Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., currently the leading 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are making history this week by leading their party in Congress to the brink of endorsing a virulent New Isolationism. This New Isolationism imposes an impossible standard for deciding when America can legitimately use force overseas to protect its interests and establishes a cognitive dissonance as a benchmark for congressional oversight of foreign policy.
Clinton’s Senate speech on Wednesday mostly generated headlines about her warning to President Bush not to attack Iran without prior congressional approval. Given her name and status in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes, however, the more important graph from that speech was this one:
“We have all learned lessons from the conflict in Iraq, and we have to apply those lessons to any allegations that are being raised about Iran. What we are hearing has too familiar a ring. And we must be on guard that we never again make decisions on the basis of intelligence that turns out to be faulty.” (Emphasis added)
Because the prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction has since been proven “wrong,” Clinton’s new standard is that the United States must not in the future act except on intelligence that can never be proven wrong after the fact. The reality is that 99.99 percent of the time, the best intelligence is incomplete and thus imperfect. Presidents rarely have intelligence so clear-cut as photos of Soviet missiles amid the palm trees during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Either Clinton misstated her view with these words or she intends, if elected president, to pull America into an isolationist shell. That shell of isolationism is exactly what hard-left professors on American campuses and other members of the Blame America First brigade have been demanding since Clinton was in college.
Similarly, the cognitive dissonance Pelosi proposes is embodied in the resolution presently before the House. On the one hand, the resolution declares opposition to Bush’s troop surge in Iraq, but on the other hand, the resolution proclaims that Congress continues to “support and protect” U.S. troops now in Iraq or who have been there before. In legal terms, the resolution is toothless, but its passage will strengthen and embolden enemy insurgents, as well as their backers in Syria and Iran. Congress cannot declare its support and protection of troops who will die at the hands of enemies made bolder by simultaneous congressional grandstanding. Passage of this Alice-in-Wonderland resolution encourages more such dangerous nonsense in congressional oversight of U.S. military and foreign policy.
Clinton, Pelosi and Democratic leaders generally should heed the warning of Lawrence Haas, former senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore, published in Thursday’s Examiner: “Failure in Iraq, leading to an exodus of U.S. forces, will provide merely the illusion of peace.” And sooner or later, the American people will reject the illusion, as well as those leaders who tried to sell it as the real thing.
