Senator Clinton's Shifting Views On Iraq...

...Or the "I was for the war before I was against it" routine.

In the news today:

“This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy,” the Democratic senator from New York said her in [sic] initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

"We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office" in January 2009, the former first lady said.

Emphasis mine. I'll pass over the last statement - Mrs. Clinton does not want to have to deal with the war when (as she hopes) she takes office in January 2009. Note that she said that the decision was his to make. She states elsewhere

"'This is not a vote for pre-emptive war.' I said that on the floor of the Senate. I said that we should not go to war unless we have allies... If we knew then what we know now, there never would have been a vote. I never would have voted to give this president that authority."

Note that Senator Clinton said that we should have allies and that she was misled by the information provided by President Bush. As I have posted elsewhere, President Bush inherited his Iraq policy from President Clinton and since we know that Bill and Hillary were "two for the price of one", she most likely knew the same things that her husband did. If nothing else, she believe the same faulty intelligence that President Clinton gave to the American people

But let's take the YouTube Delorean (see video below) back to March 6, 2003 when Senator Clinton meets with a group called Code Pink just after voting to authorize President Bush to go to war with Iraq and just weeks before the Coalition's invasion.

First of all, I love their opening theme song!!! Senator Clinton enters at 1:41 into the video. Note how she wears BLUE to speak to the Code PINK group in 2003... And the spokes-lady talking at 4:00 in has Hillary's name spelled wrong on her shirt (Hilary)!

Now, compare Hillary's comments there regarding her research into the war (8:52-9:20) - stating that she voted as she did "after carefully reviewing the information and intelligence I had available, people whose opinions I trusted" with the current statements. This flies pretty squarely in the face against what the Senator is telling us today - that she was misled by one man and one man alone!

See also the question at 10:14 and 11:06 where Hillary is asked if the US should go in unilaterally. Hillary's answer begins at 11:15. Hillary is strong and doesn't give way to the disagreement by Code Pink. The question is basically "Whose responsibility is it to disarm Saddam?" Senator Clinton said (11:47) that

"I do not believe that, given the attitudes of many people in the world community today, that there would be a willingness to take on very difficult problems were it not for the United States' leadership. And I'm talking specifically about what had to be done in Bosnia and Kosovo where my husband could not get a Security Council resolution to save the Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing. And we did it alone as the United States , and we had to do it alone. It would have been far preferable if the Russians and others had agreed to do it through the United Nations. They would not."

At 14:30ish they started railing on the Senator as she was leaving!! Wow! - it's good to see how Senator Clinton was trying to distance herself from that group - she wouldn't even take one of their pink shirts. I will give her some credit for that!


Technorati: Hillary Clinton, Iraq