Now, note how I didn’t say she was necessarily right, about Kyl-Lieberman, but posts saying that the revelation that Iran apparently halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003 is worse for Hillary than it is for Bush seems a bit absurd to me.

First of all, despite many on the left’s mischaracterization (to put it kindly. I could use “lie” as well) of Kyl-Lieberman, it was nothing like the AUMF (and even that I claim isn’t as bad as the left makes it out o be).

Basically, liberal blogs claim that the Kyl-Lieberman amendment is AUMF II, except this time for Iran. There are several reasons why it’s not.

1. The Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq was a law. It was binding. The Kyl-Lieberman amendment was a Sense of the Senate resolution.

2. While the AUMF against Iraq did authorize the use of force, it did so by requiring that Bush show to Congress that:

“reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq”

Meanwhile, the original text of Kyl-Lieberman didn’t even go as far as the AUMF and said:

to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies

Not necessarily great language, but it’s not AUMF language. However, this text killed the amendment and Kyl and Lieberman ended taking it out. As a result, the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that actually passed neither had this text PLUS it had added text stressing that diplomacy was clearly the preferred way to deal with Iran.

How you get a “vote in favor of war with Iran” out of that, I’m not sure. That is unless you just hate Hillary Clinton and everything she does is evil.

3. There is the argument that by stating that it was the sense of the senate that Bush designate the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization (note, the Senate was merely saying they thought he should. They didn’t actually give the designation, and he could have, and probably would have, granted it even without this), they give Bush free-reign to attack Iran since, of course, if they’re terrorists, then we bomb them.

There are several issues with this. The first one I’ve already pointed out: Bush almost certainly would have designated the Revolutionary Guards as such even without this resolution, so this resolution basically caused nothing. Second, if Bush wanted to use terrorism as an excuse to attack Iran, he already had that justification, being that Iran is on the list of state sponsors of terrorism already.

4. I can vividly recall the days when liberals decried these Sense of the Congress resolutions as “toothless” and “meaningless.” I guess they’re only toothless and meaningless when they vote on a Sense of the Senate resolution that liberals actually support.

Now, granted given the news that Iran may have ended it’s nuclear weapons program in 2003, voting in favor of Kyl-Lieberman may seem, in part, unnecessary (though there were more reasons behind it than just their nuclear program), and I’m not sure whether any members of Congress had access to this NIE report before voting on that resolution. If not, all they had access to would have been the previous NIE, which was much more dire about Iran, and thus one could understand why someone might take a position to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Also the claims that this gives Bush a blank check, in essence, validates his “unitary executive” viewpoint. The Left Coaster explains it well, I think:

Just because Bush might falsely claim that this toothless resolution gives him the legal authority to invade Iran, doesn’t mean that progressives should be claiming that it gives him that authority. What Sen. Obama and Sen. Edwards are doing here – with this line of argument – is unfortunately advancing the destructive right-wing meme that the President of the United States can use stuff that has nothing to do with law as justification to do patently illegal things. According to this theory – which Sen. Clinton obviously disagrees with – if Sen. Obama becomes President and the Senate passes a legally toothless “Sense of the Senate” resolution against Country X, President Obama can bomb Country X freely because such a bombing would be considered Congressionally sanctioned. This is dangerous nonsense that no Democrat should ever be advancing.

Many on the left either hope, or even think, that this vote will come back to bite Clinton.  However, they thought the same thing about the AUMF vote, and it didn’t.  Remember back in February when everyone who voted for the war couldn’t stumble over each other fast enough to get in front of a camera and apologize for it?  Meanwhile, Clinton wouldn’t, and everyone on the left said that this would doom her?

Well, obviously it didn’t.  And not only that, but A Washington Post/ABC poll at the time showed that 52% of democrats believed that Clinton’s vote for the AUMF against Iraq was the right decision.  This was February of this year.  And only 31% of the 47% who thought it was a mistake thought she should apologize for it (that’s 15% of the total).

I think the same would be true for Kyl-Lieberman, and I have a feeling it’s for a rather simple reason: who people place the burden of responsibility on for taking an action.

What I mean by this is that, I think (I don’t have any real evidence to back this up, I’m just hypothesizing), is that most people have a belief that someone is responsible for their own actions, but that people who may have enabled them to take that action may not necessarily be responsible.

It’s kind of the belief that it wasn’t appeasement which started World War II, it was Hitler who started World War II.  With Iraq, I think people are smart enough to realize that the ultimate trigger-puller was Bush, not Congress.  This is especially the case since Congress told Bush that he shouldn’t start the war unless it was clear diplomacy couldn’t work anymore and that clearly wasn’t the case.  Should members of Congress take responsibility for their vote? Yes, and Clinton says she has.  However, let’s not forget that if Bush invades Iran using some non-binding Congressional resolution that doesn’t even call for war, that the problem is Bush’s, not Congress’.

And one final note.  I hear a lot of reasoning along the lines of “we know Bush will grab onto anything he can get, so you shouldn’t give him anything!” to justify basically doing nothing on anything when it comes to Iran.  This even goes as far as some saying that “all options are on the table” – something which is basically known to be understood even when it’s not said -  gives Bush justification for an attack.

However, under a situation where Iran could possibly be a threat (and it was believed that this was the case up until only a few days ago), what did Democrats think Bush could do?  There was basically a feeling on the left that telling him to negotiate was pointless, and telling him to flex his muscles was dangerous.  So what exactly should Congress have done?  The answer I seem to get is “sit on their hands until 2009.”  That’s not a great policy position to take with a county which allegedly had a nuke program and was unfriendly to us.  Luckily for the liberal wing of the party, this report came out, hopefully making Iran, for the most part, a non-issue (or at least not as big of one).

As for Clinton, the test for her is to see how she changes her rhetoric in response to this new NIE report.