Clinton admits error in voting for Iraq war
Hillary Clinton admits she “got it wrong” in voting to support then-U.S. president George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, but says she disagreed with current president Barack Obama’s decision not to arm moderate rebels in Syria, say excerpts from her new book.
Clinton also says she and former U.S. president Bill Clinton “fully appreciate how hard life is for so many Americans,” as she sought to refine remarks she had made about the pair being “dead broke” and $12 million in debt when they left the White House.
The former U.S. secretary of state has just released Hard Choices, the manifesto-memoir widely seen as the launch pad for another bid for the U.S. presidency in 2016.
In a TV interview with ABC, Clinton said she wants “to use the talent and resources that I have to make sure” others have the same opportunities she has had — seen by many as proof she will seek the Democratic Party nomination for the 2016 White House.
On the invasion of Iraq, she writes: “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong.
“But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple,” she writes about her support of the war, renouncing a decision that Obama used against her in their bitter 2008 primary contest.
Clinton is on an extensive tour to publicize the 688-page account of her four years as senior U.S. diplomat, working for Obama but not always agreeing with him.
But she remains respectful of the man who crushed her hopes of becoming the first female U.S. president in 2008, while carefully distancing herself from Obama’s decision not to intervene in Syria’s civil war. Describing the Syrian conflict as a “wicked problem,” Clinton says she believed the U.S. should have armed the moderate rebels and helped them in their fight against the Assad regime.