nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200511110833.asp
November 11, 2005, 8:33 am The Gullible Party If Bush lied, it stands to reason that Democrats who followed are all nai fs, foolishly drawn to the seductions of a charlatan. Getting suckered usually is not a sign of good judgment. But Democrats are making the conte ntion that they were told lies prior to the Iraq war, and believed them, central to their party's identity.
They are caught between their base's conviction that President Bush lied about Iraq and the fact that the cream of the party voted to authorize t he war. Nearly every Democratic senator who has higher ambitions voted " yes" Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and John Edwar ds. If Bush lied, it stands to reason that they are all naifs, foolishly drawn to the seductions of a charlatan. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, si nce retired, agrees: "We were misled."
Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton drew t he wrong conclusion at the time, well, that's true of a lot of Americans who were deceived by this president." Surely, however, these Democrats don't rely on Bush exclusively for their information. In a demolition of the Bush-lied argument in the current i ssue of Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz recalls the other players who warned of Saddam Hussein's WMDs Democrats could have consulted Bill Clinton, who had talked of the "threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass- destruction program." They could have read the 2002 National Intelligenc e Estimate that maintained "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expand ing, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs." They could have asked the State Department, which believed Saddam had chemical and biological weapons. They could have listened to former UN weapons ins pectors, a group of whom said in the presence of Iraq expert Kenneth Pol lack in 2002 that they all believed Iraq had WMDs The Democratic "aye" votes contend they were further misled because they assumed that Bush would carry out the war competently. This is another w ay of saying that they thought it would go smoothly. Democrats were free to believe this admonition an d conclude that the war was too risky. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia complains that we thought "we could be welcomed as lib erators," but it turns out that "we don't know anything about the Middle East." Did he believe in 2002 that we were soaked in a nuanced knowledg e of the Middle East? And what precisely did Bush say to convince him of that? When Democrats claim they were duped, they are sidestepping an inconvenie nt truth: Many of them supported the war for the same reasons as the pre sident. We now know Saddam didn't have WMD stockpiles, but the only reas on we know it with any certainty is that we crushed his regime. To prete nd that, absent Bush's deceptions, everyone would have known with exacti tude the reduced state of Saddam's weapons programs is juvenile and cont emptible, especially from Democrats who want to shimmy their way out of their pro-war votes. This is where the Howard Dean Democrats deserve a glimmer of admiration. Even when things seem to go well in I raq, they hold firm. Dean was unswayed by the capture of Saddam two year s ago. They don't sully themselves with after-the-fact rationalizations and evasions, and have the courage of their paranoid and wrongheaded con victions. But their drumbeat of "Bush lied" puts their party's leaders in a bind. I f Bush was a misleader, many top Democrats were misleadees. Dick Polman, a political reporter for Knight-Ridder News, reminds us that Republican George Romney damaged his presidential bid in 1968 by claiming he had b een deceived by the military into supporting the Vietnam War. Voters wer en't looking for a president who could, by his own account, be easily mi sled.
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