Republican lovin' Senior Editor at the (no good Democrats since 1917) Columbus Dispatch had the following to say today below the fold.... (I can only imagine that an endorsement of Kerry is on its way.... )
Facts force writer to concede error in endorsing war
"Bless me, dear reader, for I have sinned. I am a flip-flopper. I no longer believe it was necessary to invade Iraq. Alleged facts have been discredited. New information has been received. Circumstances have changed.
As a result, I have changed my mind. The Baltimore Catechism of my youth offered no guidance on the matter, but today's presidential campaign instructs that reversing one's views is a sin. So, I confess.
This is not the first time I have committed the sin of flip-flopping. As a high-school senior in the late '60s, I won an American Legion speech contest by arguing that the war in Vietnam was just and necessary. Within two years, I had changed my mind.
That lesson of history was lost on Oct. 7, 2002, when I went to Cincinnati to cover President Bush's historic prelude-to-war speech.
Iraq, Bush said, ``possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism. . . . If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
My answer was no. I said so in a column on Feb. 16, 2003, about a month before the U.S. invasion. ``On Iraq," I wrote, ``Bush is right, even though many Americans and much of the world disagree with him."
Last March, as I toured Iraqi villages north of Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle, I continued to believe that Bush was right. In Al Rafae and Al Anwar, I saw the grateful faces of Iraqis as American soldiers distributed supplies to schoolchildren, rebuilt schools and purified contaminated water systems. It made me proud.
Over time, and through the prism of a presidential campaign, my view about the necessity and wisdom of this war has shifted. Certainly the deaths of more than 1,000 U.S. troops and 15,000 Iraqis and the expenditure of billions have influenced the flip-flop. But it goes beyond that. Betrayal is at the root of my sin.
Above all else, we must be able to trust our political leaders to tell us the truth and to do what's right. It is very probable that President Bush was misled by faulty intelligence into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was working with al-Qaida. But those bases for war have been disproved, and Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should cease the rhetorical ruse that Iraq posed an immediate threat to U.S. security.
Yet, even as the Iraq Survey Group confirmed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction to use or give to terrorists, that its chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed years ago, and that its ability to develop nuclear weapons actually had diminished, Bush and Cheney continued to insist that the invasion was necessary.
``There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said on the same day the group released its report.
The president now is down to two justifications for the invasion. One is that there was a moral imperative to rid Iraq of a genocidal dictator; a noble cause if only it were also applied to North Korea, some African nations and other suffering lands without oil.
The second is to bring democracy to Iraq -- a laudable but increasingly unlikely outcome. There remain honest disagreements about the necessity of the invasion, but today's Iraq leaves little room to argue that once Bush made the fateful decision, he did the wrong thing by trying to fight the war on the cheap.
If the administration had put sufficient troops on the ground -- the 300,000-plus requested by generals -- the lawlessness and chaos that now reign could have been avoided. The school and utility construction, police protection, viable government institutions and other intended fruits of America's goodwill are of little use to Iraqis who can't receive them because terrorists block the way or blow them up.
To withdraw now is impossible; doing so would ensure a civil war that could usher in the terrorist regime the invasion was intended to prevent.
Iraq is an awful mess. I wish I had known when I wrote that column 20 months ago what I know now. I wish the president had, too. He might have waited. Containing Saddam, in retrospect, was a better option than a war with no foreseeable end.
I join Sen. John Kerry as an Iraq war flip-flopper. But his sin, I believe, was rooted in political calculation. Howard Dean was the devil who made him do it.
Please, dear reader, accept my confession.
Joe Hallett is Dispatch senior editor. "