Hillary’s War
STEPHEN ELLIOTT
Benazir Bhutto was standing in an open car in the military city of Rawalpindi when the shrapnel sliced into her. That was just over a day ago. Violence has engulfed the region and we’re waiting for the next chapter in this ever-worsening dilemma.
It would be cynical to blame Hillary Clinton for Bhutto’s assassination. She didn’t pull the trigger, after all. Nonetheless, she voted to authorize George W. Bush, George W. Bush!, to go to war in Iraq. It was a simple, obvious vote based on political calculations. There were still weapons inspectors in Iraq saying they needed more time.
Now we’re looking at the rebirth of the Taliban in Afghanistan and a rapidly destabilizing Pakistan. The connections with our failed adventure in Iraq are beyond obvious. By losing focus and spreading our resources too thin we’ve turned a possible success in Afghanistan into a failure. That failure has spread to Pakistan (and New Orleans). To imagine a stable Afghanistan one just needs to imagine a world where America does not bomb Iraq, focusing on the task at hand instead of opening a war on two fronts with the entire Muslim world. [more]