Reply #119: I agree that there is a possibility that he would have

[karynnj]

He was not a loner in the Senate and the vote was constructed to be difficult - with Bush saying it was not a vote for war (speech in Cleveland). Many of the Democrats started arguing in the summer of 2002 that Bush could not go to war in Iraq based on the authorization to fight terrorism and that it was important to go to the UN. Several Democrats saw the fact that Bush did agree to both bring it to Congress and to the UN as a victory. In addition, Bush agreed to many changes to his original.

Now, history shows that Bush had no intention of NOT going to war. It is also clear that Bush did not really care about what words were added or subtracted from the IWR - he was not negotiating in good faith.

I can actually see Obama in either group - with Kennedy et al saying that war was not justified at that time - so no authorization was warranted. Or, arguing that a President could argue from a position of strength if he had this resolution. (Remember that it is not all that far from the resolution that Clinton got that agreed that regime change would be acceptable - and which of course did not lead to war under Clinton.) The other thing to remember was that in 2002, the rest of the world was on the verge of ending the sanctions - that should never have been allowed to be in place for 12 years.