On Tuesday June 3, when Hillary Clinton made a speech refusing to concede that she had lost the nomination, she posed the question: “What does Hillary want?” The context was: she had received 18 million votes in the course of the primary season and won nearly half the delegates, which put her in a position to force some concessions out of Barack Obama. So what concessions would she demand of him? She answered her own question by saying she wanted what she “has always wanted,” and then went into a laundry list that began with “ending this war in Iraq.”

Subtext: Obama has waffled, and she, the one unambiguous anti-war campaigner, would now force this guy to commit to a stand.

That moment epitomized my objections to Clinton’s candidacy. Clinton was among the many senators who voted to authorize the war in the first place. When the error of that course became obvious, many of those senators switched over to publicly opposing the war. A few, like John Edwards, bravely and simply declared that their vote to ratify the war had been a mistake. Clinton, however, refused to make any such statement. It took her until March 2008 to even say she “regretted” voting to authorize the war in Iraq.

One month after expressing that regret, she voted to authorize a war in Iran. It was essentially the same vote as the one on Iraq, the same context, the same political considerations as, and the same authority ceded to the president.  Let me repeat: this came one month after she stated regret about voting to authorize the war in Iraq and one month before she implied, in her non-concession speech, that she was the leading anti-war campaigner and the one who would hold Obama’s feet to the flames on this issue.

One can only shake ones head in wonder.

For the first two thirds of the primary season, she claimed she didn’t know her vote on Iraq would lead to an actual war. She didn’t vote to launch it, she said, only to authorize it.   If the United States starts a disastrous war in Iran, will she later claim she didn’t know her vote of May 2008 could lead to a war there? Will she then position herself as the leading opponent of the war in Iran, the one who has been against it all along?

The question is: why did Clinton refuse to take a stand against the war? The answer, I think, is this:  she wasn’t sure which way the wind was blowing. She correctly perceived that sentiment among U.S. voters about the Iraq war was (and is) more complicated than the media suggested. The media consistently speaks as if there are just two positions on the war, for and against. Actually there are three: for the war, against the war, and for the war but against “the way it has been handled.”

People who think the war is a good idea but that Bush has mismanaged it variously say he didn’t put in enough troops, or not the right kind, or took them out too early, or didn’t coordinate properly with allies, or didn’t prepare for the civil disorder after the war, or chose the wrong Iraqis to lead the new government, or pushed too fast on this or moved too slow on that—etc., etc., etc. They wistfully believe the war could still be “won,” if new tactics are deployed in time.

People who entertain this opinion scrupulously avoid the core question. What does “winning this thing” consist of? (”This thing” is what neocon William Kristol calls it.)  We often hear about the misrepresentations that got us into “this thing”—nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, nonexistent links between Saddam and al Qaeda, etc. Rarely, however, do we hear about the really major misrepresentation on which this war was based and which still endures: the narrative that we went to war to save the Iraqi people (from Saddam or whoever), whereas in fact we find ourselves at war with the Iraqi people. (If you doubt this, see Penny Allen’s stunning documentary The Soldier’s Tale, available here.) Over a million Iraqis are now dead or homeless because of this war, and I challenge anyone to say what our quarrel is with these people.

During the months that Clinton was refusing to disavow the war, she promoted the inference that she would handle the war better than Bush: she would put more troops on the ground, or distribute them differently, or give them better armor, or some other nuance of differentiation. The bottom line: her commitment was not to ending the war but to “winning” it.

And of course winning the war would indeed end it, but the trouble is, “winning the war” is an example of World-War-II type thinking that has no relevance to this case.  The whole notion of “winning the war” depends on a deep subconscious image of a particular enemy with a particular capital and a headquarters somewhere, an image of conquering that capital, overwhelming those headquarters, and imposing American terms on the conquered leaders.

But there are no such leaders. “Bad guys” aplenty, sure, an inexhaustible supply of them, actually: they’re like malarial mosquitoes that proliferate because the swamp exists. Any action that deepens the swamp multiplies their numbers, drawing continuously from the ranks of the people we’re allegedly there to save. And what is the one phenomenon working most corrosively to deepen and expand the swamp? This war. “Winning the war,” therefore, is a false concept. There is only getting out or staying-in-and-bleeding. Suggesting that a third option exists is a form of pandering. It allows politicians to play to those who underlyingly wanted this war (very largely to sate our collective urge to see “someone punished” for the events of 9/11) while positioning themselves as anti-war candidates. I opposed Clinton’s candidacy because she engaged in just this sort of pandering from start to finish.

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