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It seems that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be dogged for eternity regarding her vote in the Senate to give authority to the president to use all means, including military force, against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2002.  I understand the anger and consternation her vote engenders particularly on the liberal left of the Democratic Party. What seems to really grate on many, though, is her unwillingness to recant her vote, to say she’s sorry, to admit that she made a mistake.  For those people I have two questions: why should she and what good would it do now?   

Clinton’s 10 October 2002 floor speech in support of Senate Joint Resolution 45 authorising the use of force against Iraq makes clear her ambivalence on the issue. In the end she was persuaded by the intelligence analyses, which indicated Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, that the president needed the strongest possible hand to garner international support in dealing with the putative threat posed by Saddam.  Her words suggest that she had a naïve and manifestly misguided faith that George W Bush would not abuse the authorization and would resort to war only as a last resort.  Bush had used this very argument to gain support in the Congress – that it would strengthen his hand in seeking United Nations support for tough action against Iraq, including invasive and exhaustive inspections.  Without a credible threat of force, the argument went, Saddam would impede UN inspectors in their efforts to find WMD.  Clinton seems to have believed that Bush would allow the inspections to play out, thereby obviating the need for an invasion.

We know now (or at least strongly suspect) that Bush had no intention of allowing the UN inspectors to do their jobs.  Sure he tried to get the UN on board (Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious address laying out the intelligence that Iraq possessed or was trying to obtain WMD), but this was for military action, not measures which would allow the international community to ascertain, once and for all, whether an invasion was necessary. In the end, the UN inspectors were forced to leave Iraq to get out of the way of our own General Tommy Franks doing his George Patton imitation.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Was Clinton hopelessly naïve to have trusted Bush?  No question about it.  On the other hand, most of us believed at the time that Saddam still had at least some WMD capacity (we should have listened to Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine weapons inspector whose warnings that Iraq had few if any such weapons fell largely on deaf ears).  The difference was that those of us who opposed the war simply did not believe that he represented a genuine threat.  He had never used them or threatened to use them outside of the region and he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so.  And the notion that he would hand deadly weapons over to al-Qaeda seemed ridiculous given that they were just as likely to turn them on him as on an American target; hence his willingness to kill Muslim fundamentalist extremists in Iraq with the same mercilessness that he did any potential threat.  

When it comes to the conduct of the war’s aftermath, the total absence of a meaningful occupation plan, and the level of incompetence that followed as both the civilian and military hierarchy scrambled to impose order and to counter a growing insurgency, this came as an unpleasant surprise to everybody – not just Senator Clinton.  I mean really, who knew we were so ill-prepared?

Many suspect that there was also a political calculation to Clinton’s vote to authorise the war.  It’s an unfortunate fact that Clinton faces an uphill fight as a presidential contender in part because many Americans are sceptical that a woman is tough enough for the job of commander-in-chief; as though anyone could be less fit than our current duo at the top.  Take Dick Cheney, who talks endlessly about the danger of exposing America’s lack of stomach for war if it withdraws from Iraq, when his own was so conspicuously lacking during the Vietnam War; and G W Bush who used his daddy’s connections to get into the Texas National Guard – and who didn’t even fulfil that obligation properly.  At least Bill Clinton had the grace to oppose the war (and anyone else’s sacrifice) on principal when he avoided the draft; Cheney and Bush never had a problem with others going to war as long as their own backsides were safe.

It’s hard not to view Senator Clinton’s vote as an effort, in part at least, to counter this image of perceived feminine timidity (which is absurd on its face – Margaret Thatcher anyone?) and to buttress her national security credentials.

Which raises the second question: what good would it do for her to apologise for her vote now?  Other than to appease some folks on the left, I mean.  It would appear self-serving, calculating and insincere, the same criticisms her original vote provoked.  It’s way too late for such an action to look anything but a weak and ultimately self-defeating attempt to curry favour with the liberal wing of the party. 

There are some who compare this reluctance to say she’s sorry with Bush’s stubborn refusal to admit mistakes or reverse course when his policies have clearly failed.  This is unfair.  There is no reason to believe that Clinton would show similar inflexibility and obtuseness as a policymaking executive on the basis of her refusal to recant a single, albeit important, vote in the Senate for a war that, at one time, commanded the support of almost 70% of the American people.

Personally, I’m sorry Mrs Clinton voted as she did in October 2002.  I think her misplaced faith in George W Bush showed uncharacteristically poor judgment. To the extent she was influenced by political considerations relating to her presidential aspirations, it clearly turned out to be a miscalculation.  I do not however believe that she has anything to apologise for.  She did what she thought at the time was the right thing, based on the information that she had (which was much less than the administration).  If some Democrats won’t vote for her in the primaries as a result, so be it.  There are, as she has said, other candidates.  John Edwards, for example, has recanted his senate vote and Barak Obama had the good judgement not to support the resolution in the first place.

Senator Clinton may or may not stick to her guns on this issue but I hope she does.  Let’s not lose sight of the fact that it was not Senator Clinton who ordered the attack on Iraq.  That was George W Bush and it is he and nobody else who bears ultimate responsibility for the terrible mess in which we find ourselves in that unfortunate land.