Compare and contrast, Democratic senator John Edwards, recently acknowledging his fuckup in voting for the war on Iraq:
Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told — and what many of us believed and argued — was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.
It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn’t make a mistake — the men and women of our armed forces and their families — have performed heroically and paid a dear price.
With Democratic senator Robert Byrd, in his speech explaining why he voted against the war:
So where does Iraq enter the equation? No one in the Administration has been able to produce
any solid evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attack. Iraq had biological and chemical
weapons long before September 11. We knew it then, and we know it now. Iraq has been an enemy
of the United States for more than a decade. If Saddam Hussein is such an imminent threat to the
United States, why hasn’t he attacked us already? The fact that Osama bin Laden attacked the
United States does not, de facto, mean that Saddam Hussein is now in a lock and load position and
is readying an attack on the United States. In truth, there is nothing in the deluge of Administration
rhetoric over Iraq that is of such moment that it would preclude the Senate from setting its own timetable and taking the time for a thorough and informed discussion of this crucial issue.
As I’ve said before, it’s simply not true that, as John Edwards wants us to believe, everybody though Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. The evidence presented for it was so flimsy anybody willing to look at it clearly could see that it was untrue even if, like me, they had to rely on newspaper reports rather than intelligence briefs. It’s just pathetic to suggest that as a US senator John Edwards could not have known this intelligence to be flawed; if he was mislead it was because he wanted to be mislead. Senator Byrd in his speech before the vote, which as you know was taken just before the 2002 elections, said that “Democrats favor fast approval of a resolution so they can change the subject to domestic economic problems.”
Which explains why the war issue was never raised during the 2004 presidential elections. Most of the
Democratic Party establishment wanted the war as badly as Bush did, for a mixture of reasons: they wanted to get back to “normal” politics, didn’t want to be seen as weak on defence, perhaps thought that Bush could genuinely pull it off, or similar dumb reasons. Now that it has blown up in their faces they’re trying to reposition themselves as skeptical of the war, but without great conviction.
So now we have the sorry spectacle of an opposition party unable or unwilling to actually provide opposition on the most important issue of the day, a party hopelessly compromised by its past support for this issue. Is it any wonder the Democrats can’t gain any traction against Bush?