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Clinton: Hillary Would Win in 2008
The Iraq war is not what makes the United States unpopular in the world, according to former President Clinton. It's our attitude that we are free to act in any way that suits our purposes. Speaking Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Clinton told moderator Tim Russert: "I think it’s true that in the Middle East and many places out in the independent, unaligned countries, they don’t necessarily agree with our Iraq policy. But I think it’s more the feeling that that’s just the most severe example of a country that is more committed to doing what it wants when it wants, and not listening to other people and working with them whenever possible. "And the bigger you are and the wealthier you are and the more traditional power than you have, the more you have to be sensitive to how you’re perceived by other people, the more you at least have to want to have people think that even if you don’t agree with them, you’re kind of on their side. And I don’t think America has any significant image problems that couldn’t be turned around rather quickly with a different way of dealing with people." Clinton added that if there were a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, that would help a lot in the Muslim world, observing that "because everybody knows that in the end, that situation can’t be resolved, in all probability, unless we’re involved in a supportive way in what happens after they sign the deal." Reminded that he had once said, "We may have to decide it’s a lost cause,” he was asked, "How close are we to declaring it a lost cause?" "I am not conversant enough with the facts on the ground to know," he replied. "But I know this is like every insurgency ever, where there is an outside force attempting to provide stability. The good news is we’re not the, you know, we’re not the French, we have no colonial, imperialist, permanent ambitions, but the fact is we’re still guys who are not from there. And therefore, we have to remember that the people are always the prize. "It’s one thing if you’re talking about [Osama] bin Laden and an attempted attack in America. But if you look at Iraq, any time we do something that makes 50 more enemies, even if we catch one bad guy, that may be a, that may be a net bad thing. We could win every single battle and lose the war, because the people are the prize here." Turning to the upcoming November elections, Clinton said he believes Democrats are doing better, citing the nine Democratic Iraq war veterans running for House seats. "We’ve got President Reagan’s former Navy secretary running a great race in the Senate in Virginia. And every Democrat I know -— now, I just heard Amy Klobuchar, a candidate in Minnesota, a prosecutor, speak, and they say something like this: 'We face a serious threat to our security from terrorism. The question is not whether we meet it, but how. I do not agree with a lot of decisions made in Iraq,' and then the candidate says whatever they say. 'I believe that we have made a mistake not intensifying our efforts in Afghanistan to stabilize a moderate pro-American democracy, to fight, to hunt bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. We made a terrible mistake favoring big tax cuts instead of implementing the 9/11 Commission’s homeland security recommendations. And if we really want to be more secure, we need to have a more vigorous effort to get this country independent of foreign oil. So I will fight for the security of America, and don’t believe them when they say, ‘If we don’t agree with everything they’ve done in Iraq, we can’t be trusted.’ ... I think our differences on everything from energy to the economy to the deficit to the minimum wage to you name it will carry the Democrats to a substantial victory." He called the 2002 congressional election campaigns a great GOP shell game. "I mean, you’ve got to give Karl Rove political credit. I mean, they were against the Homeland Security bill for eight and a half months, then they decided they were for it. Then they decided -- because they couldn’t make any votes on us, because we’d been supportive of them in Afghanistan, in the weapons inspections in Iraq -- so they said, 'We’ll just take all the job rights away from 170,000 federal employees, and then when they don’t support this bill, we’ll say, ‘If you’re not for this bill just the way we wrote it, you obviously don’t want to protect America from terror.’” And it was, you know, a lot of people bought it, but I think it’s because we didn’t effectively address it." Acknowledging that Rove and the GOP leadership are "in business to beat us," he touched on the Democrats problems with convincing the people they can be trusted to protect the national security he said "our job is to tell the American people that we, too, want to protect their security. And we have different ideas about how to do it, and then to trust the people to decide. But if you leave people with the impression that your disagreement with the president’s Iraq policy is not part of a broader campaign against terror, then you get in trouble. I think if we do it this time -- and I think we will -- we’ll do fine." He stopped short of claiming the Democrats might recapture the House and possibly the Senate. Speaking of his wife's possible presidential candidacy, he said: "My gut is that she would win. When I said that, I said that in a way of being humble. It is, it is the same way when I ran for president in '92, I wasn’t at all sure I’d win. And then I wanted to make the point that number one, I don’t know if she’s going to, number two I’m not going to talk to her about it until after we get this election out of the way. And number three, I don’t think you run for president because you know for sure you can win, because no one knows that. It’s totally unpredictable. That’s all I meant. Actually, my instinct is that she’d do quite well." He added that he would be fully supportive of her should she run, but said "we shouldn’t be talking about it or thinking about it now, and ... if by whatever means she wound up being president, I think she would be a superb president. I’d be very amazed if she weren’t just great. But I don’t know if she’s going to run, I don’t want to talk to her about it, and I don’t want her thinking about it until we get this election out of the way." Editor's note:
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