Hillary’s Hawkishness

In a previous blog entry, I critiqued the Democratic debate that was held this past Wednesday in Philadelphia. In my critique I mentioned that Hillary Clinton sounded very hawkish, frighteningly so. I’d like to expand on that theme for a bit.

First, regarding Iraq, it is clear to me that Hillary Clinton made a politically calculated decision to support the resolution to invade Iraq because not doing so, would make her seem weak on national security. Regardless of her other motivations — and remember she never read the National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq — she needed to be a hawk on Iraq. If you think back to 2002, she had been in the Senate for just under two years and was already considering a run for the presidency. Her name was bandied about as a contender for the 2004 Democratic nomination. Therefore, she needed to start building a track record from day one in the Senate.

At that time, the Senate was controlled by the Republicans, so she couldn’t gain a good track record for sponsoring bills as a very junior Democratic Senator. Therefore, she needed to show her mettle and substance in other ways. National defense was one of those ways. For years, pundits had claimed that the Democrats were weak on national defense and were unelectable as a result. Her husband was criticized in the same way, having reduced our military size in the 1990s. She must have been clear that she needed to be a hawk in order to have credibility on national defense. Hence, her vote in 2002.

Fast forward to the primary election in 2008 and we can see that it is impossible for her to recant on her vote because it would play into Obama’s call that she had been tested on the most important foreign policy decision in her career and had failed. She could not be deemed “ready to be commander-in-chief on day one.” Therefore, she is being forced to nuance the vote. That said, she still feels a need to show foreign policy meddle. Why else would she lie about Tuzla.

Yet, in the debate, she made what I consider to be a number of outrageous statements about potential changes in U.S. Foreign Policy if she were elected. The most outrageous was this concept of the U.S. offering an “Umbrella” of protection to Middle Eastern countries who forswear nuclear weapons. She was suggesting that we would attack Iran if they attacked Egypt or Saudi Arabia, much as we would retaliate for an attack on a NATO member. Well, NATO members are ostensibly stable democracies with few threats. The Middle East is an unstable region where such an Umbrella policy would be a disaster. This concept gives the entire Middle East a free ride with the U.S. as enforcer. I was stunned.

The second most ludicrous statement involved “massive retaliation.” She used the phrase “massive retaliation” to describe our response if Iran attacked Israel. Again, I find such commitments scary with unforeseen future consequences. No reasonable President should want to lock themselves into a commitment for massive retaliation defending nations in the Middle East. Obama was much more circumspect here, noting that such an attack would provoke a response. However, Obama did not say anything about “massive retaliation.”

From where I sit, those two statements — combined with her intransigence on a pullout timetable — make her foreign policy agenda a very negative point against her being President of the United States.