What Hillary Clinton should have known

The presidential candidate claims that if she knew then what she knows now, she wouldn't have voted for war. But others knew.

By Alex Koppelman and Jonathan Vanian

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, Russ Feingold, News, Iraq, Gary Kamiya, Robert Byrd, Iraq War, Alex Koppelman

Photo: AP/Mary Ann Chastain

Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., holds a town hall-style event at Allen University, Monday, Feb. 19, 2007, in Columbia, S.C.

Feb. 26, 2007 | Almost four years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the war there remains the single most important issue of the campaign for the 2008 presidential election. On the Democratic side, two of the front-runners -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C. -- have managed to stake out positions as war opponents. Obama, who was still a state legislator at the time Congress voted to authorize the use of force, vehemently opposed the war. And Edwards, who as a senator did vote for the war, has apologized for that action, which seems to have gotten him off the hook with many voters. Only Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., remains resolute about her vote for the war, admitting she wouldn't do it again, but refusing to apologize for it. It's an issue that has, so far, dogged her with voters.

For the most part, Clinton has tried to portray herself as an innocent duped by an administration that had a monopoly on the facts, then lied about them. "I'm not going to believe this president again," she said on NBC's "Today Show" this past December. "Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote, and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."

It's a convenient out, but it's not really true. Though often maligned or ignored altogether, there were plenty of voices -- some of them from the highest levels of the military and intelligence establishments -- warning that the case the administration had laid out was not as clear-cut as it seemed, that postwar Iraq would not be the land of flowers and chocolates administration officials promised.

What follows is the collective wisdom of some of those voices.

Aug. 15, 2002 -- The national security advisor to Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush, and for three years chairman of President George W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Brent Scowcroft was a foreign policy realist who favored stability over the grand ambitions of the neocons, and was largely derided for doing so. In an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal, "Don't Attack Saddam," he laid out his case: "There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them.

"He is unlikely to risk his investment in weapons of mass destruction, much less his country, by handing such weapons to terrorists who would use them for their own purposes and leave Baghdad as the return address. Threatening to use these weapons for blackmail -- much less their actual use -- would open him and his entire regime to a devastating response by the U.S. While Saddam is thoroughly evil, he is above all a power-hungry survivor. Saddam is a familiar dictatorial aggressor, with traditional goals for his aggression. There is little evidence to indicate that the United States itself is an object of his aggression."

Sept. 13, 2002 -- Though most of the press passed on all too credulously the administration's false information, some did publish stories questioning the spin. On this occasion, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and Joby Warrick were among them: "The White House document released yesterday ... contains little new information -- and no bombshells -- showing that [Saddam] Hussein is producing new weapons of mass destruction or has joined with terrorists to threaten the United States or its interests abroad ... Experts on Iraq's weaponry say that on [the subject of ballistic missiles] the report, with few exceptions, recycles a mix of dated and largely circumstantial evidence that Hussein may be hiding the ingredients for these weapons and is seeking to develop a nuclear capability and to weaponize chemical and biological agents ... 'Given the high priority for knowing what is going on in Iraq, I'm stunned by the lack of evidence for fresh intelligence,' said Gary Milhollin, executive editor of Iraq Watch, a Washington-based nonprofit institution that tracks developments in Iraq's weapons program. 'You'd expect that, for the many billions we are spending on intelligence, they would be able to make factual assertions that would not have to be footnoted to an open source.'"

Sept. 25, 2002 -- Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., voiced some of his concerns at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "I have attended numerous briefings and read countless reports from a variety of sources. I have listened carefully to the Administration. And I have read, quite closely, the proposed resolution authorizing the use of force that the Administration sent to Congress last week. After all of this, I still do not have answers to some fundamental questions. I remain extremely troubled by the Administration's shifting justifications for going to war in Iraq. I remain skeptical about the need to take unilateral action now and to accept all of the associated costs of that decision. I remain unconvinced that the Administration has thought through the potential costs and challenges of post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq, or even thought through how to address the issue of weapons of mass destruction once an engagement begins."

Also on this day, Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., penned an article for the Hill, the influential political newspaper in Washington. Though Skelton would end up voting for war, he was a longtime leader of the party on military issues, and in his piece, he reflected the concerns of many in the military: "While the Bush administration cites the threat of Iraqi WMD, the case has not yet been clearly made as to why military force is an appropriate way of addressing the threat, and why action must occur now.

"I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq's forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.

"Any strategy must consider the form of a replacement regime and take seriously the possibility that the Iraqi people might reject it, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy. What will we do with Iraqis that continue to support Saddam, and with the scientists and engineers with expertise born of the Iraqi WMD program? Can we create a stable regime that's geopolitically preferable to Saddam and incorporates the disparate interests of all groups within Iraq -- Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurd?"

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