There are two big reasons many Democrats of conscience will never join the Clinton parade.
1. Failure to be a senator and her subsequent rationalizations:
Because of her Iraq war vote and those of the other members of Congress who voted to prove they were not afraid to send other people to die, the cost of Bush's big adventure will be upwards of 1.5 trillion dollars. The cost in lives will never be known. Call it a lot. It doesn't matter if 76 other senators made the same mistake. What matters to this argument is that she, and most of the other senators, abandoned their sacred duty as part of a separate branch of government and bowed to the executive.
The constitutional responsibility for declaring war was placed upon the Congress specifically so that an ambitious, reckless, or stupid president could not do exactly what Bush did – launch a foreign adventure to satisfy his desire for - well, God only knows. She and her colleagues cravenly abdicated their duty and let him do it. That was the crime of the Iraq vote. She does not admit that it was a crime. She doesn't even think it was a mistake.
2. Her inclination toward belligerence as a foreign policy:
The Iraq war vote was not just about Iraq. It was about war and whether the candidate thinks war is an abhorrence or just another tool in the foreign policy bag.
Even as she has excused her vote for the Iraq war by claiming that Bush promised to "put the inspectors in to determine whether or not...there were stores of chemical and biological weapons," she has recently supported the Bush administration's hard line against Iran using the same arguments about weapons of mass destruction She has voted to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, another Bush administration ploy to justify military action. One wonders if the senator ever learns anything.
Opposing war invariably draws derision from those who think it is our right whenever we have a compelling reason. They think the realities of an imperfect world easily trump moral issues. The problem is really simpler than that. War is simple. It is blowing up things and killing people. When you make war, that's all you do. Nothing good comes out of war at the other end. This should be a “Duh” moment for all of us, but, sadly, it is not. Remember how democracy was going to flourish after Saddam was overthrown?
Included among the tools that blow up things and kill people are nuclear weapons. We have had nuclear weapons for 67 years, a very small slice of human history. Some think we are safe because we've been lucky so far. Those people have great faith in luck.
An article appeared in the Wall Street Journal last January by four well known conservative authors. It was titled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons“ and the gist was that abolition of nuclear weapons is possible and the only sane alternative to the problem.
Senator Clinton cited that article in one she wrote for the latest “Foreign Affairs”. In it she paid lip service to its goals but then promised to “...retain enough strength to deter others from trying to match our arsenal.” In other words, the rest of the world is required to disarm while we get to keep the biggest stick. The hypocrisy of that statement is equaled only by its insanity. This is not a person who will lead the world to nuclear disarmament.
Her explanation for the Iraq vote is that she was tricked by the lies of the Bush administration. This almost clever ruse is to convince us that she did not “make a mistake”.
If Hillary Clinton did not make a mistake, then it is clear she thinks that, as long as nobody is passing false intelligence to her, preemptive war is sometimes a good thing. The upshot is that, under the same circumstances, she would do it again.
When I post thoughts like these on the blog DailyKos, I always draw incensed criticism from Clinton supporters. That is understandable. They are in her parade and I am raining on it. There's more rain in the forecast.
