Those Who Voted for the War

Ted Rall's latest is a repudiation of those Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 and now are trying to distance themselves from that vote. I'm not fan of Rall, but I do agree with some points. He quotes Senator and possible presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, "If Congress had been asked [to authorize the war], based on what we know now, we never would have agreed." The defense is, "We didn't know."

Well, yes you did, Senator. The UN had weapons inspectors investigating sites administration intelligence said housed WMD production facilities, and consistently found nothing. Everyone knew this. That the Senator chose not to believe these facts is not the same as saying she didn't know them. The truth is most people believed Saddam had weapons (as the president consistently reminded us since things have gone bad, he wasn't the only one who believed it), so they chose to ignore the facts, and in that way she and many other Democrats failed the American people.

But, as I've written on from the beginning of this blog, the failure goes deeper than that. Not only did the Senator ignore the plain facts being reported by the inspectors, she and the rest of the Democrats made little effort to evaluate the rest of the evidence the president presented to justify his war. When the documents were offered for Congressional perusal, no one bothered to even read. So, to whatever extent one wants to argue the Senator really didn't know as she claims, it is to a large extent because she didn't want to find out.

I focus on Senator Clinton, but she is emblematic of numerous Democrats who chose political expediency in 2002, and voted for an ill-advised war because they were too terrified of standing up to the president and of losing their precious seats.

So don't give me the "We didn't know" defense. If you really didn't know, you have no business being in Congress.