General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: DO NOT BE FOOLED!!! [View all]pnwmom
(109,055 posts)the war couldn't go forward UNLESS they found WMD's. So the fact that WMD's in Iraq were unlikely would mean that going to war would be unlikely, because the IWR would only allow going to war if WMD's were found. So reading the NEI might not have changed her mind.
The Dems who voted for that conditional IWR knew that if they voted it down, the Rethugs would just put up an unconditional IWR in January when they took over Congress. They tried -- and failed --to rein Bush in with their conditional IWR.
No, I don't blame them for trying. Al Sharpton and Ted Kennedy and others were proven to have made the right call. But the war would have gone forward in March, whether it was with the IWR passed in the fall, or another one passed in January.
Ted Kennedy has talked about how the Bush administration deceived the Senate. Hillary was among those deceived.
http://www.cfr.org/iraq/foreign-policy-address-edward-m-kennedy/p6834
QUESTIONER: My name is [inaudible]. I work for the State Department's Washington File. In the run-up to the war, [Senator] Robert Byrd [D-West Virginia] was almost the only voice in Congress making a case against the war. Where were the other members of Congress at that time?
KENNEDY: The question is Robert Byrd spoke out brilliantly against the war; where were the others? They weren't behind Robert Byrd where they should've been. [Laughter.] I was glad to be there with Robert Byrd on that issue, but the clearly, we shouldn't have been there. I reached that my decision as a member of the Armed Services Committee [by] listening to members of the military testify and predicting exactly what was going to come. You listen to General [Joseph P.] Hoar [USMC (ret.)], the principal former leaders both of the Marines and the military, [and] men and women who had experience and had been over in that region of the world, [and they] absolutely predicted exactly what was going to happen. And it was so powerful, clear, and convincing, that the decision was an easy one for me.
Quite frankly, our colleagues, some of those that were on the Armed Services Committee, reached the similar conclusion. Senator Byrd is on that Armed Services Committee. But it was the we I think what they would say is they didn't have the kind of balanced information that many of the rest of us had. There's no question, as I mentioned in the talk, that the presentation that was made to the members of the United States Senate misrepresented and distorted the intelligence information. And we have to have, as any democracy has to have, confidence in both what the president is going to tell you and what the president's representatives are going to tell you. And when they had the kind of series of misrepresentations that I've reviewed, this is an indictment of this administration in its own words.