Not all endorsements are welcome. A couple of weeks ago, the WaPo’s Charles Krauthammer suggested Hillary Clinton, unlike the other Democratic presidential candidates, is someone he “could live with,” in part because she is “always leaving room for expediency over ideology.” Given Krauthammer’s far-right bent, Clinton wasn’t trying to win him over, and his back-handed praise wasn’t exactly what the campaign was looking for.
Today, Sebastian Mallaby follows a similar pattern, complimenting Clinton for being a “foreign policy grown-up,” because her positions, Mallaby argues, are more conservative than her Democratic rivals. He points, for example, to Iran.
All the Democratic presidential hopefuls know that a nuclear Iran is scary. They know that the Europeans have been patiently negotiating with Iran to secure a freeze of its program and that the Iranians have been stalling. But Clinton is the only Democratic candidate who unequivocally embraces the obvious next step: Push hard for the sanctions that might change Iran’s calculations. Unlike all her opponents, Clinton supported a pro-sanctions resolution in the Senate. Ever since that vote, Obama and the rest have attacked her mercilessly.
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.
It’s a weak argument, defending Clinton on an issue on which she feels vulnerable. She is, after all, the only Democratic candidate who supported the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, and we already know what the Bush gang does with resolutions like these.
As Matt Yglesias explained, “‘Bush haters’ is a cheap rhetorical move by which to pre-emptively discredit the notion that one, perhaps, ought not to trust that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will handle murky and complicated situations with skill and moral rectitude. But why shouldn’t one be, in this sense, a ‘Bush hater’ — one who is inclined to expect the worst rather than the best from Bush and Cheney?
Which leads Mallaby to defend Clinton’s approach on Iraq.
Clinton’s rivals are contemplating history and deriving only a narrow lesson about Bush: Don’t trust him when he confronts a Muslim country. But the larger, more durable lesson from Iraq is that wars can be caused by a lack of confrontation. The Iraq invasion happened partly because the world had lost the stomach to confront Saddam Hussein by other means. By 2002, the sanctions on Hussein’s regime had been diluted, and there was pressure to weaken them further. Hussein was no longer “in his box,” to use the language of the time: If you believed that a resurgent Saddam Hussein presented an intolerable threat, it was worth taking the risk of unseating him by force, sooner rather than later.
Alone among the Democratic candidates, Clinton has the honesty to insist that the case for war was reasonable at the time — even if, with the benefit of hindsight, the invasion has proved disastrous. In sticking to that politically difficult position, Clinton is saying that, despite its awful risks, war can sometimes be the least bad choice. She is not running away from military power, even in a political climate that makes running attractive.
Publius, who suggests Mallaby’s column may be among the worst op-eds published this year, noted how wrong this entire line of thinking really is:
The larger point here is that one manifestation of America’s pro-war bias is this tendency to shift the burden of proof onto those who oppose using war to solve foreign policy problems.
Mallaby’s op-ed is a perfect example of this thinking. First, he argues that the Iraq War — though “disastrous” — was “reasonable at the time.” It was only reasonable, though, if you assume that all doubt should have been construed in favor of war. I mean, the idea that Saddam was “resurgent” is probably a lie. But even assuming he’s arguing in good faith, the world didn’t stop in October 2002. A steady stream of information — forgeries, IAEA, etc. — was streaming in, calling the administration’s claims into question.
But at the very least, the disaster that is Iraq should cause Mallaby to rethink his presumptions.
Well, one would like to think so, anyway.