Of all the major Democratic presidential candidates, there’s one thing that catapulted Howard Dean to the top — opposition to war in Iraq.
To be sure, Dean has other political strengths and has inspired his followers. From my perspective, however, Dean was able to overcome his initial obstacles as a presidential candidate by reminding primary voters and liberal activists that he has consistently opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq from the very beginning, while his serious congressional rivals — Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, and Lieberman — voted in favor of a congressional resolution supporting the war.
The angrier Democrats got about the war, the more Dean’s anti-war message resonated. And the more the costs of our occupation escalated — in terms of lives and money — the smarter Dean looked. Even Al Gore, in endorsing Dean this week, said the Vermont governor was “the only major candidate who made the correct judgment on the Iraq war.”
With this in mind, I believe John Kerry, who has probably suffered more than any other Dem candidate as a result of his 2002 vote in support of that congressional resolution, raised a critically important point yesterday.
“I think the great missing story of this campaign is, in fact, the truth about Howard Dean’s statements about the war,” Kerry said.
An awkwardly-worded attack from a candidate falling in the polls? In fairness, maybe a little. But Kerry’s point — that Dean’s statements about the war in Iraq warrant a closer look — is dead on.
I’m not saying that Dean supported the war, nor am I arguing that Dean is secretly a neocon hawk in dove’s clothing. That’s ridiculous. I am saying that Dean’s record is not as clear as the conventional wisdom would have us believe. There were complexities to Dean’s position that have been largely ignored in recent months as Dean has assumed the mantle of the leading “anti-war candidate.”
To his credit, Dean has been entirely consistent on two points: questioning the immediacy of the Iraqi threat and Dean’s desire to see the Bush administration seek broad international support, preferably through the United Nations, for the war effort. On both of these points, Dean’s public statements have been unswerving. On other points that have driven the war debate, however, Dean’s record deserves closer scrutiny.
Viewing Saddam Hussein as a threat
On the September 29, 2002, episode of Face the Nation, Dean seemed to believe, wholeheartedly, that Saddam Hussein was a threat that needed to be dealt with.
While questioning the immediacy of the danger Hussein posed, Dean nevertheless said, “There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and to our allies.”
Then, in February 2003, Dean agreed with Bush that the Iraqi threat was real; he simply disagreed with Bush as to how the U.S. should go about dealing with that threat.
“I agree with President Bush — he has said that Saddam Hussein is evil. And he is,” Dean said. “[Huseein] is a vicious dictator and a documented deceiver. He has invaded his neighbors, used chemical arms, and failed to account for all the chemical and biological weapons he had before the Gulf War. He has murdered dissidents, and refused to comply with his obligations under U.N. Security Council Resolutions. And he has tried to build a nuclear bomb. Anyone who believes in the importance of limiting the spread of weapons of mass killing, the value of democracy, and the centrality of human rights must agree that Saddam Hussein is a menace. The world would be a better place if he were in a different place other than the seat of power in Baghdad or any other country. So I want to be clear. Saddam Hussein must disarm. This is not a debate; it is a given.”
A month later on Meet the Press, Dean said he believed that Iraq “is automatically an imminent threat to the countries that surround it because of the possession of these weapons.”
Dean may have thought there was “no question” that Hussein was a threat before the war, but looking back now, his hindsight is telling him the opposite. Just this week, for example, Dean mentioned at the DNC’s New Hampshire debate “that there was no serious threat to the United States from Saddam Hussein.”
Similarly, the New York Times reported today that Dean said, plainly, “I never said Saddam was a danger to the United States, ever.” In light of the Face the Nation quote from 2002, we know that’s just not correct.
Unilateralism
While Dean has repeatedly emphasized his belief that war efforts should be pursued through the U.N., Dean has also appeared willing, at times, to accept unilateral war in Iraq.
As recently as February 2003, just a month before the war began, Dean appeared to accept a unilateral approach in Iraq as a necessary evil.
According to an interview with Salon’s Jake Tapper, when Dean was asked to clarify his Iraq position, Dean said that Saddam must be disarmed, but with a multilateral force under the auspices of the United Nations. If the U.N. in the end chooses not to enforce its own resolutions, then the U.S. should give Saddam 30 to 60 days to disarm, Dean said, and if he doesn’t, unilateral action is a regrettable, but unavoidable, choice.
Five months before this statement, according to a Des Moines Register report on October 6, 2002, Dean said, “It’s conceivable we would have to act unilaterally [in Iraq], but that should not be our first option.”
On January 31, 2003, Dean told the LA Times’ Ron Brownstein that “if Bush presents what he considered to be persuasive evidence that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction, he would support military action, even without U.N. authorization.”
Since then, however, Dean has insisted that unilateral war is wholly unacceptable. In April 2003, Dean described unilateralism as “a disaster” and an approach “doomed to failure.”
The difference here is subtle but important. Before the war, Dean didn’t embrace a unilateral approach to war, but he seemed willing to accept unilateralism as an unattractive choice that may be necessary. After the war, Dean appears to have rejected the notion of unilateralism entirely.
