Hillary Clinton Was A Lion For Keeping Troops There

Some Democrats are happy and some are sad but both camps tend to see Hillary as inevitable, both as their party's nominee and as the next President. Well… better her than Ted Cruz. But do we really need another centrist corporate shill/multimillionaire surrounded by predatory elites? Ughhh. Is getting used it all we can do? Beltway personage Ron Fournier explained how she could squander her second chance a few days ago.

First he wants to talk about the lack of authenticity. I only met her up close and personal twice. And was she inauthentic-- painfully so, especially in contrast to her ebullient husband who is-- if nothing else-- a much better actor. The first time I met her was at the White House, at a state banquet for Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic. It was in the middle of the Republican impeachment mania and she was so uptight, it was horrifying. The President seemed unphased and determined to have a good time and make sure all their guests did as well. She retired early and a pall seemed to lift off the whole event. The next time I met her I somehow got assigned to baby-sit for her before a speech in Hollywood. Again, so uptight. Maybe she was nervous having to speak or maybe she hated me but whatever it was, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Dodge.

On the other hand, my friend down the street is a family friend and thinks the world of Hillary, not politically but as a human being. Maybe Hillary just lets her hair down around her and shows another, more authentic side or something. Her friends all say she should be herself and people would like her more. Fournier asks, "Who is Hillary?"

Her book tour is not going great. Clinton seems to be repeating the central mistake of her 2008 presidential campaign, burying her personality and passion beneath redundant layers of caution, calculation and defensiveness.

The campaign to sell Hard Choices-- a test run for the 2016 presidential campaign-- began with Clinton telling ABC's Diane Sawyer that she and her husband were "dead broke" when they left the White House. While that's perhaps true in a literal sense, the remark ignored dead-certain plans for the Clintons to make more money per speech than an average American earns in a year.

Then, during an excruciating seven-minute span with NPR's Terry Gross, Clinton fought a fair-minded attempt to clarify her evolution on gay marriage. A better answer would have been the easiest one: "Like many Americans, I didn't always support gay marriage. It was a mistake. As president, I'll never let politics determine my decision-making. Now, let me tell you when and why I changed..."

On Friday, Clinton was asked whether she feels more able to speak her mind freely. "I think that's true, from some of the reactions I've had the last few days." The sold-out audience laughed. But she sounded serious about tapping her inner-honesty.

"Maybe because I'm totally done with being really careful about what to say because somebody might think this instead of that," Clinton continued, according to the Washington Examiner. "It just gets too exhausting, and it just seems a whole lot easier to just put it out there and hope people get used to it."

[Webb] Hubbell isn't the only person encouraging Clinton to get real. I wrote a column six months ago that channeled her closest associates urging Clinton to run a radically atypical campaign-- accessible, authentic, insurgent and populist. One of the sources of that column, a top adviser, told me last week, "My friend is making the same old mistakes."

Worse that personality defects-- at least for me, who has already pretty much decided I just can't bring myself to vote for her no matter how much I would like to see a woman president-- are her policies and the people she surrounds herself with, both advisors and supporters. Yesterday, there was a buzz about how she was the force to try to keep troops in Iraq when Obama was trying to end the war and bring them home. Beltway monsters on the Democratic side of the aisle may be celebrating that but it once again confirms in my mind that I just cannot vote for her.

“Hillary Clinton was a lion for keeping troops there,” James Jeffrey, who was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2011, told The Daily Beast in an interview. “She was a strong advocate for keeping troops there past 2011,” when American forces eventually withdrew.

At a CNN Town Hall on Tuesday, Clinton unveiled what is now her official accounting of what happened in 2011, when the Obama administration was negotiating to keep troops in Iraq with the government of Nouri al-Maliki. Clinton placed the blame for the failure of the negotiations on Maliki. She said the administration had offered him a Status of Forces Agreement with American troops attached, but he didn’t accept.

“I was involved in a lot of the efforts to come up with what our offer would be,” she said, pointing to the need to have immunity for any remaining U.S. troops. “We didn’t get that done. And I think, in retrospect, that was a mistake by the Iraqi government.”

But at the time of the negotiations, Clinton’s State Department and the Obama White House were not on the same page. The vast majority of the senior White House national security team, including Obama himself, saw ending the Iraq war as a key campaign promise, a way to right a Bush administration wrong, and as a bow to the will of the American people.

For Clinton, her State Department senior staff—as well as for top officials at the time, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus—there was a national security interest in keeping thousands of troops in Iraq. There were limited, but important, missions to be done: countering terrorists, advising the Iraqi armed forces, and protecting U.S. personnel. Clinton was particularly aggressive in pushing for a long-term troop presence, officials involved in the negotiations say.

Of course, Clinton has always been more hawkish on Iraq than Obama. She voted to authorize the war, only later to say she believed that vote was made based on bad intelligence. In his recent autobiography, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed that Clinton admitted to opposing the 2007 surge in Iraq against her beliefs because she was preparing to run in a presidential primary against Obama.

…If she runs for president, Clinton will have several questions to answer about her stewardship of the Iraq portfolio. The State Department led a reconstruction program that squandered billions of American taxpayer dollars on misguided and poorly implemented projects. The U.S. Embassy and its support staff grew to gargantuan proportions, only to be “right-sized” later on. U.S. consulates were built and then abandoned. State Department training of the Iraqi police forces was a disaster.

But the main question Clinton does not answer in her book and has not directly addressed yet is, if she had been successful in her drive to keep American troops in Iraq, would that have made the difference? The White House didn’t believe it would.

For the White House, “The question at the time was, how will a residual troop presence reduce sectarianism or make Maliki create a more inclusive government, and there wasn’t good evidence to support that,” said former National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor.

You can be sure that Republicans will do their best to undermine Hillary with their mania for conspiracy theories and twisted lies. It's a shame because, to some extent, the GOP hysteria almost inoculates her from actual problems that voters should take seriously. For example, Bill and Hillary are attempting to shield their new-ish wealth from estate taxes, despite having both supported raising estate taxes on the wealthy in the past… [T]he Clintons' hypocrisy actually makes a pretty great case for strengthening estate tax rules, since it demonstrates that even those  who endorse them find the loopholes irresistible. Of course, that's not the kind of problem that makes sense for Republicans to use against her, since that's the kind of behavior all their candidates extol. That's why it's so important that the Democrats have a vibrant primary and make a decision to not settle for the lesser of two evils.