Iraq War Returns as Prime Debate Issue

[Hissyspit]

Source: Boston Globe

Iraq war returns as prime debate issue

Globe Staff / February 1, 2008
LOS ANGELES - Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton last night defended her 2002 vote to authorize force in Iraq as a "reasoned" decision at the time, while her primary opponent, Senator Barack Obama, said Clinton's vote raised questions about whether she has the judgment to lead the country.

In the last debate before Super Tuesday and the first two-person face-off since the campaign began more than a year ago, Iraq - long dormant as an issue in the Democratic race - returned to the forefront last night. Obama said his consistent antiwar stance would make him a stronger candidate against Senator John McCain of Arizona, the GOP front-runner. Clinton, meanwhile, portrayed herself as the contender with the experience and gravitas to confront a Republican opponent in the general election campaign.

"I've said many times that if I knew then what I know now, I would never have given President Bush the authority" to attack Iraq, Clinton said, declining to apologize for her vote. But there was "a credible case" for the resolution, Clinton said, adding that she did not expect Bush to invade Iraq in March 2003 without letting the weapons inspectors first finish their work.

Obama, an Illinois lawmaker who was not in the Senate when the vote was taken in October 2002, countered that "everybody, the day after the vote was taken, understood that this was a vote to go to war." While Clinton has "fairly" espoused her experience and ability to take charge from day one, he said, "it is important to be right on day one."

Read more: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/02/01/iraq_war_returns_as_prime_debate_issue

[ixion]

1. that's awfully funny Hillary, because many of us knew THEN what you know 'now'

so using that as an excuse seems intellectually dishonest, IMO.

[Jacobin]

2. She never explains why over one hundred other congresscritters

voted against it, either.

[earthlover]

3. It was called the Iraq Inspectors Resolution? Oh...it was the Iraq WAR Resolution

I guess Hillary didn't read the title....

Now she is trying to spin her way out of it.

Problem is, there were some amendments to the Iraq WAR Resolution that would have bought some time in our rush to war. Time that could have been used for these inspectors.

Hillary voted NO on every single one of them, including the Levin Amendment.

[leftchick]

4. 'Hillary hurts herself with old Iraq claim'

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/02/01/2008-02-01_hillary_hurts_herself_with_old_iraq_clai.html

<snip>

But her claim about the 2002 vote set off my Whopper Alert. She insisted she was voting to send inspectors into Iraq and that the invasion was a "misuse" of the authority Congress gave Bush.

The facts are otherwise. As Obama noted, the title of the resolution was the "Authorization for use of military force against Iraq," and news reports said it meant war was almost certain. There was no ambiguity.

Moreover, that October 2002 vote preceded the March 2003 invasion by nearly six months. During that period, Clinton never objected to the invasion. As our troops massed in the Gulf region and Saddam Hussein continued to defy inspections, war clearly was imminent. If she felt her vote was being misused, why didn't she say so then, when it might have mattered?

She also incorrectly described another vote from that period. Known as the Levin Amendment, it wanted a Security Council authorization before the U.S. and other nations could invade. Clinton voted against it, she said last night, because it ceded American authority to the UN.

Not so. The amendment was clear that if the UN had not "promptly adopted" a war resolution, the U.S. could act alone with congressional approval. As a supporter of the amendment wrote, it ceded "no rights to an international body" and "explicitly avowed America's right to defend itself."

[Rockerdem]

5. "Credible case"???????? Wowza

What swayed her? Colin Powell's baloney. Or the persuasion of the Commander in Chief himself?

Give me a break, I'm not five years old.

Denial is not becoming.

[danielet]

6. THEY TRIED TO PAINT HIM AS MUSLIM NIGGER BUT DEMS SEE HIM AS NEW JFK

THEY TRIED TO PAINT HIM AS A *MUSLIM* NIGGER BUT DEMS SEE HIM AS THE NEW JFK

The last debate between Obama and Hillary was a cementing and riveting indication of a Democratic Sweep in the Fall. But something very interesting is afoot. Three Democrats-- college educated but white collar workers in middle age-- who only weeks ago told me that they are for Hillary-- are moving to Obama. As one put it only two weeks ago: I don't want a nigger in the White House...White House, get it!

