Reply #7: The part I printed is ONE, here's another (difficult since we can only [View All]

excerpt 4 paragraphs):

-snipped- (Senator Clinton says that in 2002, Obama said "we didn't have to make any efforts" re Saddam)

That was one helluva charge. Obama was willing to sit back and let a WMD-toting dictator go along on his merry own way (while Clinton was doing what she could to pin down that snake). Could this be true? Had Obama been a do-nothing appeaser of Saddam in 2002? (Forget for a moment that it turned out Saddam had zilch in the WMD department at the time.) I emailed Howard Wolfson, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, and asked for a citation to back up this incendiary allegation. He quickly replied, directing me to page 294 of Obama's Audacity of Hope.


Obama writes on this page, "Like most analysts, I assumed that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and coveted nuclear arms." Indeed, that's what Clinton had maintained he had said. So far so good. But what about Clinton's charge that Obama didn't want to do anything about a WMD-bearing Saddam? For that, Wolfson provided a link to the same speech that Russert had quoted from. And Wolfson pointed out this particular sentence:

can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

Was favoring the continuing containment of Saddam Hussein in October 2002 the equivalent of doing nothing? That's what Clinton was suggesting on Meet the Press (adopting a talking point of the neoconservative cheerleaders for the war). But in that same 2002 speech, Obama advocated making "sure that the UN inspectors can do their work." That was not a call for doing nothing. And in his book--on the very page that Wolfson cited--Obama fully explains his position at the time,