Chafee Extends No Pity to War-Voting Democrats

From where Lincoln Chafee sits, the spectacle of Democrats writhing under questions about their Iraq war vote is ... interesting. The Rhode Islander was the only Senate Republican to oppose giving President Bush authority to invade. Chafee's refusal to support the war enraged Republican partisans, some of whom launched a stiff primary challenge against him. He survived it, only to be cut down in November by a backlash against anything Republican.

Now teaching at Brown University, Chafee doesn't have a whole lot of sympathy for the Democratic presidential hopefuls now trying to distance themselves from that fateful resolution in 2002. To him, voting "nay" was a slam-dunk, and "what we know now" was pretty obvious back then. That New York Sen. Hillary Clinton won't disown her "yes" vote, and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards has renounced his, Chafee told me the other day, is immaterial. Their vote was the problem.

"What frustrates me — even watching (Massachusetts Sen. John) Kerry in the '04 campaign as he tried to explain the vote — is that there were two votes that day," Chafee said. One was the Levin amendment, which would have slowed the march to war by sanctioning an attack only if approved by the United Nations.

Kerry, Clinton, Edwards, Delaware's Joe Biden and Connecticut's Chris Dodd refused to support the measure, introduced by Michigan Democrat Carl Levin. These Democrats all harbored presidential ambitions and probably didn't want to be linked with a strategy that Bush allies portrayed as a weak-kneed response to the menace of Saddam.

Then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chafee recalls taking great pains to note that the Levin amendment came with an important caveat that protected America's right to self-defense. "It said that if the Security Council drags its feet and we're in imminent danger," he said, "or some kind of new information comes out and we had to act quickly, we could meet in 24 hours and be ready to give the president authorization."

Presidency-minded Democrats could have voted for the Levin amendment, and when it failed to pass, gone on to fully authorize the president.

Chafee also never bought into the weapons of mass destruction argument. "I went to the CIA and asked the analysts what they had," he said. Their body language indicated not much — it was, "Don't look at me." He spoke up at Republican caucuses about the lack of a serious threat, but to no avail. "The anger associated with 9-11 was clouding everybody's judgment."

Some Democrats who authorized the war are now advocating various timetables for pulling out the troops, which Chafee also opposes. While he sees little point in Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq, he's also against a "precipitous" withdrawal. "We took down the government, and the government provides services," he said, "and so that burden falls on us."

As a fellow at Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies, Chafee continues to advance his long-held view that solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is key to bringing calm to the Middle East. And he bristles at the Bush administration's neglect of the "Road Map," the international plan to establish a Palestinian state living peacefully with Israel.

The Arab anger stirred by that ongoing conflict makes the job in the region harder, he insists. "Let's at least remove the propaganda that's used against us."

As for America's terrible dilemma in Iraq, "there's no easy answer now," he adds, not letting up on legislators trying to justify their vote for the war.

"When the roll is called, that's what matters," he said, "and we needed people to say 'stop.'"

To find out more about Froma Harrop, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE