| Given this comment from a three-star general who is backing Clinton, it seems worthwhile to ask what opposing the war in Iraq actually means:
A retired U.S. Army general visiting the state to campaign for Hillary Clinton said yesterday she does not oppose the Iraq war -- and she said she's never heard Clinton oppose it, either.
Retired Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, the Army's first woman to reach the three-star rank, said she supports Clinton's promise to withdraw the majority of U.S. troops from Iraq if she is elected President. But Kennedy said she does not consider her position to be opposing the war as it is currently being conducted.
Kennedy, 60, retired in 2000 after serving in the Army since 1969.
Asked if she opposes the war as it is currently being conducted, Kennedy said in a telephone interview: "As of the last couple of years, I do think that we should be on a different track. I wouldn't put it that way because, as retired military, it might come across as being -- you know what I mean -- I wouldn't say it in a completely stark way.
"I'm very proud of the army," Kennedy said. "I'm proud of the Army leadership. They've done the very best they can given the circumstances. They get a shifting sense of mission and it comes from their civilian leadership. They haven't gotten the support they needed."
Kennedy said she agreed with Clinton's position to withdraw, as Clinton has said, "the vast majority" of U.S. troops from Iraq while leaving behind a relatively small counter-terrorism force.
"Senator Clinton has it exactly right," said Kennedy. "If she is elected, her plan is to bring together the chairman of the joint chiefs, the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council and get them to create a plan that will have the withdrawal begin within 60 days."
Kennedy said she does not consider such a position opposition to the war.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war, has refused to apologize for that vote, has praised "progress" in some areas of Iraq, and has made it clear that she will keep a residual American military presence of indeterminate size in Iraq through at least 2013. At the same time, she claims that she would not have started the war in Iraq had she been President, and that she will withdraw "the vast majority" of American troops from Iraq if she becomes President. She also voted for Feingold-Reid twice, and against the capitulation, blank check supplemental (albeit at the last minute). Given all of this, is Hillary Clinton "opposed" to the war in Iraq, or not?
I think the answer is that she has pretty much always been in favor of the war, but in the last couple of years has also been in favor of reducing the size of our military involvement. That seems to be pretty much the only position that is consistent with her actions over the past five years. She isn't opposed to it, but she thinks it can be done smaller, and better. That is also a position that is generally consistent with liberal hawk foreign policy thought: the war wasn't wrong, it was just conducted poorly, and now can only be "successful" in a more narrowly targeted way. Perhaps a good analogy is that her views on Iraq are more JFK than LBJ: both are hawkish, but one is narrow and targeted while the other is expansive and prone to quagmires.
It also functions as a centrist position on an issue rarely understood to have a middle ground. Of course, like so many other centrist positions like mandated health care, cap and trade without a carbon tax, and the recently attempted immigration reform in the Senate, it also will neither make anyone happy nor do much to fix the main problems we face (expensive for profit health care, expanding carbon emissions, the development of a near permanent underclass in America, etc). Iraq isn't going to get any better, either for us or the Iraqis, if we leave tens of thousands of troops in the country. The war won't end, either. But it will make elites happy, and appear to be doing something to solve one of the major problems we face. And that is, in a nutshell, how our political system has learned to function. |
