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http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0804,robbins,78933,2.htmlOne such recollection is particularly fresh. The ex-president was stumping through Iowa for his wife in late November when he suddenly announced that he'd been against the Iraq War "from the beginning." This was nonsense, of course. "I don't think it will be a big military problem if we do it," he had said back in 2002 as war loomed. In 2003, he said with apparent pride: "I supported the president when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
As reporters searched out these old quotes, Clinton's aides hastened to explain that the ex-president had been forced to keep his true feelings to himself at the time because of his standing as a former commander in chief.
And yet, back then, Clinton's former vice president, Al Gore, had no such qualms about speaking his mind: Stay focused on Al Qaeda, Gore warned in the fall of 2002 as Bush and Cheney taunted Democrats in Congress, daring them to vote against their war. "Do not jump from one unfinished task to another," he said. Bush had said nothing about his plans after the invasion, Gore noted. For Gore, a former hawk, it was thoughtful stuff, reasoning that we now know to have been prophetic.
Presumably, even an ex-president's discretion would not have prevented Bill Clinton from advising Hillary Clinton as she made her own decision. Whatever he told her, she nevertheless voted with the majority to authorize the war. It was the most critical vote she ever cast, Hillary has acknowledged. And yet, as New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. reported in their book, Her Way, she never got around to reading the classified National Intelligence Estimate. Former Florida Senator Bob Graham read the 90-page document and urged his colleagues to do likewise, saying it raised big questions for him as to whether the administration even knew what it was talking about regarding events inside Iraq. Graham voted against the war.