Clinton has emphatically refused to apologize for her 2002 vote, recently telling a New Hampshire audience, "If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from." Clinton's comments generated a flood of analysis and criticism, including charges of Bush-like obduracy and allegations of a disconnect with Democratic voters on the most vital issue of the day. The comments even spawned meta-debates over whether Clinton should "admit" a mistake and how admitting error compares to actually apologizing.
The ruckus is excessive -- and beside the point.
Anger with those who voted to give the president war powers in 2002 is understandable, as is frustration with those who refuse, for whatever reason, to renounce the vote. Very little of the current debate, however, illuminates the actual positions of the major presidential contenders on matters of war and peace. Every Democratic candidate supports full redeployment from Iraq in either 2007 or 2008, so the implications of the 2002 vote -- and its aftermath -- do not significantly differentiate the contenders on current policy. The evolution of their positions and views since 2002 do matter a great deal, though, for unforeseen events and future contingencies.
All four candidates who were in the Senate in 2002 (Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Edwards) voted to give President Bush the power to wage war in Iraq. They have since asserted, in varying terms, that they would not have gone to war with Iraq knowing what they know now -- an easy position to take, with the war a massively unpopular failure. Each candidate has criticized the Bush administration's incompetence and duplicity in the march to and execution of the war, particularly regarding the processes of intelligence gathering and dissemination. Indeed, to the incompetence dodge, a way of avoiding addressing questions of policy by blaming the disaster of the Iraq war on botched execution, perhaps one can add the intelligence dodge, which posits that going to war was wrong because the intelligence was wrong. Clinton and Edwards, in particular, often cite incomplete and manipulated intelligence in their criticisms about the war, and the other candidates similarly condemn the process that led us into Iraq.
But, fundamentally, the war was not a bad idea because the Bush administration dissembled about the proof of weapons of mass destruction, or even because there were no WMDs. The war was a massive strategic blunder because preventive war is nearly always profoundly unwise, and nothing about the realities of pre-invasion Iraq mitigated this fact. (Quite the contrary.) Invasion and occupation of another country entails so many unknowns, so many permutations and possibilities, that such an effort should be undertaken only in the face of imminent danger to the United States or its allies. Which candidates believe this notion? It's hard to say, as it remains unclear precisely why each candidate sees the Iraq war as a mistake, even if all have come to believe that it was.
What if, for example, the intelligence had been only partly erroneous instead of massively, incomprehensibly wrong? What if we had invaded and found some old, marginally effective chemical weapons stores in Iraq? Would the war then have been right, or still a mistake? After all, we would presumably still face all the problems existing today, and both the country and the region would still be aflame, had we invaded and found such old weapons stores. One could certainly argue that U.S. foreign policy and national security would be better served by containment of a hypothetical WMD-armed Iraq, a policy we have practiced with Libya, Iran, and North Korea, not to mention the old Soviet Union.
All of which brings us back to the Democratic candidates. The issue with Clinton is not her refusal to apologize, but whether she still believes it is sometimes proper to invade and occupy countries that pose no imminent danger to the United States or its allies. Edwards, conversely, has unflinchingly repudiated his vote, blaming the Bush administration and the intelligence process for leading him to believe Iraq was a threat that we needed to immediately address. It is not difficult to imagine that his decision, made as a Senator with no substantial foreign policy experience or record, was largely based on the false information peddled by the administration -- or by sheer political expediency -- rather than by a profound desire to remake the Middle East in a democratic image by force of arms. Still, Edwards has not made clear whether he has changed his mind about when war should be waged. Obama largely escapes critique on Iraq, and rightly so, because he opposed the war from the beginning. He recognized even in 2002 that Iraq was a "dumb war" and presciently said that Saddam posed no imminent and direct threat -- but he has not identified what constitutes a "smart war." Does he have a doctrinal outlook on foreign policy strategy or the use of force?
If people want to get a real sense of how Iraq has affected candidates' views on foreign policy and warfare, they might start with some simple, straightforward questions that, in addition to having particular relevance and resonance in light of Iraq, look forward to future issues.
Despite the unrelenting focus on Iraq, there remains a remarkable lack of information about what candidates believe are the lessons of our invasion for foreign policy in general and waging war in particular. The major Republican candidates all still support the war, demonstrating a stunning inability to learn from mistakes that will cripple them politically as Iraq continues to deteriorate. The Democrats have much more room to maneuver, and in that space they should ultimately articulate visions of war and peace beyond opposition to Iraq.
One should not, therefore, be especially moved by apologies, or by a refusal to grant one. An apology does not necessarily constitute acknowledgment of the problems with the hawkish theories propagated by political leaders and pundits earlier this decade, nor does failing to apologize necessarily indicate a propensity for future warmongering. Why the war was a mistake, and what lessons have been learned -- those are the questions that really deserve answers.
Alex Rossmiller is a Fellow at the National Security Network and a former intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
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