Hillary's Iraq war vote.

[delrem]

Hillary is responsible for her vote, and her very positive (in favor) speech before the vote, so she's responsible for not just her vote but also for how she went out of her way to influence the Democratic party and fellow senators. Yes, she wielded influence! Her husband was POTUS, she was already being touted as a prospective POTUS in waiting, and nobody with any credibility can deny that her words had and have power in the Democratic party establishment.

In '08, even after half a million Iraqi innocents were slaughtered, their electrical and water grid bombed out of existence and their cities turned into burnt out husks, while millions more were fleeing or had already fled to points unknown as refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their families in tow, while those families left behind had nowhere to turn for medical assistance and had to live with the sheer terror of seeing the tortured remains of bodies turning up daily on streets, with survivors looking for their loved ones in the lines of dead at makeshift morgues. After a torture regime that's still unknown in scope but included gitmo and abu ghraib, and for which nobody was held to account, Hillary said this:

"And I believe that at the same time that we have to make clear to the Iraqis that they have been given the greatest gift that a human being can give another human being – the gift of freedom. And it is up to them to decide how they will use that precious gift that has been paid for with the blood and sacrifice and treasure of the United States of America.”

Then she went on to assume power as SoS after Pres. Obama appointed her, and she followed her neocon advisers to totally destroy Libya. Her work secured the massive Libyan oilfields for the US and disregarded the rest, it being too insignificant to bother with. That's how much those lives mattered to her. She was more concerned with following her neocon advisers in setting up a "Friends of Syria" network of mercenary thugs to begin a war to effect regime change in Syria. Which is the situation that Obama has been trying to extricate the US from ever since.

Is Hillary Clinton innocent of all that?
Can it be explained away?

Who has any idea how many 1,000,000 deaths is, and what it means in terms of total devastation and desolation for the survivors?

[DemocracyDirect]

1. Even worse is her parroting the idea that Iraq was a haven for Al Qaeda.

I can't believe that any intelligence said that.

That means that she got all her talking points from the Neo-cons.

[delrem]

3. There is a video juxtaposing Hillary & George W., echoing each other

on Iraq war talking points.

Hillary and George W. were identical all down the line.

[Scuba]

7. Almost like they were reading from the same script ...

[delrem]

9. Yah that's the vid. Uncanny isn't it?

A total Vulcan mindmeld, or maybe equal drones of the same hive mind, or something like that.

One thing for sure, a Clinton win will mean the total exoneration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, along with their clear fact on the ground political victory. Like the USA got trapped in tar sands...

[DemocracyDirect]

5. Just thinking this through...

If the US had bombed the heck out of Iraq to eradicate any chance of weapons...

... it would have been far better than pushing regime change...

... and leaving a power vacuum.

But the insistence of the connection to Al Qaeda is what they needed to do regime change.

And regime change is what they needed for the big money (and oil) to start flowing.

I think we can conclude her leadership on the Democratic side on this lead to uncontested engagement in the biggest mistake in US history.

[delrem]

10. So you figure the US should've just bombed Iraq flat. No troops.

Kinda like turning the country into a sheet of glass, to fix it.
You figure that'd be a good alternate reality - coming at the matter from the wisdom of your hindsight.

Not cool.

[DemocracyDirect]

11. No I didn't say that at all. I'm a pacifist.

But based on faulty intelligence, and let us overlook for a moment the source and reasons for the faulty intelligence on WMDs...

If we had simply bombed weapons manufacturing or storage facilities based on the premise of imminent threat, perhaps that could have been justified.

But regime change and the botched nation building that follows has led to instability, ISIS and 100s of thousands of deaths.

Hillary Clinton went the extra mile to parrot the connection to terrorism, that was based on no credible intelligence...

... playing right into their hands for regime change to start the flow of war profits and oil.

[delrem]

12. Well, actually the US did "bomb the heck out of Iraq to eradicate any chance of weapons"

Over a period going on ten years.

The US also imposed heavy sanctions that led to an estimated 500,000 unnecessary civilian deaths due to lack of medicine and basic infrastructure, even while the US did the usual bombing. Madeleine Albright had a VERY ugly response when asked about that. Everyone who gives a shit knows this.

The US ignored the UN arms inspectors who said that Iraq was disarmed, so was in fact helpless. It's only then, when Iraq was already mostly destroyed and the inspectors confirmed that Iraq was helpless that the US went in full bore with "shock and awe". And the world saw people jumping up and down exclaiming "USA! USA! USA! We're the greatest! We're THE ONLY GLOBAL MILITARY SUPERPOWER!" It was disgusting and I wept. I still weep.

You did in fact write what you wrote - not with my "sea of glass" hyperbole, to be sure, but you wrote it.

If you consider yourself a "pacifist", the first duty of a pacifist is to be somewhat informed.

[jhart3333]

2. I think Hillary is accountable for all the death and destruction she has left in her wake.

I'm still all in for Bernie but we definitely disagree on this one.

[delrem]

4. Bernie has to be diplomatic.

But I think we all understand what's going on.

[jhart3333]

6. Okay, that works.

[choie]

8. A gift of freedom from the United States?

The 1,000,000 Iraqis who died say to her: Fuck you!

And so do I.