General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: DO NOT BE FOOLED!!! [View all]pnwmom
(109,050 posts)or all the others who voted for the IWR after being deceived by Colin Powell and the rest of the Bush administration.
Ted Kennedy has explained that the reason he knew to vote NO was because, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, he had access to confidential information that the rest of the Senate did not. He didn't blame them for trusting the Administration not to be lying to them. That's how the system is supposed to work. And until then Colin Powell had been regarded as a moderate and a person of some integrity. That all changed afterwards.
You are remembering the protests in the spring, when it became apparent that Powell had lied, there were no WMD's, and Bush was going to war anyway. But the IWR had been approved during the preceding fall and by January the Rethugs controlled the Congressional majorities. There was nothing the Dems could do to stop the war in March.
http://www.cfr.org/iraq/foreign-policy-address-edward-m-kennedy/p6834
QUESTIONER: My name is . I work for the State Department's Washington File. In the run-up to the war, Robert Byrd was almost the only voice in Congress making a case against the war. Where were the other members of Congress at that time?
KENNEDY: The question is Robert Byrd spoke out brilliantly against the war; where were the others? They weren't behind Robert Byrd where they should've been. I was glad to be there with Robert Byrd on that issue, but the clearly, we shouldn't have been there. I reached that my decision as a member of the Armed Services Committee listening to members of the military testify and predicting exactly what was going to come. You listen to General Hoar , the principal former leaders both of the Marines and the military, men and women who had experience and had been over in that region of the world, absolutely predicted exactly what was going to happen. And it was so powerful, clear, and convincing, that the decision was an easy one for me.
Quite frankly, our colleagues, some of those that were on the Armed Services Committee, reached the similar conclusion. Senator Byrd is on that Armed Services Committee. But it was the we I think what they would say is they didn't have the kind of balanced information that many of the rest of us had. There's no question, as I mentioned in the talk, that the presentation that was made to the members of the United States Senate misrepresented and distorted the intelligence information. And we have to have, as any democracy has to have, confidence in both what the president is going to tell you and what the president's representatives are going to tell you. And when they had the kind of series of misrepresentations that I've reviewed, this is an indictment of this administration in its own words.