A simple quiz for 'brainiest' senator

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published June 18, 2007

Angry antiwar Democrats are still demanding that Hillary Rodham Clinton apologize for her Senate vote authorizing President Bush to take the nation to war against Iraq. Their anger is misplaced. Instead of calling for an apology, they should be demanding that she reconcile her campaign rhetoric with her voting record on the war. To be kind about it, Clinton continues to mislead voters about the most important vote she cast as a senator from New York.

It's hard to find a profile of Hillary Clinton that doesn't mention how smart she is - the "brainiest" senator, Washingtonian magazine calls her. So how did someone so smart allow herself to be duped, as she now claims, by George W. Bush, who every day proves that a Yale degree does not necessarily come with an education?

"Before I voted in 2003, " she wrote in a letter to her supporters last November, "the administration publicly and privately assured me that they intended to use their authority to build international support in order to get the U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq. ... As I said in my October 2002 floor statement, I took 'the president at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible.' "

She should have gotten it in writing. The war resolution she voted for left it entirely up to Bush to choose between diplomacy and pre-emptive war. Even worse, Clinton voted against an amendment introduced by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., that would have required the president to first seek a U.N. resolution approving the use of force against Iraq, and, if that failed, to come back before the Senate for another vote before taking the nation to war - a position Clinton now says she favored all along. She has yet to explain why she put greater stock in Bush's promise than in Levin's amendment.

Clinton also did not bother to read the latest National Intelligence Estimate, a classified document available to all senators, before voting for war. When the question came up at the recent Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, she said: "I was thoroughly briefed; I knew all the arguments."

But did she?

Florida's Bob Graham, who left the Senate in 2005, was one of only six senators who took time to read the 90-page intelligence estimate from cover to cover. He said the doubts raised by the report were a major factor in his decision to vote against the war resolution.

"The October 2002 NIE raised serious questions in my mind about some of the critical assertions supporting a pre-emptive war in Iraq, " Graham, who was chairman of the Senate intelligence committee at the time, wrote in an op-ed for the St. Petersburg Times on Sunday. "I became highly dubious about the credibility of the overall case for war. The NIE strongly influenced my vote against giving President Bush warmaking authority in Iraq - one of only 23 such votes in the Senate."

In a Senate speech, Graham warned his colleagues that they would have "blood on their hands" if they voted for the war resolution without reading the complete NIE, and not just the summary.

The NIE represents the collective view of all 17 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. Graham says while the estimate states a consensus view, each agency is encouraged to offer reservations about or dissents to the majority opinion. And it was in reading the dissents and reservations expressed by some agencies that Graham came to the conclusion that the Bush administration was using intelligence to manipulate public opinion.

If, as she claims, Clinton was "thoroughly briefed" on the NIE, then why did she, in a hawkish Senate speech before the war vote, accuse Saddam Hussein of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members" - another bogus Bush-Cheney claim she fell for.

Had she read the NIE, she would have found that such a link was unsupported by secret intelligence reports. Graham told the New York Times recently: "It wasn't in the NIE."

Of course, we will never know whether Clinton would have voted the other way had she read the complete NIE that seriously undermined the administration's rationale for war, from weapons of mass destruction to a link between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaida. The vote for war was an opportunity for Clinton to show herself as commander in chief material.

Tested, experienced and tough - that's how the Clinton campaign bills the Democratic front-runner. Maybe she is all of those things, but she needs to explain why she trusted George W. Bush more than Bob Graham and Carl Levin. No apology necessary, just an honest answer.

[Last modified June 17, 2007, 22:25:18]