"If only we had known then what we know now -- that there was no hard evidence of WMD, no hard evidence of al-Qaida ties to Saddam Hussein -- we would never have voted for the war." "If only we had known how incompetent Rumsfeld's Pentagon would be in managing the war, we would never have given Bush a green light."
This Kerry-Edwards defense is a version of the 1967 defense advanced by Michigan Gov. George Romney to explain his earlier support of Vietnam. Said Romney, "I was brainwashed" during a trip to Vietnam, prompting the cruel retort of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, "In Romney's case, a light rinse would have sufficed."
The Democrats' defense begs these questions: Why didn't you know? Why didn't you find out? Why didn't you do your constitutional duty and refuse the president the power to go to war until he had convinced you that only war could spare the republic worse horrors?
What the Baker Commission is ultimately all about is providing political cover for a bipartisan retreat from Iraq.
For what was the one issue the Iraq Study Group would not and will not address? The crucial question: Was the Iraq war a blunder to begin with? The commission seeks at all costs to avoid the judgment of the nation that today's establishment that took us into Iraq served America as badly as the Best and Brightest who marched an earlier generation into Vietnam, then cut and ran and called it "Nixon's War."
The media are celebrating the ISG for its "bipartisanship" and the "consensus" achieved. But was it not a bipartisan consensus that produced the war: a Democratic Senate failing in its duty to ascertain the necessity of a war to be launched by a Republican president, because Democrats feared that telling a popular president "no" would reinforce the party's reputation as being soft on national security?
The people who were right about Iraq were those who rejected bipartisanship to warn that invading Iraq was an unnecessary, unwise and, yes, even an unjust war that would inflame the Arab and Islamic world against us. Unsurprisingly, this group had no representative on the Baker-Hamilton Commission.