William Saletan has a good Slate article criticizing Hillary Clinton's refusal to admit that her 2002 vote to authorize force in Iraq was a mistake. Hillary's problem is that she is making the refusal to admit the mistake a matter of principle and using weak arguments to justify her stand. Nobody cares about her concerns about appearing to be a flip-flopper, looking like she's strong on defense, and not looking like a female stereotype. What Americans want to know is if Hillary Clinton can learn from her mistakes in a way that George Bush and Dick Cheney have refused to learn from theirs.
One problem is in locating the nature of Hillary's mistake.
There have been several levels of mistakes on Iraq that connect to Hillary--the Bush administration's incompetence in conducting the war, faith in the Bush administration ability to carry off the war, and trust in the Bush administration's claims concerning WMD and ties with al-Qaeda. I don't have the links here, but I believe that Hillary has admitted to these mistakes without a whole lot of trouble.
Why, then, doesn't Hillary just cop to the mistake of supporting the war resolution in the first place? I believe that she is making the further error of assuming that there was a good chance that the Iraq War could have been successful if the Bush administration had not been such dunces in their management of the conflict. In saying that she made a mistake in supporting the war resolution, Hillary would be admitting that there was no way that the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein could have had a good outcome.
The Bill Clinton administration was convinced that Saddam needed to be overthrown as well and was ready to go to war in 1998 if they had seen either domestic or international support for an invasion. For Hillary to admit that her support for the Bush war resolution was a mistake means that the Clinton administration and she herself had been wrong about invading Iraq in 1998. That seems to be a place that she's willing to go to yet.
I support Hillary Clinton for President and think that she would make a good president for the hard times that lie ahead for the United States as a result of the Bush years. To be President, however, she's going to have to admit that she and her husband's administration were just as badly mistaken about overthrowing Saddam Hussein as the Bush administration. It's a bitter pill, but she won't be president unless she finds a way to swallow it.
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In your opinion, how is Hillary's stubborness to admit her mistake different from what you see as Bush's stubborness to admit his?
Saletan argues that Hillary's stubborness is like Bush's and I agree.
The point of my post is that Hillary needs to show that she can grow out of this B.S if she wants to be president. If the post-Bush era is going to be as tough as I think it is, the country is going to need leaders who can admit their mistakes and still appear to be resolute. It's a tall order, but that's what I think we need.
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