Reply #96: YES, when they voted to give Bush the green light to invade Iraq [View All]

[Martin Eden]

Before the vote I wrote my Repuke congresswoman urging her to oppose it. She of course voted for the Iraq War Resolution and sent me a reply letter stating that 9/11 demonstrated how dangerous WMD were in the hands of terrorists. I wrote back excoriating her for treating a constituent like a ignoramus who didn't know that the 9/11 terrorists were armed only with box cutters and that Iraq had absoluteoly nothing to do with it.

My anger and disappointment was multiplied when so many Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry also voted for it. Kerry -- given his rise to the national spotlight as a leader of Vietnam Vets against the war -- should have been our leader in the Senate making a stand against the insanity of invading Iraq on the basis of what was already obviously a pack of lies. Had John Kerry made that principled stand but it passed anyway, he would have been in a much better position in the fall of 2004 to take the White House from the Worst. President. Ever.

The Vietnam war was just as abhorrent, but the Tonkin Gulf resolution passed when I was only 7 and I was unaware of it at the time.