Frank Rich: Senator Clinton's 'mission unaccomplished' on Iraq

RAW STORY:

In his latest column in the Sunday New York Times, Frank Rich takes aim at Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for trying to "rewrite her own history on Iraq to match" the positions held a long time before by other prominent Democrats, including at least one of her main rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination: Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).
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"The Democrats' pre-eminent presidential candidate can't escape the war any more than the president can," Rich writes. "And so she was blindsided Tuesday night, just as Bush was, by an unexpected gate-crasher, the rookie senator from Virginia, Jim Webb."

Rich adds, "Though he's not a candidate for national office, Webb's nine-minute Democratic response not only upstaged the president but also, in an unintended political drive-by shooting, gave Clinton a more pointed State of the Union 'contrast' than she had bargained for."

"Clinton cannot rewrite her own history on Iraq to match Obama's early opposition to the war, or Webb's," Rich continues. "She was not prescient enough to see, as Webb wrote in The Washington Post back in September 2002, that 'unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is clearly at stake.'"