NY Times excerpt of Her Way falsely claimed Clinton "first" accused Bush of misusing Iraq authorization in 2006

On May 29, The New York Times published an excerpt of Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s upcoming book Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co., June 2007). The excerpt asserted that Sen. Clinton's June 21, 2006, floor statement marked "the first time in her public speeches" in which she offered "a new interpretation" -- or "revised account" -- of her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq: "The authority Congress given [sic] the president and his administration four years earlier, Clinton explained, had been 'misused' because they acted 'without allowing the inspectors to finish the job in order to rush to war.' " In fact, Clinton has been claiming that President Bush misused the Authorization For Use Of Military Force Against Iraq since at least October 2003.

The Her Way excerpt appeared online on May 29 and will appear in the June 3 issue of The New York Times Magazine. In the excerpt, Gerth and Van Natta examined Clinton's support for a nonbinding amendment, introduced in June 2006 by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jack Reed (D-RI), that called for "the beginning of a phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of the year":

What Clinton had accomplished was symbolic and important, even if it went unnoticed by reporters. Clinton could take credit for a compromise that garnered 39 votes, one independent and one Republican in addition to 37 Democrats. Still later, as the war worsened, she could argue that she had long backed some kind of withdrawal. She could also showcase on her campaign Web site her role as a "leader" in the Senate on national security.

In her impromptu remarks on the Senate floor, Clinton presented the usual litany of criticism against Republicans. Then, for the first time in her public speeches, she offered a new interpretation of her own actions in 2002. The revised account contained an ironic twist with respect to Levin, who had just graciously granted her the floor.

The authority Congress given [sic] the president and his administration four years earlier, Clinton explained, had been "misused" because they acted "without allowing the inspectors to finish the job in order to rush to war." In other words, Bush had given short shrift to diplomacy. Clinton did not mention her own vote against Levin's 2002 amendment, the one that would have required the president to pursue a more diplomatic approach before any invasion of Iraq. Her singling out of President Bush for misusing the authority from Congress played so well it soon became a staple of her campaign speeches.

Clinton said on the Senate floor on June 21, 2006:

CLINTON: As we debate our next steps in Iraq, it is critical that we recognize and fix as best we can the mistakes that have already been made and not repeat them. The Bush Administration misused the authority granted to it, choosing to act without allowing the inspectors to finish the job in order to rush to war, without a plan for securing the country, without an understanding of the insurgency or the true human, financial and strategic costs of this war, all the while viewing the dangerous and unstable conditions in Iraq through rose-colored glasses and the prism of electoral politics here at home.

However, Clinton had been making the same argument since at least October 2003. From a Senate floor speech Clinton delivered on October 17, 2003:

CLINTON: I know, from having heard the brief remarks of the Senator from Florida, that in a few minutes we will hear his usual thoughtful exposition as to why he, too, voted against the $87 billion.

I think it is imperative we all agree that, whichever way one of us voted, for or against this funding, all of us are united in our support for our brave men and women who are literally risking, and all too tragically losing, their lives on a daily basis in Iraq.

This was a very difficult vote for many of us. There are those of us, such as myself, who voted to give the President authority. We disagree with the way he used that authority. We have many questions, and still most are unanswered, about the choices the President and his team have made over the last year. But the idea of giving our President authority to act in the global war against terrorism, if necessary in his opinion, against Saddam Hussein, was one I could support and I did so. In the last year, however, I have been first perplexed, then surprised, then amazed, and even outraged and always frustrated by the implementation of the authority given the President by this Congress.

[...]

CLINTON: Time and time again, the administration has had the opportunity to level with the American people. Unfortunately, they haven't been willing to do that.

Among the many questions that I and others raised and the many criticisms we lodged against the use of the authority , which I and the majority of this body voted for, was the administration's aborting of the United Nations process and the inspections regime in order to launch military action.

There was never any doubt in anyone's mind with any knowledge of the American military what the outcome would be. I, for one, knew there was no worry whatsoever; that we have the finest equipped, trained, and motivated military probably in the history of the world, and they would do the mission they were assigned. So they did.

