Clinton, Kerry & the other Democrats in the Senate made a mistake by voting to give Bush power to initiate military action....but a rational person should understand how it happened:
1) After 9/11, the mood of the nation was angry and itching for retaliation.
2) Bush/Cheney & the NeoCons cynically played upon the tragedy of 9/11 and used manipulated evidence and outright lies to place incredible political pressure...considering the 9/11 attack...on Congress to go along with their long-planned invasion of Iraq....which, by the way, had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks.
3) To seal the deal, Bush promised that he would not initiate military action against Iraq without three things in place: 1) A clearly defined mission; 2) The support of our worldwide allies; and 3) A clearly defined exit plan. Ultimately, he ended up taking military action without fulfilloing any of those three promises. The purpose of the mission changed several times, as each purpose was debunked. The flimsy group of nations supporting us was a joke. Other than England, virtually no major ally endorsed our action. Indeed, Bush said he would go to the UN to get a vote supporting military action against Iraq. At a nationally televised press conference he was asked if he would ask for that vote "no matter what"....and (stupidly...showing his lack of political intelligence) he clearly reaffirmed that he would ask for that vote "no matter what...that it was time for everyone to "show their cards". (This can be easily found on YouTube if anyone wants to watch him say that again.) Then, later, when his handlers finally got him to shut up and explain that he didn't have the votes there and, therefore, should never have promised to ask for that vote "no matter what" on national television....he simply walked away from his promise. And, finally, there was obviously not only no "well defined exit plan", but no exit plan at all.
So the Senators who voted to authorize military action were completely lied to about the circumstances under which that authority would be exercised....and cynically squeezed as a result of the unrelated 9/11 tragedy.
It takes a total bunch of lying bastard SOBs to do something like that...particularly using 9/11 the way they did....but that's exactly what Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle and all those other NeoCons were/are. And this nation will be paying for that for years & years to come.
And, as I said, if Katherine Harris had not stolen the 2000 election by illegally purging 57,000 people from the Florida voter registration rolls, the war in Iraq would ever have happened. Hell, 9/11 might not even have happened. We still don't know what Bush & Cheney knew about 9/11 in the months leading up to that attack, because neither of them would agree to testify about it. Maybe if one of them got a blow job someone would force them to testify........
There are a few things that we do know about the 9/11 attacks:
1) The two men who benefitted the most politically by the attacks were Osama bin Laden & George W Bush.
2) George W Bush & his NeoCon cronies were itching at the bit to attack Iraq.
3) There is no way that Bush/Cheney & the NeoCons could have ever put enough pressure on Congress & the American People to attack Iraq if 9/11 had never happened.
4) Bush was explicitly warned that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike the U.S.....possibly using airplanes as weapons...in a PDB from his own National Security Advisor on August 6th....more than a month before the attacks took place.
5) George W Bush & Dick Cheney have steadfastly refused to testify...under oath or even not under oath...regarding what they knew about a possible 9/11 attack during the months preceding it.
If Bush & Cheney have nothing to hide, why won't they testify? More importantly, why aren't they being forced to testify? It seems to me that if you can force a sitting president to testify about his personal sex life, you should be able to force an former president to testify about the worst attack on the nation's mainland in its entire history....which took place on his watch....after he was warned about just such an attack by his own National Security Advisor more than a month before it occurred..
