Fred Kaplan, still not getting it—UPDATED

Several dog lifetimes ago, Bob Newhart was on the Tonight show, and he told Johnnie Carson “You know, Johnnie, truth is stranger than fiction. And even if it isn’t we’re going to pretend that it is, because if you buy the frame, you buy the bit.”

The accuracy of Bob’s words of wisdom were perfectly albeit unwittingly illustrated by a recent post from Slate’s Fred Kaplan, “Hillary Clinton Told the Truth About Her Iraq War Vote”, defending Hillary’s fateful “pro-war” vote prior to the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq.

Kaplan argues, accurately, that Clinton did not simply vote “for war”. He paraphrases her position, with quotations from her original remarks, as follows:

‘“So,” she continued, “the question is, how do we do our best to both diffuse the threat Saddam Hussein poses to his people, the region, including Israel, and the United States—and, at the same time, work to maximize our international support and strengthen the United Nations.”

‘[S]he criticized the idea of attacking Saddam then and there, either alone or “with any allies we can muster.” Such a course, she said, “is fraught with danger,” in part because “it would set a precedent that could come back to haunt us,” legitimizing invasions that Russia might launch against Georgia, India against Pakistan, or China against Taiwan.

‘She went on to say that there was “no perfect approach to this thorny dilemma” and that “people of good faith and high intelligence can reach diametrically opposing conclusions.” But, she concluded, “I believe the best course is to go to the United Nations for a strong resolution” that calls “for complete, unlimited inspections with cooperation expected and demanded” from Saddam.

‘“If we get the resolution the president seeks, and Saddam complies,” Clinton added, “disarmament can proceed and the threat can be eliminated. … If we get the resolution and Saddam does not comply, we can attack him with far more support and legitimacy than we would have otherwise.” This international support is “crucial,” she added, because, “after shots are fired and bombs are dropped, not all consequences are predictable.”’

Okay, that’s a lot. But what’s wrong with it?

What’s wrong with it is that both Hillary and Fred buy the Bush Administration’s frame, or frames: if Saddam Hussain possesses “weapons of destruction,” then he is a threat to “his people, the region, including Israel, and the United States.”

Frame No. 1: As I’ve said many times before, biological and chemical weapons, which “everyone” assumed Saddam possessed, are not weapons of mass destruction. Saddam himself claimed that they were, saying/threatening that he could destroy half of Israel with chemical weapons, so, in effect, he dug his own grave, but in actual use these weapons are no more, and no less, horrible than the standard bullets and high explosives.¹ March 16, 1988, saw the worst chemical weapons attack in modern history, when Saddam’s forces slaughtered up to 5,000 helpless Kurdish citizens of his own country in the town of Halabja in a five-hour assault involving a dozen bombers. The Twin Towers collapse took some 2,500 lives in less than half an hour, while Hiroshima took at least 70,000 in less than a minute. Despite the endless “worst case” scenarios, there is simply no comparing, much less equating, chemical and biological weapons with nuclear ones.

Frame No. 2: Actually, multiple frames here, with Hillary supplying a few on her own initiative: “the threat Saddam Hussein poses to his people, the region, including Israel, and the United States.” The U.S. assisted Saddam Hussein when he used chemical weapons against Iran, supplying him with intelligence that allowed him to pinpoint troop locations. After the Halabja massacre, George H. W. Bush’s ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Saddam in a personal interview that the U.S. desired a “deeper, broader” relationship with Iraq, at the same time assuring him that the U.S. would not object if he “adjusted” his borders with Kuwait. Clearly, the U.S. simply did not give a damn what Saddam did to his “people” or his “region” as long as it didn’t impinge on U.S. interests and allies.

