New York Times

Clinton Dodges Political Peril for War Vote
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

There was a time when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s position on the Iraq war seemed to place her in the same political peril afflicting Senator Joseph I. Lieberman.

The senators, both Democrats, voted to authorize the military invasion and both refused to apologize for their votes as the occupation began to falter and opposition to the war swelled. Both were labeled as hawks within Democratic ranks.

But while Mr. Lieberman, his party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000, has wound up vulnerable to an antiwar challenger in his re-election race in Connecticut, Mrs. Clinton has suffered few, if any, serious consequences in her campaign in New York.

It is not simply because she faces token opposition; unlike Mr. Lieberman, who has long resisted turning against the war or President Bush’s handling of it, Mrs. Clinton has consistently tried to distance herself from her initial vote without repudiating it, becoming increasingly critical of Mr. Bush’s management of the war.

That process crested on Thursday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, where Mrs. Clinton bluntly and publicly castigated Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the war, in an exchange that drew a considerable amount of news coverage.

“Yes, we hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios,” Mrs. Clinton said to Mr. Rumsfeld during the hearing, “but because of the administration’s strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy.”

Even those remarks have not satisfied the most ardent opponents of the war. Her antiwar Democratic primary opponent, Jonathan Tasini, dismissed them as “more bluster” and said Mrs. Clinton was “trying to obscure her record by shifting the focus to Rumsfeld.”

Still, Mrs. Clinton has diverged from Mr. Lieberman at critical junctures, reflecting what her advisers cast as a consistent belief on her part that Mr. Bush mismanaged the war and its aftermath. Her advisers offered a chronology of her criticism dating back to 2003.

Unlike Mr. Lieberman, she joined 38 fellow Democrats last month in backing a resolution, defeated by Republicans, that called for American forces to begin exiting Iraq this year, without setting a withdrawal deadline. Last November, Mrs. Clinton voted for a Democratic amendment calling for a “phased redeployment” of United States troops from Iraq. Mr. Lieberman opposed that measure as well.

Mrs. Clinton has described her initial vote in 2002 as one intended to give Mr. Bush the leverage he needed to get United Nations weapons inspectors back into Iraq, not as a blank check to rush the country into war. Mr. Lieberman, by contrast, continued to defend the president. Still, Mrs. Clinton has not backed away from her initial vote, a stand that has helped her avoid the sort of flip-flopping charges leveled by Republicans at Senator John Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign, even as it has complicated her effort to distance herself from criticism that she was a war supporter.

“You know, you don’t get do-overs in life or in politics,” she said in an interview in late June. “You have to be a grown-up. I take my lumps.”

Yet while skillful repositioning and adaptation to changing circumstances have enabled her to avoid political damage, they have also exposed her to a line of criticism that has come to dog her in the same way it did her husband during his presidency: that she devises policy positions to shield herself from attacks from the left or right and surrenders principle to political flexibility.

“The notion that ‘I supported the war but unfortunately it wasn’t carried out effectively, and therefore we should go on but I won’t say how to carry it out’ isn’t helpful,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “It’s not really the exercise of leadership.”

P. J. Crowley, who served as a spokesman for the National Security Council during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and is now affiliated with a progressive policy group, defended her position. “Are her positions on Iraq politically calculated? I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s much easier in the current polarized environment to be drawn to one side or the other. It’s tougher to draw a middle position and stay there.”

The war has proven divisive for Democrats as they head into midterm elections this fall, as antiwar forces have demanded repentance from members of Congress who supported the October 2002 resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war if Saddam Hussein failed to comply with United Nations’ demands.

But the issue is particularly important for Mrs. Clinton. As a potential presidential candidate, she is under pressure to avoid any implication that her principles might waver when it comes to national security. As a woman, she could be subjected to especially intensive scrutiny of her suitability as commander in chief, making her position on the war central to her 2008 prospects.

Her showdown with Mr. Rumsfeld on Thursday came after she played a role in pressing him to come to the committee hearing, which gave her a chance to send a clear message on the war. Mr. Rumsfeld had initially turned down the committee’s invitation to appear. Mrs. Clinton then wrote a letter, made public by Democrats, urging him to change his mind, which he did. Several hours after her exchange with Mr. Rumsfeld, Mrs. Clinton said it was time for Mr. Bush to demand his resignation.

Mr. Lieberman, in an interview on the campaign trail on Friday, suggested he had been as critical of the administration as Mrs. Clinton in some ways. “I had to laugh at — I don’t mean laugh, but be surprised at all the attention to Senator Clinton calling for Rumsfeld to resign,” Mr. Lieberman said, pointing to comments he had made as far back as 2003 indicating that if he were president, he would ask Mr. Rumsfeld to step aside. But Mr. Lieberman never demanded that Mr. Bush take that step.

While Mrs. Clinton has come under fire for not repudiating her initial vote to authorize the war, she contends that intelligence reports that her husband saw in the White House supported the Bush administration’s contention that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

She has said that she believed Mr. Bush when he said he intended to use the Congressional authority to force weapons inspectors back into Iraq rather than immediately heading into war.

Her associates said she had been assured as much by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, in a phone call. Sean McCormack, a spokesman for Ms. Rice, said she had no specific recollection of the call to Mrs. Clinton, but did not dispute that it took place.

Mrs. Clinton has sought to cast her position on Iraq as part of a broader and consistent approach to foreign policy and the use of military force. She subscribes, in her words, to a doctrine of “sensible internationalism, pragmatic internationalism” — a philosophy that essentially calls for military intervention when it has broad global support and is all but certain to succeed.

“They have a doctrine, as expressed by President Bush in his second inaugural — ‘we’re going to rid the world of tyranny,’ ” Mrs. Clinton said in the June interview, referring to the Republican leadership. “Well, O.K., I agree with that, that’s a good goal,” she said wryly. “Now, how do you operationalize that in a sensible way that minimizes the loss of American life, the lives of other people, and actually moves us forward to get some kind of accomplishment that everyone can point to?”

Some analysts question how that outlook will withstand the rigors of a race for higher office, which usually demands sharper definitions.

“She hasn’t laid out in any clear and sustained way a real worldview,” said Stephen M. Walt, academic dean at the Kennedy School of Government. “What she has done is sort of associate herself with being opposed to lots of bad things like terrorism — she thinks it’s a bad thing — and she’s in favor of things like a strong military and veterans’ benefits and helping our soldiers.”