Helen Thomas: Will the REAL Hillary please stand up!
Posted by Vince Foster
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has great political skills, but her war-and-peace compass leaves something to be desired. Clinton has blown hot and cold on Middle East issues, including Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. She is at best pragmatic. Principles? Well, that’s another story. Before and during her early years in the White House, she supported Palestinian statehood, but she apparently forgot this after successfully running for senator from New York as a Democrat.
The rest is history. She obviously had to cater to a new constituency, make the ritual trip to Israel and forget any sympathy she once had for the Palestinians. But is her 180-degree flip-flop on that festering issue a portent of her leadership if she attains the White House? As for Iraq, she voted in October 2002 to authorize President Bush to do what was necessary to unseat Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Unlike former Democratic Sen. John Edwards, she has refused to say she made a mistake when she voted for the war. She cannot claim she was misled.
During the lead up to the war when she was briefed on the latest U.S. intelligence about Iraq, Bush was shouting from the housetops that he was going to attack Iraq. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often strutted before reporters at the Pentagon two years before the invasion and bragged about the attack the U.S. would wage against Iraq. Clinton is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a post that will allow her to embellish her credentials as a possible future commander-in-chief to show she would not hesitate to make tough military decisions. As a member of that committee, she visited Iraq in 2005 and said U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake. But she also criticized the administration for making poor decisions about the war. In 2007, she voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within a certain deadline; the president vetoed the measure. But Clinton then voted against a compromise war-spending bill that tied funding to progress by Iraq in meeting certain benchmarks.
