Over the last week, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign has opened a new offensive against Senator Barack Obama: Former President Bill Clinton has asserted that Mr. Obama was initially ambivalent about the Iraq war, and Mrs. Clinton's strategist has highlighted his votes to finance a war he says he opposes.
But a review of Mr. Obama's statements on Iraq since 2002 shows that he has opposed the war against Saddam Hussein consistently, calling it "dumb" and "rash." Yet when it came later to hypothetical questioning about how he would have voted on the 2002 Iraq war resolution, Mr. Obama has been more circumspect.With the war a central issue in the campaign and with part of Mr. Obama's appeal among Democrats rooted in his opposition to the war, his stance and the question of whether he has been consistent are likely to be themes throughout his battle for the Democratic nomination, especially if Mr. Obama uses his position to suggest that Mrs. Clinton and other candidates failed to be sufficiently skeptical of the Bush administration.
While Mr. Obama's positions on the war are generally of a piece, he has been more outspoken on some aspects of Iraq than others. In 2002, in the weeks before and after the Senate voted on the war resolution, Mr. Obama, then a state senator, took a strong antiwar line, popular in his liberal Chicago district, and repeatedly said President Bush "has not made his case for going into Iraq."
When it came to the sort of hypothetical questions politicians dislike, like whether he would have voted for the resolution, Mr. Obama was more reserved.
"I think I would have agreed with our senior Senator Dick Durbin and voted nay," he said in November 2002. "What I would have been concerned about was a carte blanche to the administration for a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes that I'm not sure sets a good precedent."
At that time, Mr. Obama said he had based his judgments on following the debate in Washington and on his gut. He did not have access, of course, to the intelligence reports that were provided to senators voting on the resolution. He brought up that fact two years later, in the 2004 presidential race, as he made clear that while he opposed the war, senators who voted for it were acting on other information.
Indeed, reporters asked Mr. Obama about the Democratic presidential ticket throughout the 2004 campaign, because Senators John Kerry and John Edwards had both voted for the Iraq war resolution. In an interview with The New York Times in July 2004, he declined to criticize Mr. Kerry or Mr. Edwards over the Iraq vote, but also said that he would not have voted as they had based on the information he had at the time.
"But, I'm not privy to the Senate intelligence reports," Mr. Obama said. "What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made."
The Clinton campaign has lifted part of that comment - "I don't know" - to question whether Mr. Obama would have opposed the war resolution had he been in the Senate at the time. The campaign has also cited other remarks Mr. Obama made in 2004, when he said there was "room for disagreement" on the war resolution vote.
In an interview yesterday, Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, was asked eight times to explain Mr. Obama's "I don't know" remark on Iraq. Mr. Burton repeatedly returned to the last sentence in the remark - that Mr. Obama believed the case for war was not made. Finally, he said he would not comment on a hypothetical about how Mr. Obama might have voted in 2002.
Mr. Burton also said Mr. Clinton was "100 percent inaccurate" in suggesting that Mr. Obama was ever ambivalent about Iraq.
The other line of attack from the Clinton camp, voiced Monday night by Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton's chief strategist, is that Mr. Obama's Senate voting record on Iraq is nearly identical to Mrs. Clinton's, including votes for financing the war.
Mr. Obama's criticism of the war led him to say, in 2003, that he would have opposed the $87 billion emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. Once elected to the Senate in 2004, however, Mr. Obama voted in favor of spending bills for the Iraq military campaign and the troops there.
An Obama spokesman said yesterday that Mr. Obama's only problem with the $87 billion bill was the roughly $20 billion part for reconstruction and no-bid contracts. But the subsequent spending bills Mr. Obama voted for also included similar allocations. Mr. Burton, the Obama spokesman, said those bills were less problematic because the money was better accounted for.
Yesterday, on a conference call with reporters, Mr. Obama said his votes for Iraq spending bills did not contradict his opposition to the war.
"Once we were in, we were going to have some responsibility to try to make it work as best we can," Mr. Obama said, according to The Associated Press. "More importantly, you make sure the troops are supported." (The Iraq war began in the spring of 2003, however, so the troops were already in when the $87 billion bill came up for a vote.)
The Clinton campaign has pounded especially hard on those Iraq spending votes as evidence that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have similar Senate records on Iraq. Clinton advisers say their goal is to show that Mr. Obama campaigned one way and acted another way in office. They said also they also hoped to offset Mrs. Clinton's shifts in her Iraq position by focusing on Mr. Obama, whom they see as a real threat to winning the Democratic nomination.
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