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All this nonsense about how Clinton believed and said the same things about Iraq.... Digby sends it straight into the cheap seats

Clinton said that American policy was that if Saddam took certain threatening actions, we would use force. Bush and Cheney said that Saddam might take threatening actions, so they had to invade. That's quite a different threat assessment. Clinton never suggested an invasion and occupation to deal with Saddam, his policy was to contain him with threats and judicious use of force when he provoked us. And apparently it worked. There were, after all, no weapons of mass destruction and he had perpetrated none of the other actions that would have led to a need for further use of force as of 2002.

That's one of the things that has baffled me about this talking point. Clinton's policy was so obviously different from Bush's that, well... you have to wonder about the mental health of people making this claim. And beyond that, as Digby points out, since their policies were so different, and since Bush's policy was to invade but find no weapons, it is clear that Clinton's policy was in fact successful not just at containing Saddam, but also at destroying his WMD! Think it through. In the early 90's we know for a fact Saddam had WMD. We also know for a fact that by the early 2000's he didn't have them any more. What happened in between? Right....

I'll leave you with more Digby:

The true irony is that it now appears that Clinton managed to accomplish what Bush said needed to be done, with a heavy bombing campaign during his own impeachment. (Talk about multi-tasking.) Bush came along and spent billions of dollars, stretched our military beyond its capabilities, destroyed our international credibility and got tens of thousands killed to accomplish something that had already been done in 1998. What a cock-up.

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