Clinton Rises Above “Bush Hatred”
Sebastian Mallaby defends Hillary’s record on Iran. Apparently in Mallaby world, supporting the Bush line on Iran is somehow rising above partisanship…
It’s not that Clinton’s rivals believe sanctions are mistaken. It’s that they lack the courage to defy Bush-hating primary voters, who think that lining up with the president on any issue is like becoming a Death Eater. “I learned a clear lesson from the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2002,” says base-pleasing John Edwards, “if you give this president an inch, he will take a mile — and launch a war.” “This is a lesson that I think Senator Clinton and others should have learned,” Obama echoes. “You can’t give this president a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it.”
The truth is that Clinton did not give Bush any sort of “blank check” — if Bush wants to bomb Iran or hit Iranian units inside Iraq, he can do so without a Senate resolution. But Obama and Edwards are so intent on Bush-bashing that they refuse to cut him any slack, even when he advances a policy that they might ordinarily favor. After the administration announced a new package of Iran sanctions on Thursday, Edwards declared that the president and his team had once again “rattled their sabers in their march toward military action.” Bush hatred has driven him to the point where he regards sanctions as a harbinger of war rather than an alternative.
Mallaby destroys the context of Edwards and Obama’s implication that Clinton’s support for “sanctions” (which Mallaby never defines) gave Bush a blank check for war. When Edwards talked about Bush and Cheney “rattling sabers”, he wasn’t discussing vague “sanctions”, which Mallaby’s readers will probably interpret to be the usual mix of economic and travel restrictions, instead Edwards was referring to the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, thus implicitly authorizing all sorts of military actions against Iranian forces in both Iraq and within Iran. This isn’t Edwards and Obama being pacifists, it’s them opposing a move that would give the Bush administration more authority to escalate tensions with Iran, possibly leading to a war. This is a pretty important distinction that Mallaby should spell out, but doesn’t.
If you’re going to defend Clinton support for saber rattling with Iran, you should at least spell out what specifically she is supporting. If you don’t, some may think you’re being a tad dishonest.
