On Iraq, Front-Running Dem Senators' Records Match

By Maya Schenwar, TruthOut.org. Posted January 17, 2008.

As leading candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama head into the Nevada caucus, toting their bite-sized campaign slogans - "change," "hope," "experience" - the facts of their Senate pasts have faded from the scene. Though both pledge to end the war in Iraq, Obama has made his antiwar image a centerpiece of his campaign, drawing crowds of young supporters inspired by his initial opposition to the invasion. However, Clinton and Obama's war voting records in the Senate read virtually the same.

"One of the funny dynamics we've seen is Obama's people attacking Clinton by tying her to supporting the war," said Robert Naiman, senior policy analyst and national coordinator of Just Foreign Policy. "But it's hard to say whether there are any meaningful differences between the two of them."

Obama and Clinton have shared the same stance on all major Iraq votes since Obama entered the Senate. These include the approval of over $300 billion in no-strings-attached war funds. The only war spending bill that Clinton and Obama voted against was the 2007 version, which all four Senate presidential hopefuls balked at because a withdrawal timetable was removed from the legislation. A year before, both Obama and Clinton voted against attaching a timetable for withdrawal to war funding.

Beyond spending, Clinton and Obama both voted to confirm key players in the pro-war arena: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, among others.

So what differentiates the two candidates on the war? Analysts have pointed to their positions on Iran: Clinton voted to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, while Obama did not, and Obama has encouraged diplomacy between the US and Iran, which, according to Naiman, could significantly aid in the stabilization of Iraq.

However, Obama did not vote against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard measure; he was campaigning in New Hampshire when the vote was taken. And Clinton has spoken out in favor of curbing the president's authority to singlehandedly initiate war on Iran.

It's what happened before Obama's Senate term that dominates the war-record comparison, according to independent foreign policy journalist Allan Nairn, who blogs at newsc.blogspot.com. In particular, Nairn said, Obama is boosted by an antiwar speech he made as a state senator in 2002, criticizing the invasion of Iraq before it began.

"That's the one thing that sets them apart," Nairn said. "That speech."

What They Say They'll Do

Both front-runners propose to begin withdrawing troops "immediately." This pledge for an initial withdrawal, though, would essentially continue status quo policy, and in itself is "not very meaningful," according to Naiman. Troop levels will be falling anyway as the surge ends.

Beyond that, the Obama campaign's Iraq proposal centers around a 16-month goal for bringing all "combat troops" home. It would leave troops in Iraq to protect the American embassy and execute "targeted strikes" on al-Qaeda. The "targeted strikes" language echoes a redeployment bill that was blocked by Republicans in the Senate in November. (Both Obama and Clinton voted to allow that bill to move forward.)

Obama's plan has the potential to efficiently end the war, although not as quickly as it could be ended, according to Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who also serves as the Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus. He maintains that the key question is how the phrase "targeted strikes" is interpreted.

"In Obama's case, I'm guessing that it would be an option used only rarely - such as taking out a recently discovered bomb factory or a particularly notorious foreign cell responsible for terrorism - and not a cover for going after insurgents in general," Zunes said. "These would be small, hit-and-run, special-forces kinds of missions, not major ground offensives or sustained bombing campaigns."

However, the plan's open-endedness leaves some analysts skeptical. Calling for some troops to remain in Iraq without a date for withdrawal leaves open the possibility of a long-term presence. "Targeting al-Qaeda" is in itself a fuzzy proposition, leaving the location and extent of a possible attack ambiguous. Moreover, according to Nairn, allowing an unspecified number of soldiers to remain for embassy protection is grounds for concern.

"The embassy in Iraq is going to be the biggest embassy in the world," Nairn said. "Just protecting that vast complex could require a fairly substantial number of troops." Obama's plan does not specify the future of the more than 180,000 US-paid private mercenaries positioned in Iraq.

Clinton's plan similarly allows for an extended presence in Iraq and excludes mercenaries from the redeployment equation. Her proposal differs from Obama's in that it does not identify a goal date for withdrawal. It states that upon entering office, in addition to "immediately" beginning to bring troops home, Clinton would direct her advisers to draw up a withdrawal plan based on conditions at the time.

Although she has spoken in campaign speeches of ending the war as her "first and most important mission as president," Clinton has also endorsed a long-term limited troop presence. In a March interview with The New York Times, she stated that a "military as well as political mission" remains to be accomplished in Iraq.

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Maya Schenwar is a Chicago-based freelance writer and an editor for Publications International.

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