Bill Clinton: Lieberman’s Bush-Cheney-Rummy War Vote

Bill Clinton: Lieberman's Bush-Cheney-Rummy War Vote

video via Think Progress

Bill Clinton delivers.

He holds Lieberman accountable for his unprincipled
Iraq war stance, which didn't budge until the Sunday before the election. It
was unprincipled because it promoted the Bush-Cheney-Rummy line that we need
to “stay the course” in Iraq. That kind of thinking won't get us anywhere.
It's also about something else. Democrats are no longer willing to take a back
seat to Republicans on national security.

“They are not Swift boating us on security,”
was the line Leader
Nancy Pelosi used recently. She is exactly right. Republicans have been
trying to do that since Vietnam, which has worked almost every time. But it's
over. It's over because Republicans have shown how incompetent and deceitful
they are when it comes to matters of war and peace. There's another problem.
Bush and Republicans in Congress won't hold their own leaders accountable for
grave errors. Errors that have caused a massive collapse of American foreign
policy credibility around the world, as well as troop moral that is lower than it has been since the post Vietnam era. Bush and the Republicans, with Joe Lieberman backing the president's Iraq policy, did that on their own. Lieberman needs to be held accountable for it.

Clinton on Lieberman … Lieberman has characterized his loss — and the need for his subsequent independent run — as liberals in the party purging those with the Lieberman-Clinton position of progressiveness in domestic politics and strong national security credentials. “Well, if I were Joe and I was running as an independent, that's what I'd say, too,” Clinton said. “But that's not quite right. That is, there were almost no Democrats who agreed with his position, which was, 'I want to attack Iraq whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction.'” “His position is the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld position, which was, 'Does it matter if they have weapons? None of this matters. … This is a big, important priority, and 9/11 gives us the way of attacking and deposing Saddam.'” Clinton said that a vote for Lamont was not, as Lieberman had implied, a vote against the country's security. Clinton said other Senate Democrats who had voted to give Bush the authority to go to war — including his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York — who may be weighing a 2008 presidential run, had hoped that the threat of war would force former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to comply with U.N. inspections. “They [Democrats] felt, frankly, let down that the U.N. inspectors were not permitted to finish, and they were worried that we were devoting attention away from Afghanistan and the hunt for [Osama] bin Laden and al Qaeda, which was a huge, immediate threat to our security in the aftermath of 9/11, as we saw [with] this foiled British plot continues to be,” Clinton said. No matter how a Democratic congress member voted on Iraq, Clinton said that he or she was not responsible for the constant mistakes in judgment that had been made since the overthrow of Saddam. … Clinton Sounds Off

This also means that the Clintons have gotten the message. The American people are no longer willing to stand by and let the Iraq war go on and on without a change in course. Someone needs to be held accountable.