This is a residual sense of besiegement that many middle aged whites had come to feel since the economic hard times of the 70s and 80s, when they felt that welfare was a cancer robbing them of survival. They remember Bill Clinton as the president who brought this pay-to-give-birth ballooning spiral as the weight that nearly sank the ship of state; and Bill, they say, ended it. They, therefore, defensively, used to see Obama as a return to the Welfare Boom and Hillary as even keel on welfare, as with Bill.

One should never underestimate this economic racialism that pits older whites against freeloading blacks-- it goes way back to the 60s. It is, next to Latino anti-black sentiments, Hillary's strongest SILENT social card.

But-- and here is the amazing resilience of reason that made America so great-- watching the last debate, ALL THREE, said: this man is no nigger, he's the new JFK!

YES, THEY ALL TURNED PRO-OBAMA...why?

Well it's very interesting since there are a lot of these "whiteys" in the Northeast. Obama came across as a believable unit-er with a sense of EQUAL CARE FOR ALL-- he made them all color blind, last night, despite Bill Clinton's racist efforts for the last two weeks. Obama seemed to all of them responsible and he avoided all the Jesse Jackson buzz words that had so sensitized them back then. But that made them RACE NEUTRAL towards Obama, not PRO-Obama...So what made them suddenly so pro-Obama?

Well, once Obama was no longer a "nigger" out to take from their hard earned nest egg to give to hard self-destructive blacks, they realized that he presents a picture of no longer some getting something for nothing based on skin color but of raising the water level so all ships can sail on into the sunrise of a new tomorrow, together.

The point is that these people are NOT racists. They are racialists, in that they respond to a color as code for welfare policies that they claim Bill Clinton brought to an end. These whites work with blacks and socialize with them in color blind fashion. Indeed, some of their black friends have the same attitude because they saw themselves in the same boat: retirees vs. welfare, if Obama got elected. This is what Bill Clinton so shamefully sought to exploit!

So once Obama no longer seemed to sound like the Jesse Jackson voice of fleece the corporations, paying to keep him quiet about race noise, they looked at the other aspects of Obama and Hillary.

What struck them most is that Hillary is tied down by the ankle to Bill's foreign policy. Advised by Rove-wanna-bes and neocons who moved back from the Republican Party of Bush, Clinton has come to be seen as a continuation of Bush's blood letting and throwing money at the Middle East. They recall the abysmal failure of the Clinton Mideast policies and how Bill's own National Security Director tried to steal documents, hiding them in his pants, so that the 9/11 Commission might not see them.

The key is Iran. Bill pandered to neocons and AIPAC, pushing a neocon agenda of belligerence against Iran only because neocon contributors want it. Bush kept up the Clinton policies because the same neocons that advised Clinton advised Bush.

Well, when Obama said that he would meet with the Iranians-- after sixteen years of failed Clinton--> Bush pandering to AIPAC, they saw that a new day is indeed coming in that, as president, Obama will extricate the US from a guns blazing confrontation to a sitting at the diplomatic table approach-- the very approach that SecState Rice is trying to do, too little too late. They see Obama using diplomacy and economic cooperation as carrot rather than as stick.

Hillary is stuck with the Bill-GW failed policy of aggression and threats for no other reason than because her name is Clinton and so she does what her husband's foolish neocon advisers tell her to do: you gotta sound tough of foreign policy, like a Truman on steroids, a Cold War model when there is no Cold War.

So, Americans afraid of how the dollar is turning into wall paper and our army is coming apart, realize that Bush-->Clinton-->Bush---Clinton would only mean inventing wars to keep up our Cold War level spending on war toys for use in the Mideast while troubles brew elsewhere unattended. And they realize that Bush-->Clinton-->Bush-->Clinton only means more blood shed, treasure spent while our oil dependence deepens and oil prices rise. While we give some $5 billion to Israel per year, while spending $5 billion a week attacking the very Arabs who supply us the oil that is the lifeblood of our economy, we are setting up a far greater nightmare for America's aging population preparing to retire than any welfare expenditure ever could.

Teddy Kennedy's support for Obama was the needed magic, they say, because JFK was the president who never allowed the Cold War to force us into wasting our national assets. JFK instead declared that we will get to the moon in a decade. Along the way, science and technology and higher education came to be seen as national security issues. The spin-off was amazing. And back then we avoided draining wars without ever capitulating!

Obama, they say, is another JFK-- thinking big as JFK did-- that's why Teddy endorsed him.

