Say what you will about Senator Hillary Rodham. What you cannot say is that she was a traditional First Lady. First Lady Clinton was perhaps the first actual presidential partner in the White House-- a kind of a deputy president. Hillary made a campaign joke about getting two for the price of one. She observed policy formulation at first hand and even assisted formulation in the area of national health care. Whether she participated in formulating foreign policy, I do not know. But my belief is that she did in an informal way. She was the apprentice learning at the master's side in anticipation of her inevitable solo into national politics. Whether this novel role as First Partner was part of a marital deal between the Clintons, I leave to the tabloids to speculate.The Senator's thinking about Iraq policy is revealed in her statement at the time of voting for the use of force resolution by which the President invaded sovereign Iraq: "...I believe the authority to use force to enforce that mandate [unfettered UN inspections] is inherent in the original 1991 UN resolution, as President Clinton recognized when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998." Operation Desert Fox was a 72 hour bombing campaign ostensibly intended as a punitive strike to encourage disarmament. By citing her husband's previous military action to justify her vote as Senator, she endorsed a policy that was based on lies about Saddam Hussein's alleged reconstituted weapons program. We know this because Scott Ritter, a former Marine officer and UN weapons inspector working for UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission, 1991-98) has stated so publicly:
I witnessed first hand the duplicitous Iraq policies of the administration of Bill Clinton, the implementation of which saw a President lie to the American people about a threat he knew was hyped...and [who] pursued a policy defined by the unilateral interests of the administration to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Ritter goes on to cite examples of the duplicity he encountered:
I personally witnessed the Director of CIA under Bill Clinton, James Woolsey, fabricate a case for the continued existence of Iraqi ballistic missiles in November 1993 after I had provided a detailed briefing which articulated the UN inspector's finding that Iraq's missile program had been fundamentally disarmed... I was in Baghdad in the summer of 1996 as the Clinton administration used the inspection process as a vehicle for a covert action program run by the CIA intending to assassinate Saddam Hussein...In May 1998 his National Security Team implemented a new policy which turned its back on the inspectors, seeking to avoid supporting a disarmament process which undermined the policies of regime change.
Given the Senator's identification with her husband's policy at the time of her vote for war, much more than an apology is needed from her. She supported a policy that purportedly intended only Saddam's disarmament. Yet her husband knew that Saddam was already disarmed, and he knew this when he ordered the bombing of Iraq in 1998. Skip the apology Senator, an explanation will suffice.
(Thanks for the 'toon, Pat Oliphant.)