It was impossible not to be moved as Khizr and Ghazala Khan, two Muslim immigrants
from Pakistan, stood before the Democratic National Convention and mourned their
son Humayan, a U.S. soldier who’d been killed in Iraq.
Humayan, his grieving father recalled, was “the best of America.”
Yet if it were up to Donald Trump, Khan said, the slain soldier “never
would have been in America.” It was a compelling rebuke to the GOP nominee’s
unrepentant calls to banish Muslims and immigrants alike.
Trump, in his fashion, responded poorly. The billionaire insisted that, like
the Khans, he’s “made
a lot of sacrifices.” He sneered that perhaps the bereaved Ghazala
had remained silent on stage because “she
wasn’t allowed” to talk.
It was sad and ugly. But amid the word salad was a kernel of truth: “Hillary
voted for the Iraq war,” Trump
cried, “not me!”
There at least, he wasn’t wrong.
As a senator from New York, Clinton not only voted for the war. She was among
its most vocal supporters in either party, eagerly rehashing the Bush administration’s
claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
“I stand by the vote,” Clinton told
the Council on Foreign Relations in late 2003, when those weapons had failed
to materialize. Six months later, Humayan Khan was killed by a car bomb in Iraq.
He was one of 4,424
US soldiers to die in that war – along with perhaps up
to a million Iraqi civilians.
The war in which Khan gave his life has been a political football for so long
that it’s become hard to appreciate just what an enormous catastrophe
it was – and remains. The invasion exploded sectarian tensions across the Middle
East and led directly to the rise of ISIS.
As the worst
refugee crisis since World War II unfolds across the Middle East and Europe
– and as ISIS terrorists murder innocents from Baghdad to Belgium to San Bernardino
– the gaping wound we opened in Iraq sits beneath it all like a black hole,
eviscerating human lives at ferocious speed even 13 years later.
Yet as late as her first presidential bid, Clinton refused to apologize for
supporting the invasion. If you’re looking for “someone who did
not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake,” she
told Democratic voters in 2007, “there are others to choose from.”
As her polling numbers soured, Clinton eventually did cop to making a “mistake”
on Iraq. But that
didn’t stop her, once she joined Obama’s administration, from
supporting escalation in Afghanistan, deeper involvement in Syria, and intervention
in Libya’s civil war, which also ended disastrously.
As a presidential candidate this year, Clinton remains committed to launching
a “no-fly zone” in Syria. What could go wrong?
Well, in Iraq, a no-fly zone gave way to a full-scale invasion….