Hi Andrew

Bush was really popular right after 9/11. He started all that crap about WMD. I knew he was lying. The rest of the world knew he was lying. DeFazio and Kucinich knew he was lying. Congress knew he was lying but he had a 90% favorability rating. It was very, very wrong for the Democrats to pretend that they believed the myth but perhaps they justified their votes by thinking it's better for them to be re-elected than risk getting more Repubilcans in.

So for whom did you vote?

OK, how about some, uh, facts here? It may be your opinion that the moon is blue but that don't make it so.

On what date before March 2003 did Kucinich or DeFazio say that they thought Iraq did not have WMDs?

Voting NO on the 2002 authorization to use force against Saddam Hussein would have been disastrous. Saddam was certainly a dangerous guy - we knew that from his past. He certainly needed to be contained. And he was not cooperating with weapons inspectors. A "NO" vote would have made the nation look weak and emboldened Saddam. I blame the Bush administration for pushing for such a vote in the first place when they clearly intended an invasion anyway. The threat of force, not actual force, was what was needed to contain Saddam. The threat worked. Saddam allowed weapons inspectors back in. Had Bush stopped there, we'd probably be hailing him today as one of the great presidents, who had knocked over the Taliban and forced the evil Saddam (who may have been toppled by now anyway) to let weapons inspectors back into Iraq.

The issue about the Iraq war wasn't that people thought Saddam had WMD - that's kind of not the point. The crime of the Bush administration was that they effectively shut off all debate about going to war. They scared people with speeches about mushroom clouds, yellow cake, terrorists getting nukes and bioweapons from Saddam. They said, "There is NO DOUBT" about WMDs when, in fact, there were doubts in the intelligence agencies. They lied about the aluminum tubes, the mobile weapons labs, the yellow cake. They used as a source of much of their propaganda a defector ("Curveball") who was already known by the CIA and the Germans who held him to be unreliable.

The US Congress was largely ignorant of all of this, whereas the secretive Bush administration knew all of it. A few in Congress had private doubts (especially those on the intelligence committee). But their crime was timidity against Bush, a fear of appearing unpatriotic when Bush was scaring the nation right before the mid-term election. The Democrats were afraid in 2002 even to DEBATE the war. And foolishly (blame Tom Daschle), the Democrats in the fall 2002 election campaign campaigned on the ECONOMY(!) when Americans were understandably fearing Iraq after the Bush admin's propaganda a year after 9/11.

Blame the Democrats in Congress in 2002-2003 for cowardice and dereliction of duty, but they weren't liars. They didn't secretly think Saddam had no WMDs - they were all betting he had them.

Andrew

Hi Andrew

When Kucinich was on Frankin's show, he simply said that he saw the evidence that the rest of Congress saw and knew that Bush was lying.

Aside from that, how safe to do you think that the Democrats in Congress felt if they voted not to give Bush power to start the war? It's interesting that, I'm assuming here, as I remember who voted no, that the ones in Congress who knew their seats were probably safe, voted no.

Chickenjuggler, which election?

American Idol.

I voted for Tiny Tim

Again, when before March 2003 did Kucinich (or DeFazio) state publically that they thought Iraq had no WMDs? Kucinich saying in 2004 that he hadn't believed the evidence he saw in 2002 doesn't mean the other Democrats were lying, does it?

Andrew

Andrew, I remember people in Congress saying that the evidence isn't there. Then Bush invited them in for a private meeting to supposedly show them the classified evidence. After the meeting, the Democrats still said that the evidence wasn't there.

I remember wishing to be convinced because all I could see was a great opportunity for Bush to spend a lot of money on his cronies and nothing else. I didn't see anything to convince me and I wasn't alone. Most of the world didn't believe it either.

The big difference in the US was that US citizens were standing behind Bush wanting to bloody someone's nose for 9/11.

I think all that passionate support for Bush intimidated a lot of Democrats. It was a weird time.

Btw, Republicans lied, too but I would always expect that from them.

Here's an example of what DeFazio said in 2002.
President Bush, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Defense Policy Board Member Richard Perle, and others claim to know with certainty that Saddam Hussein has successfully reconstituted his chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. There is no definitive intelligence supporting that claim. It is speculation.