What Hillary won't say about Iraq

As transcripts show, Sen. Clinton's views on the war have slowly changed since 2002, but she still can't say her own vote to authorize force was a mistake.

By Tim Grieve

Read more: George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, George Stephanopoulos, Iowa, News, Iraq, New Hampshire, Osama Bin Laden, John Kerry, John Edwards, al-qaida, Tim Grieve, Barack Obama, 2008 election, 2006 Elections

Feb. 14, 2007 | At a campaign stop in New Hampshire over the past weekend, a voter asked Hillary Clinton if she could say -- "once and for all, without nuance" -- that her October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq had been a "mistake."

Clinton couldn't do it.

"Well," she said, "I have said, and I will repeat it, that knowing what I know now, I would never have voted for it ... I have taken responsibility for my vote. The mistakes were made by this president who misled this country and this Congress into a war that should not have been waged."

Let's go through that again. Clinton said that, knowing what she knows now, she wouldn't have voted to authorize the use of force. She said that George W. Bush made mistakes. But Clinton didn't say that she was wrong or that she made a mistake back in 2002.

Does it matter? It mattered to that voter in New Hampshire, who said that he wouldn't be able to hear "all these other great things" Clinton is saying until she says that she was wrong about Iraq.

It could matter to other antiwar voters who remember that 23 senators did manage to say no to the use-of-force resolution in 2002 and that several who said yes -- including John Kerry and John Edwards -- have since declared that their votes were mistakes.

And it could matter to a lot of Democrats in places like New Hampshire and Iowa, where voters will soon have to line up Clinton against Barack Obama and take the measure of both. According to a recent poll, 92 percent of New Hampshire's Democrats say the war in Iraq wasn't worth the cost; 86 percent of Iowa's Democrats feel the same way. Obama wasn't yet in the Senate when Clinton was voting for the use-of-force resolution, but he can point primary voters and caucusgoers to a speech he gave at an antiwar rally in October 2002, a speech in which he said that Saddam Hussein "poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors" and warned that "even a successful war against Iraq" would "require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences."

As for Clinton? Her public statements since October 2002 reflect a slow, relatively steady evolution in her thinking -- or at least in her talking points. She has gone from 1) voting for the use-of-force resolution, to 2) questioning the intelligence that formed the basis of that vote, to 3) arguing that the Bush administration distorted the intelligence, to 4) saying she didn't regret giving Bush authority to use force but did regret the way he used that authority, to 5) saying the resolution never would have come to a vote if Congress knew then what it knows now, to 6) saying that Congress wouldn't have voted for the resolution if Congress knew then what it knows now, to 7) saying that she wouldn't have voted for the resolution if she knew then what she knows now.

That's a lot of small steps, but Clinton remains either unable or unwilling to take the final one: To say not just that she would have voted differently if she knew then what she knows now but that she should have voted differently based on what she knew then. Clinton has said many, many words in her evolution. "Mistake" -- at least when it come to describing her own vote -- still hasn't been one of them.

Here's a look at her journey so far.

October 2002: The Senate votes 77-23 in favor of a resolution authorizing President Bush to "use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." In a speech on the Senate floor, Clinton explains why she is voting in favor of the resolution:

"Even though the resolution before the Senate is not as strong as I would like in requiring the diplomatic route first and placing highest priority on a simple, clear requirement for unlimited inspections, I will take the president at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible.

"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 ...

"This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make ... but I cast it with conviction ...

I urge the president to spare no effort to secure a clear, unambiguous demand by the United Nations for unlimited inspections ... A vote for [the resolution] is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president and we say to him: Use these powers wisely and as a last resort."

March 6, 2003: In a tense meeting with members of the peace group Code Pink, Clinton defends her vote on the use-of-force resolution by saying: "I ended up voting for the resolution after carefully reviewing the information and intelligence that I had available, talking with people whose opinions I trusted, trying to discount political or other factors that I didn't believe should be in any way a part of this decision. And it is unfortunate that we are at the point of a potential military action to enforce the resolution. That is not my preference. It would be far preferable if we not only had legitimate cooperation from Saddam Hussein and a willingness on his part to disarm and to account for his chemical and biological storehouses, but if we had a much broader alliance and coalition."

Next page: "I've never been one of those that thought this was going to be done in 24-48 hours"