Liar, liar

Pants on fire.

Showing inconsistency on an issue that has dogged his wife, former President Bill Clinton told Iowa Democrats on Tuesday that he “opposed (war in) Iraq from the beginning.”
Clinton was in Iowa on the campaign trail for his wife, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.
On Iraq, he told the crowd that wealthy people like he and his wife should pay more taxes in times of war. “Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” Clinton said, according to The Washington Post.
Click here to read The Washington Post article.
But the former president’s opposition to the war has not been clear from the start. Like his wife, Clinton has been critical of the Iraq war in recent months, but in the past gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt.
“I supported the president when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” he said in May 2003, the same year he was quoted praising Bush’s handling of the war.
In a June 2004 article in Time magazine, Clinton also suggested that he would have acted the same way Bush did.
“So, you’re sitting there as president, you’re reeling in the aftermath of (Sept. 11), so, yeah, you want to go get (Usama) bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, ‘Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I’ve got to do that.’ That’s why I supported the Iraq thing,” he is quoted telling the magazine.
Sen. Clinton voted to authorize the war in Iraq, and has not apologized for her decision despite attacks from war opponents Sen. Barack Obama and John Edwards.
Asked about the discrepancy, Clinton aides said Tuesday’s comment was a short-handed explanation of his long-held views that weapons inspectors should have been given more time in Iraq. “As he said before the war and many times since, President Clinton disagreed with taking the country to war without allowing the weapons inspectors to finish their jobs,” said spokesman Jay Carson.
The Clinton camp also said that in the Time article, Clinton stated that he “would not have done it until after (then-chief U.N. weapons inspector) Hans Blix finished the job.”
Commenting on the apparent shift, Sen. Joe Lieberman, the 2000 vice presidential candidate and a pro-Iraq war Democrat, said he was surprised by Clinton’s turnaround.
“Clinton and (Al) Gore basically believed in a principled foreign policy, pro-freedom, sounds familiar, just like George W. Bush, and the willingness to use military force to back it up, as they did in Bosnia and Kosovo, Lieberman told FOX Radio’s “Brian and the Judge.” Lieberman added that he can’t explain why Clinton would now change his philosophy. “I don’t know. To me that’s when the Democratic Party was where it should be and, frankly, when it’s there, it wins elections.”