Here’s an interesting take on the current landscape. While I haven’t read anything else by this guy, and have the feeling our perspectives diverge, he (and, perhaps, more relevantly, Bull Moose) raises an important issue. Does the Democratic party really want to cast itself as being gullible and easily manipulated?
Clearly there was misinformation in the months leading up to the war, and it certainly appears that the Bush administration was gathering and presenting information with a clear objective of going into Iraq. But can the Democrats really claim that they weren’t at all responsible for what happened? And how would we be feeling about this if things in Iraq had gone more smoothly?
The issue in this post is a large part of why John Kerry lost in the presidential election a year ago. Almost all of the Democrats voted in favor of the war in Iraq, and, whatever one thinks about Bush manipulating intelligence to support the cause, the fact is most experts believed that Saddam Hussein at least had biological weapons. Whether that in itself justifies a war is debatable, but what isn’t debatable is that Democrats had the opportunity to object to the war at the outset. They made a decision to support it, and now they have to live with that decision. Trying to rewrite history now and claim they were duped solves nothing and benefits no one.
And, yes, if things had gone better in Iraq, I’m certain that Democrats (and Republicans) would all be taking credit for it, credit claiming being one the favorite pastimes of politicians.
The fact that most experts believed that Saddam had biological weapons should not have been enough to go to war. The Bush team was trying to make the case that Saddam had nuclear weapons (a laughable claim) and that he had connections with Al-Qaeda (an outright absurdity to anyone with minimal knowledge of Baathist ideology). To this day, I am still baffled when I try to understand how an entire country was duped into believing these lies. The truth should have been more ovbious. And somebody somewhere should have stopped this monstrocity.