How Quickly They Forget

Congress Dems Say White House Carries Full Responsibility for Iraq War

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) (WDCpix)

On Monday, five years to the week after the United States launched its "shock and awe" offensive against Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) reiterated the oft-heard Democratic argument that the responsibility for the invasion -- as well as any strategic errors committed thereafter -- lies squarely with the White House.

"The mistakes in Iraq are not the responsibility of our men and women in uniform but of their commander-in-chief," Clinton told an audience at George Washington University. "From the decision to rush to war without allowing the weapons inspectors to finish their work or waiting for diplomacy to run its course … [t]he command decisions were rooted in politics and ideology, heedless of sound strategy and common sense."

Missing from the partisan critique is the constitutionally derived inconvenience that Congress had granted the administration's invasion authority, and that Clinton had joined 28 other Senate Democrats in voting their approval. Many of those lawmakers, including Clinton, have said they were misled during that October 2002 vote, accepting the Bush administration's argument that the White House would choose a military solution to Iraq only as a last resort. With that assertion, congressional Democrats have largely eluded the blame for what many consider an ill-conceived, if not unnecessary, invasion.

But as the conflict enters its sixth year, a number of lawmakers, constitutional scholars and foreign policy experts argue that the Democrats who sided with President George W. Bush at the time were keenly aware that the vote was the start of a march to war.

"They knew what they were voting for," said former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, the only Republican to vote against the war authorization. "We'd seen the performance of this administration, and there was nothing in their actions to indicate they were interested in diplomacy. They always favored a unilateral approach to foreign policy."

In an interview, Chafee said those Democrats feared a soft-on-terror label in a post-9/11 world. They also thought an Iraq invasion would be quick, he said, "like another Gulf [War] One."

Bruce A. Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale University, echoed similar sentiments. "It was perfectly clear what the president was proposing," Ackerman said in an e-mail.

Of the 29 Democratic senators who voted with the White House, 21 remain in office. In a revealing Politico poll (pdf) taken a year ago, 11 of them said they regret their decision, while five others, including Clinton, said they did not. (The remaining five did not comment.)

Four of the 29 would become 2008 presidential candidates (Clinton, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd and Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden). On the campaign trail, those Democrats have issued public statements indicating varying degrees of remorse for their choice. Some, like Edwards, have said the vote was a mistake. Others, like Clinton, have claimed their only failing was to put their trust into a president who subsequently abused it.

Chafee, now a visiting fellow at Brown University, has written a new book, "Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President," due to be published Apr. 1, in which he accuses the Democrats of placing their personal goals above national interests. "It was phenomenal how quickly key Democrats crumbled," Chafee writes. "They went down to meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration's nonsense."

The controversial war authorization bill went through a series of changes before it was approved in late 2002, by a vote of 77 to 23. An early version, for example, would have granted the White House broader explicit powers to attack Iraq. "This was expressly removed at the insistence of some Democrats at the time," said Laura Donohue, a constitutional scholar at Stanford University. "Yet this is precisely how the [final bill] was subsequently interpreted by the administration."

Instead, lawmakers settled on a version authorizing the use of military force only if the president determined that diplomatic means were insufficient to protect the United States from Iraq. According to Chafee, the administration made that determination "as fast as they could."

In a speech on the Senate floor the day before the authorization bill was approved, Clinton called the vote "probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make." Still, the New Yorker said she would "take the president at his word" that he would exhaust his diplomatic avenues before charging into war.

"My vote is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of preemption or for unilateralism or for the arrogance of American power or purpose," Clinton added, "all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, the rule of international law, and the peace and security of people throughout the world."

But other Democrats who voted against the bill indicated this week that it was clear all along that the authorization was a direct path to such a preemptive conflict. Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), for example, said Wednesday, "I voted against this war in the beginning because I believed the case for war had not been sufficiently established."

Thomas E. Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, said there is no legitimacy to the Democrats' claims that the vote was something other than a green light to war.

The vote has plagued Clinton on the campaign trail, where her primary opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), has pressed the former first lady with accusations that she enabled a botched conflict. (Obama has been quick to point out that he opposed the war from the start, but it's hardly a fair comparison: As an Illinois state senator in 2002, he was never faced with the decision himself.)

Campaigning in New Hampshire in February 2007, Clinton came as close as she's come to indicating the vote was a mistake. "I take responsibility for my vote,” Clinton said, according to a New York Times report. “And it was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that we had at the time. Obviously, I would not vote that way again if we knew then what we know now."

Meanwhile, Chafee, who has endorsed Obama for president, uses his book to argue that presidential candidates who were fooled by President Bush over Iraq are probably unfit for the position themselves. "They argue that the president duped them into war," Chafee writes, "but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment."

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