Hillary Clinton's Iraq Vote Looms Over Her Campaign
It might not seem it at the moment -- with sounds of Jeremiah Wright, Florida and Michigan and questions about how "conservative" John McCain is rebounding around the media echo chamber -- but the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the Iraq war.
So it's appropriate today -- as word arrives of the 4000th U.S. casualty in Iraq -- to look at the candidates and their early positions on the war.
Today, Morning Edition looks at Sen. Hillary Clinton's Senate vote to authorize the war and how it has come to shadow her campaign. (The other candidates will be along later in the week.)
It's been almost six years since the "drumbeat" about a war in Iraq first started to sound. As NPR's David Greene reports, there was a lot of pressure on Democrats -- and Clinton in particular -- to support it. When it came time for her to speak on the Senate floor, she said her New York constituents were on her mind.
"I come to this decision from the perspective of a senator from New York who has seen all too closely the consequences of last year's terrible attacks on our nation," she said at the time. "In balancing the risks of action versus inaction, I think New Yorkers who have gone through the fires of hell may be more attuned to the risk of not acting. I know that I am."
"Now, I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt," she said.
So that day she and 28 other Democratic Senators voted to give President Bush the authority to go to war.
One of the Democratic Senators who voted against the authorization was Florida Sen. Bob Graham, The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Graham encouraged his cohorts to actually read the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq, which contained a lot of misgivings about some of the intelligence -- which turned out to be justified. Clinton said she was briefed on the NIE, but has never actually said if she read the entire document.
Graham says he has nothing against Clinton and the other Senators who voted for the war, but he also says it is perfectly within the right of voters to take her vote on the issue into consideration when they are thinking about her candidacy.
"I think it is appropriate to discuss your past experience of dealing with unexpected challenges and what that says about how you might deal with it in the future," he said.
Clinton has said many times since that she regrets her vote and that she would vote differently knowing what she knows now, but she has never apologized for position in 2002 (although other Democrats have).
PS: Meanwhile, it seems that our strategy in Iraq may be undermined because the members of the 80,000-strong Sahwa, or awakening, council in Iraq may go on strike if they don't start getting their $10 a day from the U.S. The Guardian reports that 49 Sahwa councils -- four with more than 1,400 men --have already quit, 38 are threatening to go on strike and two already have.
10:45 AM ET | 03-24-2008 | permalink
