Judgment v. Experience on Iraq

Monday, March 19, 2003 was a day that I, like many of you, will never forget. It was on this day five years ago the U.S. invaded Iraq. Still we remain, in defiance of the majority of Americans who voted against Bush and against war; in contemptuous disregard of the international communities, the countries that were our strongest allies; even in our own Congress, George W. Bush's will be done, forever and ever, amen.

The United States occupies Iraq in the way cancer occupies a human body. From the massive airstrikes of the "shock and awe" campaign to this very day, the United States has violated Iraq. In 2003, we used napalm in targeted civilian airstrikes. In Fallujah in 2004, we "burned the village to save it."  

When and how will our troops leave Iraq?

Five weeks into 2008, our casualties number 3,943 with Iraqi civilian casualties estimated at 80,987 - 88,431.

To understand the reasons of George W. Bush's Iraq obsession would require someone much more skilled than your humble fellow Kossack Avila. To understand the enabling of Bush's will, and Bush's war is both a right and necessity for voters. We have two Democratic candidates and their direct responses, actions or lack thereof in the 2002-2003 time frame of Bush's case for war are critically important and completely different. One speaks of experience and one speaks of judgment. One stoically refuses to apologizefor her AUMF vote and claims that she was misled. The other said no to war in Iraq in 2002 and is still saying no today.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

(Source: BarackObama.com)

Please read and consider the difference in judgment from Senator Clinton, who claims 35 years of experience in government, and to this very day, will not admit that she was wrong when she stated the following.

I believe international support and legitimacy are crucial. After shots are fired and bombs are dropped, not all consequences are predictable. While the military outcome is not in doubt, should we put troops on the ground, there is still the matter of Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons. Today he has maximum incentive not to use them or give them away. If he did either, the world would demand his immediate removal. Once the battle is joined, however, with the outcome certain, he will have maximum incentive to use weapons of mass destruction and to give what he can't use to terrorists who can torment us with them long after he is gone. We cannot be paralyzed by this possibility, but we would be foolish to ignore it.

(Source: Senator Clinton's floor speech, October 10, 2002.)

We now know that there were no chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. We also know, despite years of claims to the contrary, that Iraq had no part in the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001. We know that the Bush Administration "manipulated and ignored intelligence in their thirst for war." (Source: AlterNet)

President George W. Bush on Chemical and Biological Weapons:

"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."

(Source: Interview of the President by TVP, Poland, White House (5/29/2003).

In the unforgivable quest to jeer who's ya daddy? up close and personal to Iraqi civilians, we have poisoned their water, deprived them of seeds to grow food, discontinued their electricity, quadrupled the infant mortality rate, set fire to the lands and the oil fields which might have sustained them, raped their men, women and children, imprisoned, starved and tortured some 12,000 civilians at Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper arrested on street sweeps.

This, my friends, was done in your name and mine. Consider the magnitude of this error in judgment and how it has led to ever more death and destruction in the past five years. Our nation is less secure for Bush's reckless war in Iraq. Our military forces are depleted. We can't undo the damage we have incurred.

What we can do is use our votes as our voices and I believe this is our sacred duty. Do you want your next president to be the man who so callously proclaimed that 100 years of war in Iraq was "fine with me?" If you read Daily Kos regularly, you've probably never considered voting for John McCain.

This leaves you with two options. Millions of your voices will be heard this Tuesday when you vote for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. To make an informed choice, you need to know as much about these two candidates as you can before you vote.

Obama's campaign is based on a clear premise: he gave a speech on the Iraq war in 2002 and has unequivocally opposed the war every year since.

On Meet the Press, Hillary Clinton raised questions about Senator Obama's record on Iraq:

CLINTON: What he was talking about was very directly about the story of Sen. Obama's campaign, being premised on a speech he gave in 2002 and that was to his credit. He gave a speech opposing the war in Iraq. He gave a very impassioned speech against it and consistently said that he was against the war, he would vote against the funding for the war. By 2003, that speech was off his website. By 2004, he was saying that he didn't really disagree with the way George Bush was conducting the war. And by 2005, 6, and 7, he was voting for $300 billion in funding for the war. The story of his campaign is really the story of that speech and his opposition to Iraq. I think it is fair to ask questions about, what did you do after the speech was over? And when he became a senator, he didn't go to the floor of the Senate to condemn the war in Iraq for 18 months. He didn't introduce legislation against the war in Iraq. He voted against timelines and deadlines initially. So I think it's important that we get the contrast and the comparisons out. I think that's fair game. [Meet the Press, 1/13/07]

Fair game, Senator Clinton? As Ezra Klein has noted, it is, in fact, deeply misleading.

The issue isn't the issue -- about which Obama was correct -- it's his consistency on the issue. Barack Obama was right on Iraq, and Hillary Clinton was wrong. Obama could have made a couple more speeches, but there really wasn't much he could do to divert the course of the war as a lone Senator. By contrast, there was very much Hillary Clinton, and her husband, could have done to divert the war -- and all it would have taken was exactly what Obama did. A prescient, fiercely oppositional speech during the run-up to the invasion. Nor has Clinton, who routinely promises to end the war once in office, exercised political leadership in the Senate, using either her media power or parliamentary pull to sustain a brave stand against the conflict. Instead, she has spoken of her desire to end it and, in reality, gone along with the cowed, ineffectual approach of the Senate Democrats: Register opposition, vote against bills, eventually pass spending measures that continue the war.

On this day, there are no words of comfort we can give to each other, or to the young wife whose husband was just re-deployed, the child whose father lies in a rat-infested Army hospital with stumps where his legs should be, the young soldier who was sent back into combat with a script for Prozac to ameliorate his shattered psyche. We cannot call ourselves liberators. We cannot defend the Great Lie of "spreading democracy to Iraq."

Of course, this is all the most rank self indulgence. Much more distressing is that we cannot apologize to the people of Iraq; we cannot plead forgiveness or ask understanding of the very narrow margin by which the War President was re-elected. Of what comfort to them would be found in our dismay over the Iraq War Resolution, or the signing statements, or the surge, or the sense of powerless some of us feel about this hellish slow-motion destruction of their very lives?

And what about your families, your jobs, your homes, your health care?

Taxpayers in the United States will pay $456.1 billion for the cost of the Iraq War through 2007. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:

• 130,069,152 People with Health Care;
• 472,181,032 Homes with Renewable Electricity;
• 45,880 New Elementary Schools;
• 75,290,580 Scholarships for University Students;
• 3,547,959 Affordable Housing Units.

(Data from National Priorities Projects.)

Hillary Clinton promises to end the war "if George Bush does not."

If President Bush does not end the war, when Hillary Clinton is president, she will. Her three-step plan would bring our troops home, work to bring stability to the region, and replace military force with a new diplomatic initiative to engage countries around the world in securing Iraq's future. Hillary has been fighting every day in the Senate to force the president to change course. And today she described how she would bring the war to an end.

(Source: Clinton campaign website)

Barack Obama will bring our troops home.

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda. (Source: BarackObama.com)

When you vote, remember: This is your time -- to use your best judgment

Peace