An ambitious liberal Democrat — some even call him a socialist — is knocking Hillary Clinton for her past support of the Iraq War. His name is not Barack Obama, and the year is not 2008. It’s Bernie Sanders, it’s 2016, and the presidential campaign’s only contender to have voted for the use of force in Iraq is again opposed by a dove with political talons.
“I think on the crucial foreign policy issue of our time, it turns out that Secretary Clinton, with all of her experience, was wrong and I was right,” Sanders told reporters in Iowa on Tuesday. He even derided that experience, saying that Dick Cheney possesses it, too.
To Democrats, Cheney is still undoubtedly the most threatening bogeyman to have held the office of vice president.
The Vermont senator has contrasted his position on Iraq with Clinton’s in the past. He pointed out during Sunday night’s primary debate that he “vigorously opposed” the “disastrous” war when it came up for a vote in Congress; he was one of 133 House members to say nay on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2002. He said in a November debate that the war was one of the United States’ “worst foreign policy blunders,” and that he and the Democratic frontrunner have a basic “disagreement” on the matter of regime change.
Clinton is a lone hawk on this issue, albeit declawed. She wrote in her memoir Hard Choices that she got it “wrong” on Iraq, “Plain and simple.” But her admission has failed to blunt criticism from her rivals — and her vote sticks out more now than it did in 2008. During that campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama used the war and his opposition to it as a wedge issue between him and his rival. But even then, Democratic challengers Joe Biden and John Edwards, who finished second in that year’s Iowa caucuses, were fellow yea votes on the war. It was a Republican in the race, former Rep. Ron Paul, who was the prominent dissenter during the Iraq debate.
In 2016, the Democrat occupies the island. With Republican longshot Sen. Lindsey Graham out of the campaign and former Sen. Rick Santorum barely registering in polls, Clinton is the sole White House contender to have supported military action in Iraq while in Congress. That she says she regrets doing so isn’t an issue to her critics. An apology didn’t scrub her vote from the Congressional Record. The larger matter is what her past decision implies about the future foreign policy of a Clinton administration.
“I think — and I say this with due respect — that I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be,” Sanders said in a Dec. 19 debate answer. “Yes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could get rid of (Muammar) Gaddafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid of (Bashar) Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.
“So I think, yeah, regime change is easy, getting rid of dictators is easy. But before you do that, you’ve got to think about what happens the day after.”
Although Sanders has made a contest out of a once-uncompetitive race, Clinton continues to hold a double-digit advantage in national polls. If her campaign results in her nomination for president, it would mark an odd culmination to a decade of Democratic politics.
What began with the party fighting George W. Bush’s legacy would conclude with it selecting the one candidate in the presidential race who voted for his most famous foreign policy.