Trusting Bush’s foreign policy towards Iraq
When other candidates — most notably Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt — have defended their vote on the war resolution, they frequently argue that they were misled by the administration. They argue, for example, that they endorsed the resolution with the expectation that Bush would then work with the United Nations and our allies to build an international coalition to disarm Hussein. War, these candidates have said, was supposed to be a last resort, but Bush rushed to war, alienated our allies, ignored international bodies like the U.N., and now we’re paying for the price for Bush’s mistakes.
Dean has effectively condemned this approach with a simple retort: These guys trusted Bush?
In order for Dems to have been misled by Bush, they had to have accepted Bush’s word in the first place. Dean has told audiences for months that his rivals were wrong to have trusted Bush and that he was right for never having believed him in the first place.
As Dean said in a recent debate in Iowa, “The right thing to do would have been not to give George Bush that unilateral authority…. That was the wrong thing to do. This was an abdication and a failure on the part of Congress. And Senator Kerry was part of that failure. I don’t think that’s the kind of experience we need in foreign affairs in the White House.”
But before the war, Dean was far more receptive to the possibility that Bush deserved the benefit of the doubt. For example, U.S. News & World Report’s Gloria Borger asked Dean in September 2002, “Governor, what exactly does the president then have to prove to you [regarding Iraq]?”
Dean, who now argues that he saw through Bush’s charade from the beginning, said at the time, “I don’t think he really has to prove anything. I think that most Americans, including myself, will take the president’s word for it.”
That’s not a terrible answer, but it’s troubling that Dean feels justified in denouncing his rivals for taking Bush’s “word for it,” when he was saying the same thing before the war began.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Before the war, most congressional Democrats, including all of the major candidates for president, believed Bush’s arguments about the alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Wesley Clark did as well.
Far from seeing through Bush’s misleading façade, Dean believed the same claims.
In fact, like Kerry, Clark, and most of the other Dem candidates, Dean seemed absolutely convinced that Iraq had biological and chemical WMDs. He told Roll Call earlier this year, “I would be surprised if [Hussein] didn’t have [chemical and biological weapons.]”
Appearing on Meet the Press on March 9, 2003, just days before the war began, Dean spoke with some certainty about Hussein’s dangerous arsenal.
“I don’t want Saddam to stay in power with control over those weapons of mass destruction,” Dean said. “I want him to be disarmed.” In the same interview, as I mentioned above, Dean said he believed that Iraq “is automatically an imminent threat to the countries that surround it because of the possession of these weapons.”
Congressional resolution supporting war
Dean’s never been in Congress, so he obviously never had to vote up or down on the resolution authorizing Bush to pursue a war in Iraq. The fact that his major rivals who are in Congress supported that resolution, and that Wesley Clark offered at least tepid support for the resolution as a means to apply political pressure at the U.N., has become one the central points of debate in the campaign so far.
However, Dean’s record on Iraqi congressional resolutions is not as clear as he’d like.
Dean reminds us that he vigorously opposed the resolution passed by Congress. What Dean hasn’t advertised is that he endorsed a congressional effort pushed by Sens. Joe Biden (D-Del.) and Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) that was very similar — in substance and in outcome — to the resolution that passed both chambers in Congress. Indeed, John Kerry, whom Dean would have us believe was wildly off-base when it came to Iraq, endorsed the same Biden-Lugar resolution that Dean did.
The Biden-Lugar resolution authorized Bush to use force in Iraq — unilaterally, if necessary — if a diplomatic solution could not be reached at the United Nations.
Dean has argued that Biden-Lugar would have forced Bush to return to Congress after having exhausted diplomacy at the U.N. to seek congressional support for a military invasion. At a debate last month, Dean said, “[T]he key and critical difference was that [Biden-Lugar] required the president to come back to Congress for permission.”
Actually, Biden-Lugar doesn’t appear to have made such a condition at all. The resolution, which never reached the floor of the Senate for a vote, simply required Bush to “make available” to Congress his “determination” that the Iraqi threat “is so grave that the use of force is necessary.” The resolution had no provisions requiring Bush to seek “permission” to start the war.
Dean considered the substance of Biden-Lugar and publicly endorsed it, despite the fact that it allowed Bush to pursue war in Iraq, without U.N. support, and without a second congressional resolution. As Ryan Lizza noted last month in The New Republic, “[T]he war resolution Howard Dean supported would probably have led to exactly the same outcome — a unilateral war with Iraq.”
In case there’s any doubt, let me be clear: I am not arguing that Howard Dean supported the war in Iraq. All available evidence proves that he didn’t.
However, once one moves beyond that fact, some of the details of Dean’s positions include subtle nuances that cast him in a very different light. Simply accepting Dean as a staunch and consistent opponent of the war, as the conventional wisdom tells us, ignores some of these important subtleties.
When considered in context, the important point to be learned, as far as I’m concerned, is that Dean’s record on Iraq isn’t too-terribly-different from that of Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, and Clark. All five of them believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs, all five believed Bush should have been working with the U.N., all five saw Iraq as a threat, all five were inclined to believe White House arguments about the dangers posed by Iraq, and all five supported congressional efforts to authorize Bush to pursue a military strategy to “disarm” Hussein.
Dem primary voters hoping to use the war in Iraq as a litmus test for the candidates may need to look elsewhere for a key difference between the leading candidates. The image of Dean as the wise leader who knew the truth about Iraq while his rivals believed a lie is mistaken.