Whose War Is It Anyway? By Victor Davis Hanson

The Democrats’ excuse-making just doesn’t cut it.

“This war is lost,” Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.

That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues. But many of these converted doves aren’t being quite honest about why they’ve radically changed their views of the war.

Most of the serious Democratic presidential candidates — Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Christopher Dodd and former Sen. John Edwards — once voted, along with Reid, to authorize the war. Sen. Barack Obama didn’t. But, then, he wasn’t in the Senate at the time.

Now these former supporters of Iraq find themselves under assault by a Democratic base that demands apologies. Only Edwards has said he is sorry for his vote of support.

But if the Democratic party is now almost uniformly antiwar, it is also understandable why it can’t field a single major presidential candidate who was in Congress when it counted and tried to stop the invasion.

After all, responsible Democrats in national office had been convinced by Bill Clinton for eight years and then George W. Bush for two that Saddam’s Iraq was both a conventional and terrorist threat to the United States and its regional allies.

Most in Congress accepted that Saddam was a genocidal mass murderer. They knew he used his petrodollars to acquire dangerous weapons. And they felt his savagery was intolerable in a post-9/11 world. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. And few Democrats questioned whether the al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan.

In other words, Democrats, like most others, wanted Saddam taken out for a variety of reasons beyond fears of WMDs. Moreover, it was the Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet who supplied both Democrats and Republicans in Congress with much of the intelligence they would later cite in deciding to attack Saddam.

Motre from NRO Online