Clinton expressed the same position in a February 9, 2004, interview with the Poughkeepsie Journal (printed in the paper on February 10):

Q: I want to ask you about Iraq -- and if you had any regrets about the vote that gave President Bush the authority to use force and the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

A: I don't regret giving the president authority; I regret the way he used it, and that's connected with the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue. I believed, like the majority of my colleagues and people from the previous administration as well as this one, that Saddam Hussein did have remaining stockpiles and capability for biological and chemical weapons, and was still intent upon achieving nuclear weapons.

I believe that the Security Council's unanimous resolution to reinstitute inspections was, to a significant extent, influenced by the American Congress resolution. But, from that point on, (it is) a deeply concerning puzzle to me as to why the administration made the decisions that they made, starting with their refusal to permit (U.N. chief weapons inspector) Hans Blix and the inspectors to actually do their job, going through to the fact that they had no plan for the post-military conflict in Iraq, despite numerous questions by me and others on the Arms [sic] Services Committee about how long we are going to be there, how many trips it was going to take, what would the cost be, what would the expected reception from the Iraqis be. They just basically ignored those very important questions ...

[...]

Q: All the more reason, though, to ask why you wouldn't listen to, say, someone like Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who spoke passionately about the fact that Congress was abrogating its responsibility by giving the president this much authority.

A: Well, I think there are three reasons why I made the decision I made. First, perhaps as the senator from New York, what happened to us on 9/11 played a bigger role than it did in the calculations of other senators, and I fully understand and accept that. But, having seen the horrors of the attacks we suffered and knowing as I do that, despite the horrific loss of life on Sept. 11, the introduction of a chemical, biological or radiological weapon would have made it even worse, caused me to be very thoughtful on how I proceeded with the president's request.

Secondly, I think that the Congress was wrong to deny (President Clinton) authority with respect to Kosovo, and they did it for politically partisan reasons, and I don't think that's right. I don't care whether the president's Republican or Democratic. I think you have to take the president at his word, and this president said to us, "We believe there are weapons," which many of us also believed, and "We are going to do everything we can to try to get inspectors in to determine how we can get to the bottom of the evidence that would show us what Saddam has and then finally to disarm him." I found that a legitimate objective because we have been dealing with Saddam Hussein since 1991 in the Gulf War ...

And, finally, I think when you are asked by a president to give him authority to proceed in one manner with the ultimate decision to use force, granted, assuming the following steps would be taken, that doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable. What happened here is that we gave authority to a president who in my view misused the authority. So I think we all have to take a hard look at what happened in the intervening months, and now more than a year, and try to get answers to the questions that we now have to have.

On January 28, 2006, during an interview conducted by former NBC host Jane Pauley, Clinton similarly criticized Bush's misuse of the authority granted to him by Congress. From a Sacramento Bee article published the following day:

Replying to a question from Pauley about why she voted in 2002 to give President Bush authority to wage war in Iraq, Clinton said Bush insisted he needed that authority to prod Iraq into allowing inspectors back into that country. But Bush ultimately misused that authority, Clinton added.

"No matter what one thinks about how President Bush used that authority, we cannot root for failure," Clinton said. "We cannot take actions now that would further undermine whatever chance of stability the new Iraqi government might have."

On the May 31, 2006, edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Clinton campaign aide Howard Wolfson noted that Clinton had made this claim before:

MATTHEWS: Well, there are a lot of people that supported the Vietnam War in '63 and by '68 said it was a mistake to proceed that far. Has she made that kind of a judgment? She doesn't have to recant like in some old inquisition, but can she say looking at it from all the perspective of these last three years, we're just getting deeper and deeper into the sand. That's not recanting, that's not reconsidering, that's looking at new facts.

WOLFSON: Well, she has certainly said that the administration has not gone about it the right way and that the administration misused the authority that Congress gave them.

Indeed, it was no secret that Clinton was making this allegation prior to June 2006. From the September 18, 2004, edition of CNBC's Tim Russert:

RUSSERT: And, yet when you ask Hillary Clinton, who also voted to authorize the war, she'll say, "Yes, I voted to authorize the president, and he misused the authority." And if you asked her, "Knowing what you know today, would you vote for the war?" She said, "There wouldn't be a vote because if there's no weapons of mass destruction, there's no reason to have a vote." A decidedly different tack than John Kerry has taken.