What We Know Now

Paul Waldman
November 17, 2005


Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America . His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, will be released in the spring by John Wiley & Sons.

John Kerry’s 2004 campaign had lots of low moments, but one of the lowest came when a reporter asked the Democratic nominee whether, knowing everything we know now, he would still have voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq. Much to the chagrin of many of his supporters, and the delight of the Bush campaign, he said he would.

If Kerry’s running mate disagreed at the time, he didn’t say it publicly. But now John Edwards has become the first high-profile Democrat to say that he regrets his vote to give Bush that authority. “I was wrong,” Edwards wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed. Edwards’ admission has spurred questions for the other Democrats preparing to run for the presidency in 2008: among the potential candidates, votes in support of the war were cast by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and, of course, Kerry. (Russell Feingold is the only potential candidate who voted no.) These candidates will inevitably be asked, knowing what we know now, would you still have voted for the war? Clinton has been asked this question, and her response is that if we knew then what we know now, there would have been no vote at all. This response is certainly clever (and probably accurate), but it doesn’t answer the question, which is why Democratic voters are unlikely to accept it as sufficient.

One wonders why Kerry, or any other candidate, would hesitate at all before answering, “Of course I wouldn’t have voted for it.” The answer can be found in the Washington conventional wisdom, which says that a Democrat who favored and continues to support the Iraq war is “strong on national security,” while a Democrat who opposes it is “weak on national security.” Discussing this issue on the ABC show “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos opined that Hillary Clinton would never do what John Edwards has done, because “it’s an article of faith to both Clintons that you have got to be strong on national security going into the 2008 elections.” One could substitute the word “wrong,” or perhaps “stupid,” for the word “strong” and articulations of this idea would make no less sense. But don’t go looking for logic in the DC conventional wisdom.

The corollary to this piece of conventional wisdom is that Democratic candidates will be in a bind, because to be “strong” means supporting the Iraq war, while the “left” will demand someone who opposes it. Given the primary influence of the party’s liberal wing, only “weak” candidates will have a shot at winning the nomination.

But while it is true that a candidate who can’t bring him or herself to acknowledge that this war was a mistake will have a serious problem with voters in the Democratic primaries, it won’t be because of the influence of the left. According to nearly every publicly available poll, a majority of the American people now believe the war was a mistake. In the latest Gallup poll, 60 percent of independents called the war a mistake, as did fully 85 percent of Democrats, or five out of every six potential Democratic primary voters. In other words, it’s hardly the Democratic Party’s left wing that will look skeptically at a presidential candidate who continues to maintain that the Iraq war was a good idea—it’s the left, right and center.

So perhaps it is worth stepping back to think for a moment about just why a candidate who, knowing what we know now, still thinks the Iraq war was a good idea, will sound so ridiculous not just to Democratic primary voters but to the majority of Americans. Since we’re visiting this world of 20/20 hindsight, let’s try to imagine how President Bush would have summed up his case for war, knowing what we know now:

“I believe Iraq is a threat. Though he has no biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein did some terrible things in the past. Yes, the greatest threat to American safety is the Al Qaeda terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11, and we know that no matter how bad a guy Saddam is, he had nothing to do with that. But we’ll take resources out of Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden is, in order to send them to Iraq. And come to think of it, this war will be the greatest recruiting tool Al Qaeda could ever dream of. What’s more, thousands of jihadists will get training and experience in killing Americans as they come to Iraq to fight us. Within a year or two this war will help transform Al Qaeda from an organization into a movement, in part because the war will lead to growing anti-Americanism across the Muslim world. Prisoner abuse scandals and civilian deaths will further inflame world opinion against us. You think they don’t like us now—just wait. Terrorist attacks around the war will increase in the wake of this war.

“And the war will not be easy. Indeed, by the time it’s over it may cost as much as half a trillion dollars. It will stretch our military dangerously thin, making it harder to respond to crises in other places in the world. Military recruiting will become more difficult. Thousands of brave young American men and women will be killed, and thousands more will be maimed for life. We will find ourselves presiding over a virtual civil war in Iraq as the varying religious groups struggle for power and a vicious insurgency takes more American and Iraqi lives every day in a seemingly endless cycle of chaos and misery.

“Now who’s with me?”

If we knew then what we know now, that is the appeal George W. Bush would have made to members of Congress in order to get their support. Democratic candidates who say they would still have voted for the war knowing what they know now will be saying that this case is a persuasive one.

And when they say that to American voters, whether in the primary or general election, those voters are going to look back at them and ask, “Are you kidding me?”