As for Israel, Saddam was clearly a massive thorn in its side, but only a thorn. Despite his bloodthirsty threats, when it came to Israel, he was talk only, and no action. Most important of all, of course, was the notion that Saddam constituted a threat—“a continuing and growing threat”, in the words of the Bush White House—to the U.S. He didn’t, at all. This was a shameless contrivance of the Bush Administration, obvious at the time. There is no question of “if we knew then what we know now.” We knew then that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the whole lying crew were deliberately and systematically misleading the American people on the nature of Saddam’s “threat” to the United States. Saddam had no involvement whatsoever with 9/11, and zero interest in attacking the United States. Yet over and over, the Administration fed the public its disgustingly disingenuous line—“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”²—as though there were the remotest possibility that Saddam would attack the U.S. with the nuclear weapons he did not possess. Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” speech, his 2002 State of the Union Address, effectively declaring war on Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, three nations who had no involvement in 9/11 and scarcely any with each other, made it clear that the administration was seeking war as an end in itself.

Given all that, what was Clinton to do? Given her clear presidential ambitions, it was almost impossible for her to vote against war, because she was a woman. She had to be tough, “realistic”, decisive, not a Nervous Nellie in a pantsuit. So her vote was almost “forgivable.” Unfortunately, it’s clear that Clinton has no real objection at all to regime change, and I wonder, very much, if she actually believes that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea rather than a good one poorly executed. Her repeated pronouncements on Libya, Ukraine, and Syria demonstrate her continued belief in “firmness” as the key to success. Tell people what you want, refuse to compromise, and eventually they will give in—this, despite the fact that the careers of Saddam, Gaddafi, and other “strong men” demonstrate that often they won’t “give in”—they prefer death to dishonor, reasoning, perhaps correctly, that in their line of work, if you show weakness, you’re dead meat. Clinton may have thought her inspection proposals were “reasonable”—why object if you have nothing to hide?—and Saddam had, in fact, nothing to hide—but he preferred a war he would undoubtedly lose to complying with U.S. requests.

Clinton has learned nothing from this. In her book Hard Choices she says of Vladimir Putin, “strength and resolve were the only language” he understands. Would she be surprised if he said the same of her?

Afterwords
As I’ve said many times, liberals don’t realize how lucky they are that Saddam Hussein did not have any “weapons of mass destruction”. A single case of nerve gas canisters would have been hailed as proof that the administration was “right.” Yet in fact the “case for war” was a deliberate fraud from the get-go, a post-hoc justification for an invasion intended as the first step in a long-term policy of U.S. military domination of the Middle East for decades to come, an utterly disastrous idea that still has a dismaying amount of traction among foreign policy “professionals”. It’s time for liberals to break the frames that the Bush Administration used to deceive America.

UPDATE—FRED KAPLAN’S RESPONSE
Fred responds to this article as follows:

“I think you should go back and read my column more carefully, all of it. I say explicitly that, all the same, Hillary’s logic (along with Biden’s and the others’) was naive (in terms of trusting Bush) and fallacious (in that the executive summary of the NIE about Saddam’s capabilities was simply wrong). I also said that I was not defending or justifying her vote or her excuse for the vote - but rather simply affirming that her explanation for why she voted the way she did, offered up in the NH town meeting, was truthful (which, in itself, surprised me).”

Well, what Fred said was this:

“In retrospect, of course, these final words [from Hillary, urging Bush to 'Use these powers wisely and as a last resort’] seem the height of naïveté. Bush did take the resolution as “a vote to rush to war.” And, of course, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction or even an active WMD program—though it’s worth recalling that almost everyone, including many opponents of the war, believed he did. (Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies in the Pentagon cherry-picked the intelligence that seemingly supported that conclusion, but it’s clear in retrospect that even they believed Iraq had WMDs, even if the CIA, which they distrusted, was having a hard time locating them.)”

Sorry, Fred, but you’re still focusing on the “did Saddam have weapons of mass destruction?” question, when the whole point of my piece is that the answer to that question was entirely irrelevant to the larger issue of whether or the invasion was justified, because 1) “weapons of mass destruction” are not weapons of mass destruction and 2) regardless of the content of his armory, Saddam was no threat to the United States. Hillary’s NH explanation may have been “correct"—what she said she said was in fact what she said—but she still bought Bush’s "frame”, that if Saddam possessed biological or chemical weapons, he was an “existential” threat to the United States.