The only senator who regularly uses a wheelchair, he doesn’t think the 2002 war vote was the worst act Congress has taken this century. Worse for him, however, was the nearly 21 years of inaction after the vote, the inability of Congress to debate and pass a new war resolution.
“Our troops have shown up, over and over again,” Duckworth said in an interview Wednesday, “and we don’t have the guts here to have a real debate and a real vote every time we want to send them .”
More than two decades after that initial vote, Congress appears poised to finally scrap the 2002 Iraq War resolution – one of the worst votes ever.
In a rush to vote before the 2002 midterm elections, lawmakers gave in to the political pressure of the post-9/11 moment and gave the George W. Bush administration the authority to go to war in Iraq with little restraint.
This spring offers the rare opportunity for a do-over, with a bipartisan push in the Senate to formally rescind the 2002 resolution along with the 1991 war resolution passed after Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. The Senate is poised to pass its bill on Thursday, while the House, which voted in a broad bipartisan way to repeal the 2002 resolution two years ago, could take it up later this spring.
For many veterans of the October 2002 vote, change can’t come soon enough. Senator Robert Menendez (DN.J.), who was serving his fifth term in the House at the time he voted against the war resolution, saw the lasting effects from that consequential moment.
“This is a terrible vote,” Menendez said Thursday while presiding over the floor debate in an effort to recover the Senate. “We made Iran a power that it didn’t have before. We made al-Qaeda a franchise. It gave rise to ISIS, and we destroyed the region. It was one of the worst decisions I’ve seen made in 31 years foreign policy.”
Sen. is also ready. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to reject war resolutions, formally known as authorizations for the use of military force, or AUMF. But Collins still blamed top Bush administration officials for his initial vote, particularly Secretary of State Colin Powell, who he said told him on the eve of the vote that with congressional approval, the The United States can “avoid war” and force Saddam Hussein to withdraw.
“The premise of having weapons of mass destruction turns out to be a profound mistake,” he said Thursday.
Senator Lindsey O. Graham (RS.C.), who was in the House at the time, was the rare security hawk who still thought the vote was worth it, especially if the emerging Iraqi government would become a stable one. that democracy.
“Here’s what I would ask people to focus on,” Graham said Thursday. “Would the world be better off without Saddam Hussein, and would we be better off with a democracy replacing him? I would say yes.”
The ripple effects from the vote continue to this day, especially for the loved ones of those who lost their lives (nearly 300,000 Iraqis and nearly 5,000 US personnel) but with a region in turmoil as Syria Iran was ravaged by civil war and continued. its saber-rattling.
In terms of national politics and the role of congress in the conduct of foreign affairs, the fallout is astounding.
Democrats have watched the votes play out in every presidential election for the past 20 years, most notably in 2008, when Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who was not in the Senate for the vote but spoke out against the 2002 AUMF, used Senator Hillary Clinton’s (DN.Y.) vote for the war as a cudgel against his credibility, which went on to narrowly defeat him in the primaries.
Republican voters — especially those in rural areas that pay a higher price, with a higher rate of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq than their urban counterparts — are recoiling from traditional national security image of the two Bush presidents and adopted the “America First” approach of Donald Trump. Most congressional GOPs remain supportive of US power projection, especially against Russia, but with each new election, the nativist wing grows stronger.
And the popularity of the Congress plummeted. In October 2002, Gallup found that 50 percent of Americans approved of the performance of Congress, where approval had been for the previous four years.
In the spring of 2005, as the war continued, approval in Congress fell below 40 percent and has not risen above that mark since. Last month, Gallup measured it at 18 percent.
The Senate vote in 2002, 77 to 23, wasn’t even close. All but one of 49 Republicans supported Bush’s war resolution, and 28 of 51 Democrats voted with him.
Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is trying to work on an alternative resolution that would force the president to return to Congress for a second vote to prove that Hussein is an imminent threat. His top adviser, future Secretary of State Antony Blinken, drafted it, while aides to the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), is working on a more stringent resolution.
Denis McDonough, the incoming White House chief of staff for Obama and secretary of Veterans Affairs for Biden, coordinated the efforts as top foreign policy adviser to the Senate minority leader, Thomas A. Daschle (DS.D. ).
But the House minority leader, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), cut a separate deal with Bush and his advisers, giving them most of their wishes. A week later, each chamber had to vote.
Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), one of the most liberal members of the House at the time, said he saw his yes vote as a way to support United Nations weapons inspectors.
“They said that if they had the ability to have inspectors come in – which is the vote – and they didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, they wouldn’t start a war. So they lied about whether they would start one war,” he said, adding, “Obviously, I apologize for that vote.”
The House vote, 296 to 133, saw a majority of Democrats oppose the war resolution, while Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rallied the opposition against Gephardt and cemented her role as the dominant force in that caucus for the next two decades.
Many lawmakers heard what they wanted to hear, out of political fear and out of a desire to continue fighting terrorists after the 2001 attacks on the United States. Clinton felt pressure as a New Yorker to look tough after the attacks there but privately told aides she was uncomfortable.
“I can’t believe I signed up for this f—ing war,” he muttered to a senior aide at the time, according to “To Start A War,” Robert Draper’s definitive account of the rush to invade Iraq.
Menendez faces similar political pressures. About 750 New Jersey residents died in the attack on the World Trade Center, but as a member of the junior House, he studied the material and found the case unconvincing.
“There is no clear and present danger to the United States, no imminent threat and, above all, no evidence of weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “We’re coming full circle, where I’m going to be the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and try to end this.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime member of the Intelligence Committee, said the doubts lie within the classified reports provided by each member. Wyden obtained a piece of intelligence that was declassified the day before the vote, which showed the conclusion that Hussein was not planning any active terrorist actions against the United States.
Most senators have already announced their positions; the information is no different. The march to war has begun.
“You got these big issues wrong by going to war,” Wyden said, “and the consequences will be felt for years to come. You can’t fix this easily.”
In 2006, after recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Duckworth entered politics. He lost a race for a House seat, then served at the VA in the Obama administration. He won a House race in 2012 and his Senate seat in 2016.
Now he finally has the chance to vote against the war that cost him so much, watching the 2002 debate as a private citizen.
“I don’t see anything that compels me to have weapons of mass destruction,” Duckworth said. “I do not support war.”
