Hillary Is Trying to Drive Dems Into a Dead End on Foreign Policy

By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet. Posted February 25, 2008.

In recent weeks, Hillary Clinton has increased her attack on Barack Obama, arguing that foreign policy experience is essential to "being ready on Day One." Sen. Clinton thinks this argument will bring her closer to the presidency, but she is actually painting herself, and Democrats, into a corner in the general election, for, whatever one may think about her or Sen. Obama's foreign policy credentials, they certainly are less than John McCain's.

Democrats cannot run the general election campaign on the question of who has more foreign policy experience, or experience, in general, because the answer to those questions will be John McCain, even though most of his foreign experience is military. The Democratic campaign will have to be about which candidate has demonstrated the best judgment in foreign affairs, not who has the most experience. Which one endorsed and supported the greatest foreign policy fiasco in modern American history? Which continued to support this war long after every possible justification for it had collapsed? Whose belligerent statements would increase the chance of war with Iran? In answering these questions -- the questions Democrats will have to emphasize in a campaign against McCain -- Hillary Clinton doesn't fare so well.

First of all, it is not clear where Hillary derives the foreign policy "experience" advantage she claims, if not her eight years in the White House as first lady. But when did the American presidency become a monarchy? When did the first lady role morph into the queen? No first lady, including Hillary, has been tasked with foreign policy assignments. As first lady, the main purpose of her foreign travel was to engage in ceremonial events. There was nothing wrong with that, of course, but being hostess or guest at dinner parties is not "commander-in-chief" experience any more than Obama's experience living abroad is foreign policy experience. In fact, it can plausibly be argued that living in a foreign country, which Obama has done, provides a deeper understanding of how the rest of the world thinks than bopping into a country for a day or two to schmooze with a Saudi oligarch. If her foreign policy role was more than that, why has she refused to release her White House papers so voters could see evidence of what her "experience" claims are based on?

Whatever her actual level of "experience," since entering the U.S. Senate, Clinton has been one of the most hawkish of Democrats, including, of course, her vote for the October 2002 Iraq Resolution which led to war with Iraq. She and Bill have tried to explain that vote on the grounds that President Bush's true intentions, and the debacle Iraq would soon become, were "unknown and unknowable." These claims cannot withstand scrutiny, however. Long before October 2002, there were abundant reasons not to trust anything Bush/Cheney said about Iraq.

Long before October 2002, there existed a large body of scholarship that detailed the regional and religious conflicts that would erupt in Iraq if Saddam were removed. Two of the best predictors of the fiasco that Iraq would become, were President George H.W. Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, both of whom had written well-known articles and memoirs about why Baghdad should not be invaded -- in the case of Scowcroft, in a New York Times Op-Ed shortly before the vote on the Iraq Resolution. And these warnings were not lost on the large majority of Democrats in Congress; in fact, 148 Democrats in Congress (125 in the House and 23 in the Senate) saw through the smoke and mirrors, accurately perceived that Bush/Cheney would use the resolution to invade Iraq and voted against the resolution.

Hillary Clinton missed all the clues, took the Republican bait, and made one of the worst foreign policy decisions in modern American history. As recently as December 2005, Clinton wrote a letter to her constituents defending her war vote. While she now favors troop withdrawals, her turn against the war followed the opinion of a majority of Democratic voters by more than two years. Is following public opinion the type of leadership that "experience" produces? If it is, maybe we need less of it.

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Guy T. Saperstein is a past president of the Sierra Club Foundation; previously, he was one of the National Law Journal’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America."

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