.
Immediately thereafter, the Bush administration began revving up the military for a full-scale Iranian assault. We were headed for another war. It was only a matter of when.
Then in November, out of the blue, the famous NIE report surfaced. It became apparent that Bush-Cheney had once again been cooking the books. Public support for an attack dwindled and the war machine rapidly revved down. It now remains to be seen whether Bush and his cronies can find some other justification for a war with Iran.
Here's an analysis in two parts on why Kyl-Lieberman was so horrible and why Hillary's justifications for her vote just don't add up: Part 1 and Part 2. Also, the Real News Network has produced a video covering these issues.
So, bottom line...
I find myself unable to avoid one of the following two conclusions:
1. Hillary lacks integrity, often adopting policies for purely cynical political reasons; or
2. Hillary often has poor judgment about the consequences of her decisions.
Or, now that I think about it, maybe both of those are true.
Whichever it is, should she be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party?
I think not. We have a better choice. Even if Hillary can justifiably claim she has more years of experience, there is someone whose past record suggests he has an advantage over her in both integrity and judgment, and consequently would make better decisions as president.
Forget the detailed minutiae of their mostly-identical health care proposals, this is the most important substantive difference between the two candidates. It is the main reason I'll be voting for Barack Obama on Tuesday.
Followup (2/4/2008): Gary Hart, in an essay published today in The Huffington Post, analyzes this same issue and draws similar conclusions:
Great decisions ... can reveal how future great decisions might be made. No decision since the so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution in Vietnam is more important than the vote on the 2002 war resolution on Iraq. ...
Senator Clinton still seems to cling to the argument that Bush mismanaged the whole project, that it was worth doing but it was done badly. Thus, she seems to accept unilateral invasion as a first resort, even when intelligence, as it was in this case, is less than clear. She seems to be willing to follow policy makers, in this case neocons, who had a publicly announced imperial agenda in the Middle East. And she permits the impression to grow that "triangulation," in matters of war, requires placing protection of political career over protection of the national interest. ...
This nation needs a president who will question the conventional wisdom, who will exercise skepticism concerning foreign entanglements, who will have the courage to resist pressure from the narrow-minded bellicose right, who will admit to error when major mistakes are made, and who can look farther over the horizon than most of us. Most of all, we need a president who can restore America's honor, respect, and moral authority in the world.
That president is not Senator Clinton. That president is Barack Obama.
Followup (2/6/2008): Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and one of the founders of Creative Commons. He supports Obama and agrees that the decisive factors are the issues of character and integrity. He's posted a powerpoint-like slideshow video explaining why he prefers Obama over Clinton.
Followup (2/7/2008): Here's another data point in the estimate of Hillary's foreign policy: On September 6, 2006, the Senate voted on Amendment 4882, which would have banned the use of cluster bombs in heavily populated civilian areas. It was sponsored by Dianne Feinstein. Obama voted in favor of the ban, Clinton against it. Did her vote reflect what she believes is ethically right? Or was she cynically triangulating her right-wing opponents to look tough on national security? I can only speculate, of course, but I strongly suspect it was the latter.
Followup (2/9/2008): Stephen Zunes, a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and a leading critic of the Iraq war, wrote an essay comparing the foreign policy advisors currently in the Clinton and Obama campaigns. He found that Clinton's key advisors overwhelmingly supported the invasion of Iraq, while Obama's opposed it. Some excerpts:
Clinton's advisors are ... confident in the ability of the United States to impose its will through force. This is reflected to this day in the strong support for President Bush's troop surge among such Clinton advisors (and original invasion advocates) as Jack Keane, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon.
Clinton's top foreign policy advisor — and her likely pick for Secretary of State — Richard Holbrooke, insisted that Iraq remained "a clear and present danger at all times." He rejected the broad international legal consensus against such offensive wars and insisted European governments and anti-war demonstrators who opposed a U.S. invasion of Iraq "undoubtedly encouraged" Saddam Hussein.
By contrast, during the lead-up to the war, Obama's advisors recognized as highly suspect the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and offensive delivery systems capable of threatening U.S. national security.
Now advising Obama, former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, argued that public support for war "should not be generated by fear-mongering or demagogy." Brzezinski seems to have learned from mistakes like arming the Mujahideen. He warned that invading a country that was no threat to the United States would threaten America's global leadership because most of the international community would see it as an illegitimate act of aggression.
Another key Obama advisor, the Carnegie Endowment's Joseph Cirincione, argued that the goal of containing the potential threat from Iraq had been achieved as a result of sanctions, the return of inspectors, and a multinational force stationed in the region serving as a deterrent. Meanwhile, other future Obama advisors — such as Susan Rice, Larry Korb and Samantha Power — raised concerns about the human and material costs of invading and occupying a large Middle Eastern country and the risks of American forces becoming embroiled in post-invasion chaos and a lengthy counter-insurgency war.
These differences in the key circles of foreign policy specialists surrounding these two candidates are consistent with their diametrically opposing views in the lead-up to the war, with Clinton voting to let President Bush invade that oil-rich country at the time and circumstances of his choosing, while Obama was speaking out to oppose a U.S. invasion.
Taken together, they support the likelihood that a Hillary Clinton administration, like Bush's, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.
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