unlike sniveling cowardly Greenwald - Biden and Clinton stand by their Iraq War and Patriot Act

[joshcryer]

62. You didn't even need to assume WMDs to conclude that, btw.

The 23 Senators voting no used common damn sense. Bush didn't have a UN resolution to invade Iraq (Resolution 1441 did not enable that at all), and the Bush administration kept parroting the idea that they didn't need a resolution to invade Iraq because the NFZ was still in effect and we were "still at war" with Iraq. The Bush administration at the time made it abundantly clear that they felt that they still had authorization to invade going on old Gulf War resolutions (UN resolutions 688 and 665) which progressives noted at the time pointed out was utter bullshit (myself getting in trouble for it because people misinterpreted that as "support" for Bush's view).

Those Senators need only to have listened to the rhetoric coming out of the Bush administration to know that he was going to invade whether or not Saddam complied with the weapons inspectors. Indeed, until the day war was declared the weapons inspectors were looking at sites in Iraq. Bush told them to GTFO and of course they complied because who wants to be a weapons inspector in a war zone?

With that knowledge, and the rhetoric was loud so anyone could see it and understand the posturing, no ethical politician would have voted for it. It wasn't about WMDs from the get-go, it was about revenge for Poppy and an oil grab.

This site gives the best overview of the situation there was: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/

In particular the 12000 page Iraq report that proved that Saddam had already destroyed most of the weapons (in the case of some of those weapons they were improperly destroyed which is why casings and such were "found" years later, but it was all unusable, which for all intents means destroyed, and if the inspectors were allowed to do their job they would've eventually found those casings). People doubt he did it but he did it because he was afraid of an internal uprising getting a hold of those weapons.

BTW, any Senator would've had access to those reports about WMDs. It shows a true lack of judgment for any of them to have voted for the war.