NP: The RH Factor, Hard Groove

With all the articles on how we got in Iraq, there's been much political hay made over the Democrats who voted to authorize Dubya's use of force. At the time, there was this semantic hack about giving him authorization, but hoping he wouldn't use it. And now, the narrative seems to be that either the Democrats didn't have the full picture, that they were either duped or are hopelessly gullible. Andrew Greeley goes with the former in an op-ed for today's Sun-Times:

Bush says that everyone agreed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He has said in the past that it was not his fault that all the intelligence agencies of the world believed that they did. Therefore, the intelligence agencies of the world were to blame for the mistake, he wasn't. Everyone in Washington, he argues, supported the war.

In truth, many Democratic senators did, not realizing how much the case in favor of the war had been cooked. In the national intelligence estimate issued just before the war, the internal dissent was excluded. The administration had created an atmosphere of fear and deception that indeed won support for the war.

While I'm not going to absolve the administration for revising history, this isn't much better. The GOP insists the Dems voted to go to war because they saw Saddam Hussein as a threat. The Democrats insist they didn't see evidence that would dissuade them of that notion. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that many Democrats voted to authorize force out of fear that an anti-war vote would be used against them in the next election, whether that was John Kerry running for president, or some Senator running for re-election. I'm sure that, if you ran down the list, the votes against force came from those in the Senate who ran little risk of losing their seat.

Putting aside the notion that the real reasons behind the vote are being willfully neglected by pretty much everybody, I'd still like to see the center-left come out and say that part of the vote came out of deference for the office of the President of the United States, and that it was respect that took them down the wrong path. That would twist the knife a bit, and let's face it, I'm in this for the politcal theater at this point.