General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I will tell you why Maddow's "Hubris" aired NOW and not back then. And you won't like it. [View all]karynnj
(59,475 posts)I don't think Olbermann did either.
I think that once the inspectors were in in late 2002 (after the vote), the facts became clearer to people reading the news. It was still confusing as papers like the NYT and WP that I (and and I suspect others) had trusted for years were among the most dishonest. The protests were largest in January/February 2003 and public opinion WAS changing against war - though we were still considerably below 50%. I suspect that the IWR did delay war about 5 to 6 months - but Bush was going with or without a resolution - and no matter what caveats and conditions were included in the resolution.
Going completely off target, looking back at this now leads me to a thought on Democrats vs Republicans. In the current period of Republican obstruction, that might in retrospect show the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Almost all Democrats rejected the original version of the bill (no vote, just comments) and they worked hard in committee and in the Senate to change the worst parts of the language. This did result in a bill that listed (with no teeth) the steps Bush told them he would take before going to war - unlike the original Lieberman version. What it did then was to pull in Democrats leery of Bush but believing that they should help give the President leverage to negotiate inspections and peace. The Republicans have since conflated that vote 5 months before Bush started the war with the decision to start the war - even though by March ANY doubts about possible WMD were not reality based. In October 2002 no inspectors had been there since 1998. They then have taken CONDITIONAL statements (using words like "if" on that possibility by Democrats as equivalent to the outright lies of the Bush administration. This vote really is a good example of where the Democrats desire to compromise and work together led to votes that most of them now regret and hate - even as they know what was in their hearts at that point and likely that the in terms of whether there was to be war, it did not matter (and the Downing Street memos back that war was happening regardless) However, even voting this down would not have precluded war (especially as the next Congress was controlled by Republicans), it did give the Republicans the ability to say that it was bipartisan.
Obviously the Republicans, on literally everything have done the opposite in the last 4 years. They will not even vote for things that they were SPONSORS of in past years. It was so disheartening to see that this was not just the right wing, but people like Collins and Snowe who voted against things like a healthcare plan - that in the Finance committee - Snowe voted for so as not to be on the wrong side of history. Yet having said that, she was a "no" in the full Senate.
The Hagel nomination is pathetic and I suspect it comes down to nothing more than that Hagel did not move lock step with the Republicans on foreign policy. His position was actually not far from that of Lugar, the Chair of committee. Even before 2004, they were cautioning Bush on how they were conducting the war - and they were both quoted in the debates by Kerry. It was not until 2007 that Hagel vocally supported virtually all the Democrats who were against the surge. (In 2006, he did not support Kerry/Feingold, but after he and Warner visited Iraq in (I think) August, they both moved behind the idea that a time line to get out or a deadline was needed.) Bush was pushed to define a timeline - and it was that timeline that gave Obama cover to get out.
In addition, Hagel was honest enough to publicly repeat what the SFRC hearings had spoken of - that it was not so much the surge, but the fact that the Sunni leaders turned against AQ, wanting to end the violence that led to Iraq becoming less violent. The media has backed the Bush/Cheney/McCain view that it was the surge that fixed everything - and that gave more power to those supporting a huge surge in Afghanistan. (That Gates and Clinton backed it is part of why Obama went with a more moderate version of the surge proposed, but still far more than people like Biden, Kerry, and Reid had spoken of.)
Still, even if this is an attempt to "win" the verdict of history. it is still amazing that there are so few Republicans willing to take the position of Feingold, who voted for people like Dr Rice who he never agreed with, because he said a President should get the cabinet of his choice unless there is a serious disqualifier.