WASHINGTON (AP) — Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan sat in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s conference room at the Pentagon and listened to his claim that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction.
At one point in the presentation – one of many lawmakers’ briefings by the administration of President George W. Bush ahead of the October 2002 vote to authorize violence in Iraq – military leaders showed an image of trucks in the country from which they thought they could carry weapons. But the case sounded thin, and Stabenow, then just a freshman senator, saw that the date on the photo was months old.
“There wasn’t enough information to convince me that they did indeed have any connection to what happened on September 11, or that there was any justification for attacking,” Stabenow said in a recent interview, referring to the 2001 attacks. which were part of the Bush administration’s underlying argument for the invasion of Iraq.
“I was really thinking about the young men and women we would send into battle,” she said. “I have a son and a daughter – would I vote to send them to war based on this evidence? In the end, the answer for me was no.”
As with many of her colleagues, Stabenow’s ‘no’ vote in the early morning hours of October 11, 2002, was not without political risk. The Bush administration and many of the Democrat swing-state voters firmly believed that the United States should go to war in Iraq, and lawmakers knew that House and Senate votes on whether or not approving violence would have enormous consequences.
Indeed, the bipartisan votes in the House and Senate that month were a significant moment in American history that would reverberate for decades — the Bush administration’s central allegations about weapons programs ultimately proved unfounded, the Middle East was permanently changed, and nearly 5,000 US troops were killed in the war. Iraqi deaths are estimated at hundreds of thousands.
Only now, 20 years after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, is Congress seriously considering reversing it, with a Senate vote expected this week to revoke the 2002 and 1991 authorizations of violence against Iraq. Supporters of both sides say the repeal is years overdue, with Saddam’s regime long gone and Iraq now a strategic partner of the United States.
For senators who voted 20 years ago, it’s a circular moment that prompts a mixture of sadness, regret, and reflection. Many consider it the hardest vote they’ve ever held.
The vote was “based on the biggest lie ever told in American history,” said Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, then a member of the House of Representatives who voted in favor of the war effort. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that “all of us who voted for it are probably slow to admit” that weapons of mass destruction did not exist. But he defends the vote based on what they knew at the time. “There was reason to be afraid” of Saddam and what he could have done if he had the guns, Grassley said.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then a member of the House of Representatives running for Senate, says the war will have been worth it if Iraq succeeded in becoming a democracy.
“What can you say 20 years later?” Graham said this last week, reflecting on his own vote in favour. “Intelligence was faulty.”
Another “yes” vote on the Senate floor that night was New York Senator Chuck Schumer, now Senate Majority Leader. Taking the vote a year after 9/11 devastated his hometown, he said he then believed the president deserved the benefit of the doubt when a nation is under attack.
“In hindsight, of course, it’s clear that the president messed up the war from start to finish and should never have been given that advantage,” Schumer said in a statement. “With the war firmly behind us, we are one step closer to returning the forces of war to where they belong – in the hands of Congress.”
Twenty years later, support has turned. Then only 28 senators voted against the authorization. All but one were Democrats. Today, about the same number of senators vote against annulling the 2002 and 1991 measures, arguing that repeal could radiate weakness to US enemies and hinder future operations. But all opponents are Republicans.
Among the Republicans voting to repeal is Grassley. He said revoking the war clearance would prevent those powers from being misinterpreted and abused in the future.
In 2002, the Bush administration worked aggressively to gain support for the invasion of Iraq by promoting what turned out to be false intelligence claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Lawmakers attended briefing after briefing with military leaders and White House officials, in groups and in one-on-one conversations, as the administration applied political pressure, particularly on the Democrats.
In the end, the vote was strongly bipartisan, with Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, DS.D., House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., and others supporting Bush’s request.
Joe Biden also voted in favor as a senator from Delaware, and now supports repeal as president.
Other senior Democrats pushed for opposition. In one of many Senate floor speeches that evoked the country’s history, the late Senator Robert Byrd, DW.V., urged his colleagues to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, where “almost every day someone that wall crying for a lover, a father, a son, a brother, a friend, whose name is on that wall.”
Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., issued a similar warning during the floor debate, saying he believed fear and anxiety can drive sentiment for an invasion of Iraq. “I’m warning and begging my colleagues to think twice about that,” Durbin said, adding that “America has had periods of fear in the past.”
Now the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Durbin recalled his vote against the resolution on the Senate floor earlier this month amid a “terrifying national debate” over whether the US should invade Iraq. The threat of weapons of mass destruction “was pounded into our heads day after day,” Durbin said. “But many of us were skeptical.”
“I look back on it, as others no doubt do, as one of the most important voices I ever cast,” said Durbin.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., agrees at the time, “I remember thinking this is the most serious thing I can ever do.”
She says the environment was burdened with an “emotional pressure” in the public and media that the US needed to show Iraq and the world that it was tough. She voted against the resolution after deciding there was not enough evidence to support the Bush administration’s argument, and after speaking at home with many of her constituents who opposed the idea of an invasion of Iraq.
For many legislators, the political pressure was intense. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, then a member of the House of Representatives and now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he was “castrated” at home for his “no” vote after the September 11 attacks killed so many people. had killed his state. He made the right decision, he says, but “it was fraught with political challenges.”
Similarly, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., recalls that the idea of invading Iraq was popular at home, and the state’s other senator, Republican Gordon Smith, supported it, as did Daschle and other influential Democrats. But he was a new member of the intelligence committee and had regular access to closed-door briefings by government officials. He was not convinced by their arguments and voted against.
“It was a really dramatic moment in American history,” says Wyden. “You wish you could just unravel it and have another chance.”
Jack Reed, D.R.I., chairman of the Senate Armed Forces, then a freshman senator who also voted against the resolution, says the war “made no strategic sense” and diverted the country’s attention from the troops at war in Afghanistan. “Just an absolutely bad strategy,” he says, who has also helped build other powerful countries like China and Russia.
For those who voted for the invasion, the reflection may be more difficult.
Hillary Clinton, then a Democratic senator from New York, was forced to defend her vote when she ran for president twice, eventually calling it a mistake and her “greatest regret.” Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin solemnly told an Iowa PBS station several years ago that his vote in the Senate to approve violence in Iraq was “the worst vote I’ve ever cast in my life.”
Markey says, “I regret relying on” Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, along with other government officials. “It was a mistake to rely on the Bush administration to tell the truth,” Markey said in a brief interview last week.
Graham says he spoke with Bush last week on an unrelated matter, but they also discussed the anniversary of the war.
“I told him, ‘Mr. President, Iraq has not withdrawn from democracy,'” Graham said. United States, then it’s worth it. It turned out to be in America’s best interest.'”
Bush’s answer was uncertain.
“He said he believes history will tell whether Iraq can maintain its path to democracy,” Graham said.
