In 2004 we (Democrats) nominated a Senator who cast a vote that allowed George W. Bush to go to war. We lost the election, and yet now we seem poised to do the same thing again. Former Senator Lincoln Chafee's new account of the events leading up to the Iraq war demonstrates the perils of relying on the Senators who enabled the war.
Senator Clinton still can’t come up with a good or real reason for her vote because there isn’t one. She either cast a vote because she was gullible or because she wished to preserve her political viability.
Lincoln Chafee’s new book makes clear how weakly Democratic Senators like Hillary Clinton behaved. They knew the evidence presented by the Bush administration was garbage, but rolled over and played dead anyway.
From the Providence Journal:
The book has some through-the-looking-glass scenes; one in particular reads like Hunter S. Thompson sans drugs. As Mr. Bush pressed insistently for war, Chafee requested a meeting with CIA brass to examine the evidence against Saddam Hussein’s regime. "Sooner or later, I have to vote on this war, show me everything you have," Chafee requests of the CIA.
"What they had, I discovered as the meeting stretched into an hour, was next to nothing," recalls Chafee. "They showed me what they had with little comment and no enthusiasm. Someone handed me one of the infamous aluminum tubes, the kind we were told Saddam was using to enrich weapons-grade uranium while plotting mushroom clouds over America, the ‘smoking gun’ that Condoleezza Rice warned about.
"I looked at the aluminum tube, looked at the analysts and thought, I can go buy one of these at Adler’s Hardware," the Providence hardware emporium, writes Chafee.
"Few members of Congress were willing to stand up to the schoolyard tough [Mr. Bush] and in the early morning hours of Oct. 11, 2002, weeks before the crucial midterm elections, he bullied them into declaring Saddam an imminent threat."
(http://www.projo.com/news/content/LInc_Chafee_01-27-08_PD8NPTK_v103.279fc7c.html)
Kerry and Edwards at least had honesty to admit their mistake, but Hillary Clinton never really has. She both failed and refused to learn from her failure. Why should we let her fail again?