A line is forming outside the Iraq confessional. It consists of Democratic presidential aspirants -- Where's Hillary? -- who voted for the war in Iraq and now concede that they made a "mistake." Former Sen. John Edwards recently did that in a Washington Post op-ed article and Sen. Joseph Biden uttered the "M" word Sunday on "Meet The Press." "It was a mistake," said Biden. "It was a mistake," wrote Edwards. Yes and yes, says Cohen. But it is also a mistake to call it a mistake.
Both senators have a point, of course. They were told by the president and members of his War Cabinet -- Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld -- that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In particular, these three emphasized Iraq's purported nuclear weapons program. She just idn't know what she was talking about.
As it turned out, neither did Vice President Dick Cheney nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney said, "Increasingly, we believe that the United States will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. He's just a defense secretary who thought he was propaganda minister.
I quote this trio of braying exaggerators -- all of them still in the administration -- because they emphasized the purported nuclear weapons threat. Yet by the time the war began, March 20, 2003, it was quite clear that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program. All the evidence for one -- the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa -- had been challenged. What's more, U.N. inspectors on the ground had found nothing. "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq," said the U.N.'s Mohamed ElBaradei. That was on Feb. 14. The next month, the U.S. went to war anyway.
In their respective confessions, neither Edwards nor Biden explains why they were not persuaded by the evidence that Bush & Co. were exaggerating -- concocting is possibly a better word -- Saddam's nuclear threat. Of course, that still leaves chemical and biological. But chemical has been around since April 22, 1915, when the Germans used chlorine gas in the Second Battle of Ypres. Biological is a different story, but it's hard to deliver and not all that effective. Whatever the case, before Sept. 11, Americans hardly feared Saddam's chemical or biological weapons.
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Sept. 11 changed all that. The terrorist attacks, coupled with the still-unexplained deaths of five people from anthrax poison sent through the mail, unhinged America. Cooler heads in the Bush administration seized the moment to plump for a war they always wanted while many of the rest of us -- myself included -- got caught up in an emotional frenzy. Even after the passions of the moment cooled -- even after it was clear Iraq was no real imminent threat -- few of us demanded that Bush back down. The best I could do was whisper some doubt. On July 25, 2002, I wrote that the Bush administration would pay dearly if it was, as was then becoming clear, going to wage war for specious reasons. "War plans are being drawn up at the Pentagon," I wrote. "But explanations are lacking at the White House."
Well, those explanations are still lacking. But so, too, are those from Democrats who say they made a "mistake" in supporting the war. What sort of mistake? It's not a mistake to be misled. This is a mistake of great consequence, a failure of judgment or political courage, and it needs to be explained.
I do not hold the new war critics to a higher standard than those who led us to war or who still think it was a dandy idea. But we will learn nothing from this debacle if the word "mistake" can be used like a blackboard eraser just to wipe the slate clean. This is no different than what Bush is trying to do: The intelligence was bad, not his wretched judgment. To accept this explanation does not -- both for the president and his critics -- undo the mistake. On the contrary, it compounds it.
Richard Cohen's e-mail address is cohenr@washpost.com .
