Hillary Clinton And The Holiday Inn Express School Of Foreign Policy

Hillary Clinton did not bring peace to Northern Ireland, but she may have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.

Hillary Clinton did not negotiate to open borders in Kosovo (with Sinbad and Sheryl Crow at her side), but she may have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.

Hillary Clinton did make a speech in China, and that is the only thing her campaign advisors could think of to demonstrate her foreign policy experience.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisors of course could not point to the biggest foreign policy decision she has had to make as an example of her experience, because to do so would raise uncomfortable questions about her judgment or her competence. That experience is Iraq.

Since Hillary Clinton voted to give George W Bush authority to wage war in Iraq she has wavered from saying she had no regrets about her vote to recently saying that she regretted the vote. Her regret for the vote has increased in inverse proportion to the time left to the Democratic nomination.

However, Hillary Clinton has always claimed that she voted not to take the country to war, but instead to avert war by making it easier for the President to wage war. Mrs. Clinton stated on the floor of the Senate that:

Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation.

Barack Obama often points out that the resolution Hillary Clinton voted for was titled "A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq". So her claim that she wasn’t voting for war is on its face absurd. Further, the resolution that Mrs. Clinton voted for and defended gave the President explicit authority to wage war in Iraq in Section 3(a) and reinforced the point by covering the War Powers Resolution requirements in Section 3(c):

(c) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS.—
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION.—Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS.—Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

With Section 3(c), Congress gave the President specific statutory authorization under the War Powers Resolution. Without this authority, Congress could have required George W Bush to get authorization before launching any attack on Iraq. Sections 8(a)(1) and 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution together require the President to terminate "any use of United States armed forces" unless Congress "has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces". The Resolution Mrs. Clinton voted for was just such a specific authorization. Mrs. Clinton was not giving diplomacy a chance, she had just authorized the President of the United States to wage war. She gave George W Bush a loaded pistol and is now surprised that he used it.

In case Mrs. Clinton was under some other illusion at the time, she could have simply listened to the public statements coming from the end of Pennsylvania Avenue she now claims her foreign policy experience qualifies her to take up residence in. On the day Mrs. Clinton voted, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher was already talking about what the occupation of Iraq would look like:

Today the White House altered its explanation of the current thinking. Ari Fleischer, the president’s press secretary, said that while ”there will certainly be a role for the military” in Iraq if Saddam Hussein is dislodged, he expected that Iraqis would not be treated as a former enemy, but rather as a liberated people.

”I dispute that notion” of occupation, he said. Japan, he noted, ”actively fought the United States” during World War II, before its postwar occupation. In Iraq in 1991, he noted, many in the Iraqi military surrendered, and he expected that would happen again. ”My point is, the likelihood is much more like Afghanistan, where the people who live right now under a brutal dictator will view America as liberators, not conquerors.”

On the failure of her major foray into domestic policy as First Lady, Hillary Clinton described her performance as "naive and dumb". On her most important foreign policy decision as a United States Senator, it is baffling to think that she would not realize that she had voted to take the United States to war with Iraq.

Hillary Clinton needs to clearly explainto the Democratic voters  whether she voted to take the United States to war in Iraq or whether she did not realize what she was voting for.