So, I have seen in at least three-- but certainly a lot more-- white middle class Americans a complete turn from self-defense racialism to abandonment of Mideast war focused Bush-->Clinton-->Bush-->Clinton dynasties of Israelo-Arab obsessions when, they say, we should be focusing on cutting ourselves loose from dependence on that part of the world.

This winter, their oil bills and gas bills and gasoline pump prices make them think that the Mideast is the real nigger draining their assets, not Obama.

Hillary listened to her disguised neocon advisers and let herself look like the Bush-->Clinton-->Bush-->Clinton choochoo train heading for a crash with Americans as helpless passengers on board. Obama said: stop the train, let's fix it and get it off these doomed tracks. Hillary could have been the candidate who advocated this but she is too tied to the neocon money funding her campaign and to her neocon advisers and to the neocons that came back from their Republican positions of privilege to surround Bill.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH HILLARY SAIS SHE WANTS OUT OF IRAQ, THE REPUBLICANS WILL PLAY OVER AND OVER AGAIN VIDEO FOOTAGE OF HER IN BAGHDAD, NEXT TO SENATOR MCCAIN, WAVING HER HEAD UP AND DOWN AS HE SPOKE OF HOW WE ARE WINNING AND ENDORSING HIS HAWKISH SQUAWKING-- AND THAT WAS 2006, THE WORST YEAR OF THE WAR!

Hillary sold her better judgment to advisers that live on ethnic hate OF Islamics. Obama only listened to advisers--of the same ethnic background as Hillary's-- who spoke of liberating America from the Mideast tar pool into which it is sinking. So, to them, he's now no longer the Muslim nigger, he's the American new JFK who will pull us out of the Mideast death trap on which so many crooks are making money so we can marshal our resources to liberate ourselves through education, science and technology from our fossil fuel dependency that is killing our planet.

Suddenly, Obama is getting to look more and more white, just like the White House, to these Democrats that Bill is trying to motivate racially.

It would be easy to denounce their color and ethnic perspectives. But the fact is that these are only symbols. They are not anti-black, anti-Muslim or anti-Jew. They are afraid and put their fears into a one word placard. Bill Clinton sought to manipulate these fears and to force Hillary to do the same. She has been made to seem like a camellion opportunist as a result. Obama has come to look like JFK, and he was white, so Obama is no longer a nigger to them....

There was another time that these Democrat racialists dropped their color-vision. That was when Gen. Powell was considering running for President. Not only were they ready to go color-blind, but they were ready to vote Republican if need be!

The human brain thinks a lot more complicated that we can imagine. As a neurobiologist I am always left in wonder of how plastic it is, how reasoned its thoughts are, and how it can drop its labels for common sense. But the political advisers around various candidates are the real placard-minded small brains who look down on voters as lemmings that, like moths, are attracted to lights on a TV screen. And Hillary-- who was splendid at the last debate-- may well be forced to pay the price of having listened to Bill's small minded advisers who thought they could play on the hard frozen prejudices of the little people. The little people sure fooled them now!

Well, it's the little people that made the revolution that made America great. And though 9/11 scared them into lemming-like action, now, seven years later, they are ready for change, for hope and not for Hillary because she-- as we saw at the debate-- she sounded like an idiot trying to explain away her obeying the advisers who told her to vote for war, go to Baghdad and praise the war along with McCain, all because these dumb advisers insisted on the day after Kerry lost in 2004 that only as an anti-Islam hawk on the Mideast can she ever become president.

I supported Hillary until now because I thought she could nurse America back to health. But she has been unwilling to choose between Bill and America and will now be forced by McCain in the debates to explain her head-bobbing approval of his Hawkish rhetoric on the streets of Baghdad.

The issue is neither Hillary's competence, polices or caring-- her heart and head are full of all of these. The issue is that by listening to Bill she marked herself as part of the Bush-->Clinton-->Bush-->Clinton choochoo train wreck in the Middle East legacy instead of as the innovator of a new way to make America-- first independent of bloodshed in the Middle East-- so it can again become great. It is left to the new JFK to innovate a new direction-- and he's no nigger, he's Obama!

Daniel E. Teodoru

[jcla]

7. Many people who voted for the "War Resolution"..

now regret it, John Edwards among them. I am in the camp with Leahey, Sanders and Boxer who knew it was bogus and did not vote for that resolution. They called it what it was... a war vote and voted "NO!"