Michael at Levellers expresses some well-justified outrage at Bill Clinton’s recent attempts to whitewash history and portray himself as an early opponent of the Iraq war. But as I mentioned in a comment to Michael’s post, not only did Clinton not oppose the war, his Iraq policy made it much more likely than it otherwise would’ve been.

His administration did everything it could to hype the danger posed by Saddam’s regime, talked up the threat of WMDs, officially supported a policy of regime change, etc. After 9/11 happened Saddam was already poised as the Hitler du jour in the minds of most policymakers and pundits. Clinton did as much as anyone to promote the idea of Saddam as a great menace to the U.S. and world peace.

Needless to say, this had numerous real-world consequences, such as the no-fly zone enforcement and the UN-approved sanctions regime. The human toll of this exercise in “soft power” is disputed, but no one denies that the people of Iraq suffered terribly, not least because they were prevented from rebuilding their country’s infrastructure which had been so badly damaged during the first Gulf War. So, far from being “opposed” to war with Iraq, the Clinton administration carried on a low-grade war against Iraq for nearly ten years.