In her first presidential campaign visit to the early voting state, Clinton focused on her plans to revive struggling small-town economies, provide universal health care and make college more affordable. But at a town hall meeting in rural Berlin and at a boisterous gathering of some 3,000 people in the state capital, Concord, Clinton was peppered with questions about Iraq.
Most of the questions were cordial, and Clinton was loudly cheered when she repeated her pledge to end the war if she is elected president next year. But several attendees challenged the New York senator to explain how she could reconcile her sharp criticism of the war with her vote to authorize the original invasion.
"Aren't you trying to have it both ways?" asked a man in Concord.
Clinton acknowledged "a great deal of frustration and anger and outrage" over the war, and said she was working hard in the Senate to pass legislation capping troop levels in Iraq. She also vowed to try to bring to a vote a resolution disapproving of President Bush's planned troop increase.
"I'm still in the arena," she said — an apparent riposte to a Democratic rival, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Like Clinton, Edwards voted to authorize the invasion, but he has become a staunch war critic since leaving the Senate in 2004.
"It's very easy to go around and say, 'Let's end the war,'" Clinton added. "If we had a Democratic president we would end the war."
Her toughest question came in Berlin, a struggling mill town in northern New Hampshire.
Roger Tilton, 46, a financial adviser from Nashua, N.H., told Clinton that unless she recanted her vote, he was not in the mood to listen to her other policy ideas.
"I want to know if right here, right now, once and for all and without nuance, you can say that war authorization was a mistake," Tilton said. "I, and I think a lot of other primary voters — until we hear you say it, we're not going to hear all the other great things you are saying."
In response, Clinton repeated her assertion that "knowing what we know now, I would never have voted for it," and said voters would have to decide for themselves whether her position was acceptable.
"The mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress," Clinton said to loud applause.
Later, Tilton said he was not satisfied with her answer and was inclined to support either Edwards or Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record), D-Ill., who announced his candidacy Saturday.
I'm not satisfied either. First of all, I don't want to hear about "If I knew then what I know now", because I knew that the intelligence was bogus and that there were no weapons of mass destruction, because I listened to Scott Ritter and others who weren't just mouthpieces of the Administration, SHE should have known. That she is unrepentant of what she didn't CHOOSE to know is simply unacceptable.
But there's another troubling aspect to Hillary's attempts to finesse the Iraq issue which go beyond the Clintonesque triangulation strategy, and that's the possibility that she really DOESN'T think it was a mistake; that she DOES believe in pre-emptive war as a valid strategy. In a dangerous world, "shoot first and ask questions later" is going to accomplish nothing but expand an already treacherous war into a global conflagration.
In January 2006, Clinton made very clear that she favors a military strike on Iran to prevent that country from developing nuclear weapons, and she has not backed off one iota from that position. Speaking last month at a meeting of -- what else? -- AIPAC -- she said:
"U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons...In dealing with this threat ... no option can be taken off the table."
Now look, folks -- I'm not blind to what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is. I know the things he's said. I also know that he has lost a great deal of support within his own country. If you're going to saber rattle at Iran, wouldn't it make sense to rattle it at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who's the REAL power in Iran? Of course, Khamenei isn't as visible, and hasn't provided as much red meat to toss at the AIPAC crowd in return for campaign contributions and votes, so Ahmadinejad is a much better target for political purposes.
In her unwillingness to admit to making a mistake in her Iraq vote, and in her bellicose rhetoric towards Iran, Clinton is showing herself to be, at least where Middle East policy is concerned, George W. Bush with tits. The current president's healong march towards global conflagration can be explained away to thrall to Dick Cheney's PNAC greedy neocon dreams of empire, or his own messianic delusions. But at least from the outside, Mrs. Clinton appears to be perfectly sane -- and that makes her saber-rattling and staunch adherence to her own infallibility that much more troubling.
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