![]() ![]() Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that “all of us that voted for it probably are slow to admit” that the weapons of mass destruction did not exist. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, then a House member who voted in favor of the war authorization. The vote was “premised on the biggest lie ever told in American history,” said Democratic Sen. Many consider it the hardest vote they ever took. Bipartisan supporters say the repeal is years overdue, with Saddam's regime long gone and Iraq now a strategic partner of the United States.įor senators who cast votes two decades ago, it is a full-circle moment that prompts a mixture of sadness, regret and reflection. Only now, 20 years after the Iraq invasion in March 2003, is Congress seriously considering walking it back, with a Senate vote expected this week to repeal the 20 authorizations of force against Iraq. Iraqi deaths are estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Indeed, the bipartisan votes in the House and Senate that month were a grave moment in American history that would reverberate for decades - the Bush administration’s central allegations of weapons programs eventually proved baseless, the Middle East was permanently altered and nearly 5,000 U.S. The Bush administration and many of the Democrat’s swing-state constituents strongly believed that the United States should go to war in Iraq, and lawmakers knew that the House and Senate votes on whether to authorize force would be hugely consequential. 11, 2002, didn’t come without political risk. ![]() "I have a son and a daughter - would I vote to send them to war based on this evidence? In the end the answer for me was no.”Īs with many of her colleagues, Stabenow’s “nay” vote in the early morning hours of Oct. “I really thought about the young men and women that we would be sending into battle," she said. 11, or that there was justification to attack,” Stabenow said in a recent interview, referring to the 2001 attacks that were one part of the Bush administration’s underlying argument for the Iraq invasion. “There was not enough information to persuade me that they in fact had any connection with what happened on Sept. But the case sounded thin, and Stabenow, then just a freshman senator, noticed the date on the photo was months old. ![]() Bush’s administration ahead of the October 2002 votes to authorize force in Iraq - military leaders showed an image of trucks in the country that they believed could be carrying weapons materials. Debbie Stabenow was sitting in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s conference room at the Pentagon, listening to him make the case that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.Īt some point in the presentation - one of many lawmaker briefings by President George W. ![]()
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