Bill Clinton's Hypocrisies on Iraq

When Bill Clinton told a group of students in Dubai recently that the Iraq war had been a "big mistake", champions of the current White House occupant were quick to accuse him of hypocrisy. For once, they had a strong point.

To be clear, Clinton's criticism was confined to the conduct of the war, not its premises or ethics. "We never sent enough troops," the former president lamented, "and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders." At the moment, there are 160,000 US troops in Iraq; since 2003, half a million US soldiers have fought there. Would greater numbers have succeeded in doing anything other than further inflame an insurgency which is overwhelmingly conducted not by foreigners but by Iraqis, who have no need to slip over borders?

Clinton publicly backed the invasion of 2003--and he can't credibly claim he did so because (like the US public) he was misled by White House propaganda about Iraq's WMD and links to Al Qaeda. In fact, his administration laid the groundwork for the Iraq policy pursued by Bush.

Throughout his eight years in office, Clinton applied a ruthless sanctions regime that took the lives of at least half a million Iraqi children. He subjected Iraq (with British help) to the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, ostensibly to protect the no-fly zones established in 1991. In 1993, he ordered US warplanes to destroy Iraqi intelligence centers in retaliation for the attempted assassination of George Bush Sr. In 1998, he signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change official US policy, and did so explicitly on the basis of the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. In December of that year, US forces--with British assistance but without UN consent--mounted a ferocious four day aerial assault on Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The pretext was Iraq's refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, some of whom had been suborned by the Clinton administration to act as spies for US intellige