They Were Paying These People

Not that any of this is surprising, but doesn't this story make the case that the Democratic party needs a completely new stable of foreign policy advisors?

Shrum's book, "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner," provides an account of Edwards' private discussions leading up to the decision. The Associated Press obtained excerpts from uncorrected galley proofs of the book to be published June 5 by Simon & Schuster.

Shrum writes that Edwards, then a North Carolina senator, called his foreign policy and political advisers together in his Washington living room in the fall of 2002 to get their advice. Edwards was "skeptical, even exercised" about the idea of voting yes and his wife Elizabeth was forcefully against it, according to Shrum, who later signed on to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

But Shrum said the consensus among the advisers was that Edwards, just four years in office, did not have the credibility to vote against the resolution and had to support it to be taken seriously on national security. Shrum said Edwards' facial expressions showed he did not like where he was being pushed to go.

Edwards spokesman Jonathan Prince said the only people who influenced Edwards' vote were his wife and foreign policy experts who worked under President Clinton and argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That turned out not to be true.

Here you have the "politicals" giving the unbelievably stupid political advice that Democratic presidential candidates needed to give President Bush authorization to go to war in Iraq. If the war had gone well, having voted for it would not have made it easier for a Democrat to win in '04. Bush would have won in a walk. (After all, the war was a disaster in '04, and he won anyway.) But if the war went badly, the Democratic candidates would have ownership of it or look like flip-floppers. (Which they did.) And that was the political advice.

Meanwhile you have Clinton foreign policy advisors giving their imprimatur to the weak, tendentious case that the administration was making about Saddam's WMD. How could Democratic foreign policy experts have been this stupid? The evidence for nuclear WMD just wasn't there; it never was. And even if you thought Saddam had some chemical or biological weapons (after all, the US had given him some), why is this a reason to invade the country rather than step up inspections? Why did invading Iraq ever look like a reasonable course of action on the policy merits?

If this isn't an ironclad case for a party purge, I don't know what is.