President Hillary Smarter than Senator Hillary

Dan Conley is somewhat dubious of Hillary Clinton’s claim, “If I had been President in October of 2002, I would not have started this war.”

Anyone who believes her, please raise your hand. Or maybe there’s some literal truth here that I’m missing … such as, like Bush, she’d wait until March 2003 to start it.

Or perhaps, given the extraordinary set of circumstances it would have taken for her to be President in 2002, she had somehow acquired a superpower, let’s say omniscience, in the late 90s and knew for a fact that Saddam had no WMDs. Of course, if Hillary knew everything that Bill was doing all these years … oh, never mind.

Or perhaps, unlike Bush, she would have fired Bill Clinton’s CIA Director George “Slam Dunk” Tenet?

FILED UNDER: Iraq War, , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. ken says:

    James,

    The war on Iraq is illegal and immoral. To presume that anyone other than Bush, a Republican president, would start such a war is contemptible. No one else is *that* evil.

  2. Dave Schuler says:

    I seem to recall that in late 2003 Bill Clinton said something to the effect that, had he still been president, he’d have done much the same things as Bush did. I’ll try to dig up the citation.

  3. Dave Schuler says:

    In an interview in February 2003 with Larry King Bill Clinton supports the legality of the U. S. going to war with Iraq.

  4. M1EK says:

    It’s a fairly odious partisan trick to allege that the Administration was only ‘fooled’ into war because Bad Old George Tenet told W that the WMD intelligence was a “slam dunk”. And the Authorization To Use Force wasn’t a declaration of war, either.

    You know better than this. If you expect any of us who used to consider voting Republican to come back onboard, it’s time to cut this crap out.

  5. Anderson says:

    It’s a fairly odious partisan trick to allege that the Administration was only ‘fooled’ into war because Bad Old George Tenet told W that the WMD intelligence was a “slam dunk”. And the Authorization To Use Force wasn’t a declaration of war, either.

    I hadn’t quite read JJ that way, but perhaps you’re right.

    Expressly or not, it does seem that Tenet kept his job on condition that he support war with Iraq. He and Condi Rice have been the most damaging public figures of the last 5 years, excepting Bush & Cheney themselves.

  6. spencer says:

    The issue should not be if you, or she, would have gone to war.

    The issue should be would she have lost the war through sheer incompetence.

    That is a completely different issue.

  7. Yes, and Iraq would still be a place where children fly kites and rivers of chocolate run freely.