“On Iraq, short memories”

If you read journals these days, including this one, you would think that no more than six or seven people ever supported going to war in Iraq. But that is not the way I recall it.
During the 1990’s and in 2000, removing Saddam Hussein was a very popular idea among democrats and republicans. All U.S. political leaders and those in charge of the inspections in Iraq agreed when it’d come about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Richard Butler, former chief inspector in Iraq, wrote a very precise book about the Iraqi threat, which was published in 2000. I also recall that in 1997 Madeleine Albright compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler. At that time, the Clinton administration was preparing the nation for the war on Iraq. Later, in September 2002, Al Gore himself denounced the danger of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
In 1998, on these basis, I joined several others in an open letter supporting Saddam Hussein’s removal. A year later, Congress passed a resolution sponsored by Joseph I. Lieberman and John McCain providing 100 million dollars to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. On September 20, 2001, I signed a bipartisan letter indicating that Saddam Hussein supported terrorism and this was taken up again in March 2003.
Today, many of the signatories or those who supported the war are rewriting the story.