Its fundamentally wrong to assume Haiti is equal to iraq. While I still personally diagree with it, our Haiti policy falls under the Roosevelt Corrolary of the Monroe Doctrine. We've been involved in Haiti and the rest of the local islands for a long time (not to mention South America). Regime change and nation building in the Middle East is a wholly new thing, and one for which we were not prepared. While I think Clinton was a little more hard-lined against Sadaam than he is leading on, he never acted on a policy of eliminating him and could have very well been against this particular war in the particular circumstances that surrounded it. I don't think he's being dishonest, just politically aware of the situation at hand.
Wrong, Mike. He's being totally dishonest. A brief perusal around the con blogosphere shows just how precise Clinton's approval of Bush's actions were:
Indeed, the former president boasted in a June 2004 interview with Time magazine: “I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq.”
… For the record, then, here’s what Clinton really had to say about the Iraq war.
“We’ve got the power, we’ve got the juice. We should do the job,” he told students at the University of Florida in an April 2003 speech.
Later that month, Clinton declared in St. Louis: “Saddam is gone and good riddance” – adding: “Bush has done the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein from power.”
And just days after Bush’s controversial State of the Union Address that year, Clinton said: “It is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted-for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”
What’s more, Bill Clinton made a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq: In a 2004 Time interview, the former president stressed that because of 9/11, Bush had an obligation to move against Saddam:
“That’s why I supported the Iraq thing,” he said. “There was a lot of [weapons] stuff unaccounted for . . . When you’re the president, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.” …
Nice try, though.
Ryan didn't even need to make the Haiti case when Clinton's own words make the IRAQ case for him.
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