I was reading Al Gore's Iraq War speech from September, 2002, and struck by the fact that it still rings true. Even while conceding the existence of WMD Gore's brief against the war reads like it was from last week, rather than from before the war. The WMD issue was irrelevant, so the hawks have no "honest mistake" defense.
Not only was nothing there, but
even if there was something there it would not have justified the war. This Gore speech is a fine example of "Even if we accept everything you say it's still the dumbest idea in history." It also exposes the arguments of IWR supporters that they voted that way only because they were lied to. So what? Even if there were WMD stacked to the rafters it was still the dumbest idea in history. (In fact, as Gore points out here, the existence of WMD would have made it an even stupider decision.)
Also, note that months before the war Gore was taking it as a given that these criminals had no intention of managing the post-war phase. So the "I thought they would do a better job" defense is also bullshit.
On Edit: I am not attacking those who voted for the IWR as wicked, just noting that doing dumb things on major issues is, and should be, disqualifying for consideration for higher office. 300 million Americans will be disqualified one way or another from being president in 2008, including everyone reading this. There are many ways to wash out of the presidential sweepstakes. Why shouldn't voting for the IWR be as important as having a prior drug arrest or having big hairy mole on your nose?
Like all Americans I have been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of intense, focused and enabled hatred that brought about September 11th, and which at this moment must be presumed to be gathering force for yet another attack. I'm speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course recommended by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century. ...
...Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
We have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons with terrorist group. However, if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan - with no central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders and infiltrating members of Al Qaeda than these widely dispersed supplies of weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.
If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, "that's for the Iraqis to come together and decide."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-23-gore-text_x.htm
BTW, it's important to recall the long forgotten inspections regime. In September 2002 the existence of WMD was intelligence CW... sloppy and full of holes, but it was the intelligence community's best guess barring new evidence. By February 2003 we were inundated with new evidence and it was fairly obvious to anyone with a television that there were no WMD. That's the difference between faith and science--hypothesises are testable and subject to constant revision in the face of evidence. (By late 2002 I believed there were no active programs primarily because our most reliable intel source on Iraq's WMD, Saddam's son in law, had told us that in so many words. And Saddam had him killed for telling us! That man was the source of almost everything we knew about Iraq's historical Bio and Chemical programs and everything he told us checked out. But we breezily ignored his most interesting and useful claim, that there were no longer any WMD or even WMD programs.)
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