President Hillary Clinton: Hawk or Dove?

By Nancy Kassop, Guardian UK

03 October 13

Clinton once claimed she could handle 3am emergencies better than Obama, but her record is muddled on security issues

n February 2008, in the heat of the presidential primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign ran a striking TV ad, implying that she had more national security experience than Barack Obama. Five years later, we know how President Obama has performed in office. His actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now, Syria, as well as recent revelations on his administration's pursuit of warrantless data collection, will be fodder for many years hence to judge the quality and wisdom of his leadership on national security issues. But what would President Hillary Clinton be like as commander-in-chief?

As the 2016 presidential buzz gets louder, where might we look for clues as to how Clinton would approach the use of military force, both as a policy matter and as one of constitutional power? "Clues" are simply all we have at this moment, and even they are contradictory.

Consider her vote as US senator in 2002 to support President George W Bush's invasion of Iraq, a vote that she later regretted but for which she refused to apologize, fearing the "flip-flopper" label if she did. Or her impassioned February 2007 remarks on the Senate floor, warning President Bush against taking military action against Iran without first securing authorization from Congress for "any, any use of force against Iran" (with an emphatic rising of her voice on the second "any").

In her early days campaigning, Clinton sounded like a constitutional lawyer's dream with her strict interpretation of the separation of powers in American government and a restoration of the checks and balances on the Oval Office. In December 2007, Clinton responded to pointed questions from then-Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage on her views of the constitutional limits on presidential power. She said:

The constitution requires Congress to authorize war. I do not believe that the president can take military action, including any type of strategic bombing, against Iran without congressional authorization.

To a question about whether a president has inherent powers under the constitution to conduct national security surveillance without judicial warrants and in the face of federal statutes requiring them, she answered directly, "No, the president is not above the law." When asked if there were actions taken by the Bush administration that she thought were unconstitutional, she listed "failing to comply with Fisa, failing to adhere to Congress's prohibition on torture … and attempting to hold enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantánamo without review" as a few examples. She concluded her answer with:

I reject the basic premise of the Bush administration's view that executive power is not subject to the rule of law or to constitutional checks and balances.

In a wide-ranging address in April 2008 at the annual conference of the Newspaper Association of America, she again emphasized a pledge to work with Congress "to restore respect for our co-equal branches of government", and the need for a president "to be willing to recognize the checks and balances that have certainly been a blessing to our system of government for so many years".

Then, we turn to her time as secretary of state, when she faced real decision-making that carried political as well as human consequences. Two examples stand out: her pivotal role in persuading the president, against the advice of his military advisors, to launch air strikes in Libya in March 2011, and what can be assumed to be her tacit consent to the legality of targeted killings outside theaters of war.

Libya marked a seeming departure from her earlier interpretations of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Clinton, US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and National Security Council member Samantha Power urged Obama to approve US participation in Nato operations in Libya for humanitarian purposes in circumstances where there was no clear or vital US security interest.

The president's actions in Libya drew sharp criticism from scholars and commentators on two fronts: first, whether Obama's decision to commit US forces to the Nato operation without congressional authorization, for a non-defensive purpose, violated the War Powers Resolution; second, whether the administration's refusal to comply with the War Powers Resolution's 60-day automatic pullout provision also violated the law. But the message was clear: he pursued airstrikes for humanitarian reasons, as urged by Clinton, but based on the semantically strained interpretations of the War Powers Resolution by her legal adviser, Harold Koh, who jettisoned the need – both at the start of the strikes and at the 60-day point – for any congressional authorization.

The Clinton commitment to include Congress as a full participant in use of force decisions seemingly failed a big test.

The drone strikes appear another turning-point for Clinton. Here, too, the connection to Koh is key. Whether there is "daylight" between Koh's views and her own is indecipherable, but it is more than fair to assume that, had she determined any of his legal interpretations to be unsupportable, she would have prevented them from going forward.

Koh's eventual embrace of the legal arguments justifying targeted killings occurred over time, with strict rules of application and not without considerable moral wrangling on his part. He ultimately developed a theory of "elongated imminence", where a consistent pattern of behavior by suspected senior terrorist leaders constituted the necessary element under international law to justify a state to kill in self-defense. The extent of congressional participation in the formulation of targeted killing policy is a matter of ongoing debate.

What does this say about Clinton's views of a president's power as commander-in-chief?

First, she would not be the first national leader to pronounce lofty principles on the campaign trail, only to find that, once in office, those principles often give way to the real politik of governing. The current occupant of the office to which she may aspire is Exhibit A for that proposition.

Do we have reason to hold her to her 2008 campaign promises about respect for a governmental system of checks and balances that imposes limits on presidential power, when her own actions in office have, at times, belied those pledges? Perhaps, the best we might do is to acknowledge the reality that, as a key player in foreign policy decision-making for four years, she has absorbed the lessons of what is reasonable to promise.

One hopes, however, that she can find a way to "incorporate" back into those lessons the fundamental principles she so eloquently urged as a senator and candidate. That will be her ultimate challenge to achieve – and ours to hold her to those higher standards if she moves forward with a presidential campaign.