Clearing the war vote hurdle

I have never understood why it has been so difficult for Kerry or Clinton to avoid becoming so tongue-tied over their vote for the War Powers Resolution.

First, it was in October of 2002, six months before the invasion. The President of the United States of America and the Vice President of the United States of America, long before the evidence they are consummate liars had begun to surface, were going around saying they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam had re-constituted his nuclear weapons program. The possibility that a leader with Saddam’s history had nuclear weapons was without question a matter of the gravest possible concern. This was before the Europeans started balking, before the evidence began to mount that the whole thing was a pack of lies – before the suspicious language shift from “nuclear weapons” to the “weapons of mass destruction” formulation for all Bush spokespeople; the resumption of Blix inspections coming up empty despite sure-thing guidance by infallible U.S. intelligence; the relentless campaign against Blix’s mettle and duplicitous French surrender monkeys; the back-page articles convincingly discounting, one by one, each and every piece of “overwhelming evidence” the Administration tried to use to support going to war. None of this has happened yet.

Consider the situation. The UN Security Council is considering issuing a new resolution. The bowdlerized intelligence reports shown to Congress are clearly backing the Administration. The Europeans have not yet weighed in on their view of the intelligence information. Everyone seems inclined to believe these intelligence reports. In order to give the UN Resolution teeth – in order to force Saddam to accept inspections required -- it would make sense for the country leading the international effort to be ready at a moments notice to back the resolution if necessary. There may have been plenty of reason for suspicion such as that held by the undefeatable Senator Byrd, but mere suspicion is not a responsible basis for a vote on a matter of such grave importance. There is simply no information available that can be cited to support doubt or suspicions that we are being railroaded into war. Bush is promising it will be an international effort, under clear UN auspices. He is also promising that it can all be avoided if Saddam will succumb to inspections. Kerry (and I assume Hillary) make it abundantly clear that their vote in favor of the war authorization resolution is premised on the information available and those promises by Bush. So that’s what they voted for: not “for war,” but to put teeth behind the UN Resolution, including the threat of an international military force as in the Gulf War, to force Saddam to submit to inspections and disarm the forbidden weapons he was believed to have.

The memes are simple: remember, the issue was nuclear weapons – i.e., the consequences of being wrong were horrendous; the intelligence we saw was unanimous; it was six months before Bush started the war; both Kerry and Clinton demanded in no uncertain terms that Bush truly engage international support, and that the threat of war be focused on achieving compliance thought necessary at that point – that war would be the last resort. A good wordsmith should be able to weave that into two simple, take-it-or-leave-it, "next question" declarative sentences.