How can Clinton and Edwards (and Biden and Dodd, for that matter) "take responsibility" for their "incorrect" votes on the Iraq War, claim the war is not their responsibility at all but that of George W. Bush, and at the same time insist upon their fitness for the presidency?

The thing about a war is that once it has started, you can't take it back. Yes, Bush did push for the Iraq war. Yes, Bush asserted that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Bush also had help -- a 296-to-133 House vote and 77-to-23 Senate vote in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, with Clinton, former Sen. John Edwards, and Sens. Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd voting in the "yes" column.

This is Bush's war, the Democrats claim, because that dunderhead president misled them -- which is interesting, because presidential frontrunners Clinton and Edwards told debate host Wolf Blitzer that it did not matter that neither of them had read the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate before they voted for the war resolution. They had been briefed. Edwards read the five-page summary.

So now it's: Bush lied, we read the CliffsNotes.

In other words, they dared to vote for war without bothering to get informed -- they were not leaders, they were blind followers. Hardly a great qualification for a would-be president.

But there is more.

Maybe this attitude works in a primary election dominated by far-left partisans, but in the general election, I have to think that a more adult approach would work better for Candidate Clinton -- especially considering that the facts get in the way of her version of events. Clinton would look much better in the long run if she said not that she had been gulled, but that she had good reason to believe Hussein had WMD.

As reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. -- authors of "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton" -- wrote in a Sunday New York Times story that dissected Clinton's pro-war vote, while she did not read the full intelligence estimate, Clinton believed firmly that Iraq had WMD.

Of course she did. Her husband launched more than 400 cruise missiles at suspected WMD sites in Iraq when he was president.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton said of Saddam Hussein's WMD arsenal: "Someday, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who has really worked on this for any length of time believes that, too."

Sen. Clinton claimed Sunday that she had expected that her vote for the war resolution would allow U.N. inspectors to finish their job -- even though Bush had made clear before the Senate vote that he was prepared to strike Iraq if Hussein did not back down.

Let me add, the figure who was really wrong was Hussein for his refusal to cooperate with U.N. inspectors. Hussein misled the world into thinking he had WMD.

And so i am curious about Senator Clinton -- at what point is she prepared to condemn her husband for having misled the world on Saddam Hussein's WMDs? At what point is she willing to condemn his actions against Iraq over the "nonexistent" stockpiles of chemical biological, and (potentially) nuclear materials? Why does Bill get a pass? Well, maybe the fact that offering the same sort of "fair-minded" critique applied to the Bush Administration would completely undermine the "Bush lied us into war" mantra chanted by the Democrat Left, and point to the fact that the Iraq War was and is the logical outcome of over a decade of bipartisan American policy related to Saddam Hussein's rogue regime.

And as for Edwards, there is this.

As for Edwards, his idea of leadership is to claim in February, "I think I was the first, at least close to being the first, to say very publicly that I was wrong." To me, that makes Edwards the first, or nearly the first candidate, to let down troops who can't go home -- and fallen troops who cannot be brought back to life -- just because Edwards admits he was wrong.

And as Sen. Barack Obama pointed out: "John, the fact is, is that I opposed this war from the start. So you are about four-and-a-half years late on leadership on this issue."

Indeed, it shows Edwards to be an intellectual light-weight who is more interested in poll numbers than principle -- so much so that he must be seen as either willing to sacrifice the lives of American troops to bolster his popularity or to abandon them when it become politically expedient. Or both.

Indeed, the columnist Debra Saunders really gets it right with her conclusion -- any candidate who supported the war at its inception but claims now to have been wrong or misled needs to actually take responsibility for their "mistake" by sitting out the 2008 presidential race.

OPEN TRACKBACKING AT Perri Nelson's Website, Rightlinx, sissunchi, third world county, DeMediacratic Nation, Adam's Blog, Maggie's Notebook, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Webloggin, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, Colloquium, and Pursuing Holiness, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Posted by: Greg at 03:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 874 words, total size 7 kb.