This week marks the 5th anniversary of the Congressional vote granting ... Bush unprecedented war-making authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing... As a result, the responsibility for the deaths of nearly 4000 American soldiers, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the waste of over a half trillion dollars of our national treasury, and the rise of terrorism and Islamist extremism ... rests as much in the hands of the members in Congress who authorized the invasion as it does with the administration that requested it.
...remember this: the October 2002 resolution ... had the support of the majority of Democratic senators as well as the support of the Democratic Party leadership in both the House and the Senate.
Seven of the 77 senators who voted to authorize the invasion ... are now running for president. While the Republican candidates remain unapologetic, the Democratic candidates have sought to distance themselves from their vote, arguing that what is important ... is not how they voted in the past, but what s/he would do now... Such efforts to avoid responsibility should be rejected out of hand... No reasonable person... could have supported the resolution authorizing the invasion five years ago
... the tragic consequences of a U.S. invasion of Iraq and a refutation of falsehoods being put forward by the Bush administration to justify it were made available to every member of the House and Senate...
Some ... who voted for the war resolution and their supporters have since tried to rewrite history ...were alerted by large numbers of scholars of the Middle East, Middle Eastern political leaders, former State Department and intelligence officials and others ... that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would likely result in a bloody insurgency, a rise in Islamist extremism and terrorism, increased sectarian and ethnic conflict and related problems...
Therefore, claims by Senator Hillary Clinton and other leading Democratic supporters of the war that they were unaware of the likely consequences of the invasion are completely false... members who now claim they were “misled” about Iraq’s alleged military threat fail to explain why they found the administration’s claims so much more convincing than the many other reports made available to them from more objective sources that presumably made a much stronger case that Iraq no longer had offensive WMD capability.
... those members... who supported this resolution believed, or claimed to believe, that an impoverished Third World country, which had eliminated its stockpiles of banned weapons, destroyed its medium and long-range missiles, and eliminated its WMD programs more than a decade earlier, and had been suffering under the strictest international sanctions in world history for more than a dozen years, somehow threatened the national security of a superpower located more than 10,000 miles away.... that this supposed threat was so great that the United States had no choice but to launch an invasion of that country...
...This shows a frighteningly low threshold for effectively declaring war... As a result, support for the 2002 Iraq war resolution is not something that can simply be forgiven and forgotten.
by Stephen Zunes
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/10/4445/
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