As the election approaches, it is becoming apparent that no one actually supported going to war in Iraq. In separate statements this week, Bill Clinton and Karl Rove revised history and their roles in supporting the Iraq War.
Clinton stated in Iowa this week that he “opposed the Iraq from the beginning.” The war remains a significant problem for the Clintons with democrats. Yet, in 2003 in a commencement speech when the war was still popular, Clinton said that “I supported the President when he asked Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
However, Clinton’s slight revision is nothing like effort this week by Karl Rove to airbrush Bush and himself out of the war effort entirely: blaming Congress for the war. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Rove insisted that they did not want to rush the war vote and that Congress was simply gung ho for a war that Bush desperately wanted to avoid:
ROVE: [O]ne of the untold stories about the war is why did the United States Congress, the United States Senate, vote on the war resolution in the fall of 2002?ROSE: Why?
ROVE: This administration was opposed to it. I’m going to talk about that in my book… [T]he administration was opposed to voting on it in the fall of 2002.ROSE: Because?
ROVE: Because we didn’t think it belonged in the confines of the election. We thought it made it too political. We wanted it outside the confines of the election. It seemed it make things move too fast. There were things that needed to be done to bring along allies and potential allies abroad and yet…But you were opposed to the vote.
ROVE: It happened. We don’t determine when the Congress vote on things. The Congress does.
ROSE: You wish it hadn’t happened at that time. You would have preferred it did not happen at that time.
ROVE: That’s right.
ROSE: Because your argument– your argument is you would have had maybe more inspections. You would have been able to build a broader coalition. You could have done a whole lot other things if you didn’t have to have a vote, right?
ROVE: Right, right, exactly.
For a video of the interview, click here
In reality, Bush pushed for approval of the war resolution before the elections and praised the vote to do so. Some Democrats (unfortunately not enough) spoke out against giving the President the authority at that time.