By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 17, 2015
So far, of the declared candidates for president, the
only one who voted for the Iraq War is the Democrat.
I recently made that observation on Twitter and the
response was instructive. I will refrain from reprinting the more piquant
language from Hillary Clinton’s supporters, but one common theme was that I am
a fool. Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio weren’t in the Senate for
the Iraq war vote, many shrieked.
Well, exactly.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, you might be
interested to know that the Iraq War was not popular, especially among
Democrats. If you had to pick a single position that allowed Barack Obama to
pull ahead in the 2008 Democratic primaries, his opposition to the war would
almost certainly be it.
It still looms large in the liberal mind: Obama
frequently uses the Iraq War as proof of his foreign-policy wisdom, which is
otherwise unearned by evidence or argument.
For instance, humiliated of late by the rise of the
Islamic State — a group he’d glibly dismissed as a negligible “jayvee team” —
Obama now concedes it’s a real problem but blames its rise entirely on the war.
“Two things: One is, ISIL is a direct outgrowth of
al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama told VICE News last
month. “Which is an example of an unintended consequence. Which is why we
should generally aim before we shoot.”
Obama is merely the headmaster of this cheap and lazy
school of thought. Blaming the Iraq War for the world’s problems or using it as
a way to deflect legitimate criticism of Obama’s foreign policy remains the
primary rhetorical gimmick for many liberals. For instance, Clinton ur-spinner
James Carville dismissed Mrs. Clinton’s e-mail scandal as “diddly squat.” When
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked if he’d say the same thing if Dick Cheney had a
stealth server, Carville spluttered in response that Cheney had started the
Iraq War.
Much has been written about Jeb Bush’s challenge. Unfair
as it might be, Bush must run as, well, a Bush. His last name is a burden for
several reasons, but chief of among them is the unpopularity of the Iraq War.
In a debate with Clinton, whatever barbs Bush might hurl
at the Obama-Clinton foreign policy record — and there is no shortage of
pointed ones to be thrown — Clinton would probably be able to deflect them by
dredging up “your brother’s war” (even though she might wisely avoid familial
guilt-by-association arguments, given her own baggage in this regard).
The weird thing is, Clinton has far more responsibility
for the Iraq War than Jeb Bush does. Meanwhile, none of the potential GOP
presidential hopefuls voted for the war in 2002. Scott Walker was the Milwaukee
County executive; Marco Rubio was in the Florida House of Representatives;
Chris Christie was a U.S. district attorney; Ted Cruz was a policy wonk at the
Federal Trade Commission; Rand Paul and Ben Carson were practicing surgeons.
And so on.
Of course, one could argue that many would have voted for
the war (probably true of Rubio, probably untrue of Paul). But that’s all
hypothetical. Not so with Clinton. She voted for it, defended it in the well of
the Senate, and arguably lost the primaries in 2008 because she refused to
apologize for her vote.
Personally, I don’t think support for the war should be
disqualifying. And I have no doubt that most anti-war Democrats will
nonetheless work through their cognitive dissonance and vote for Clinton. They
hardly put up much protest when anti-war Obama selected Clinton, Joe Biden, and
John Kerry, all of whom voted for the war, as his top foreign-policy gurus.
Perhaps this generational wave of post-Iraq Republican
politicians says something interesting about the GOP? Likewise, perhaps
Clinton’s support for the war — until she apologized in her 2014 memoir — says
something about her? Reasonable (and unreasonable) people will differ on all
that.
But Clinton’s support for the war underscores a broader
vulnerability. Unlike her probable opponents, she’s truly a creature of
yesterday’s battles. From the fight over “Hillarycare,” to the endless scandals
of her husband’s administration, to the ugly brawls over the Iraq War, Hillary
Clinton has been a partisan fixture of Washington at its most exhausting and
ugly moments. A Midwestern road trip in a van dubbed “Scooby,” even one
punctuated by burrito breaks, won’t make people forget that, nor will defensive
outbursts from her supporters stop her critics from pointing it out.
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