GEPHARDT: "I WAS WRONG"

Kagro X over at The Next Hurrah spent some time with Dick Gephardt in Seattle lately and got to revisit Gephardt's crucial support of Bush's unprovoked and illegal attack on Iraq. The headline: Gephardt now admits he was wrong. Hmmmm... From Gephardt's point of view, he had told Bush he wouldn't support his little anti-Saddam adventure unless we were going in with allies and unless it was about weapons of mass destruction. Bush seems to have pouted and groused but eventually was persuaded to make up a good cover story about WMD and put together some kind of bogus alliance with England and a smattering of Eastern European countries eager for American aid and some other small easily ordered-around client states in Central America and Polynesia.

Gephardt claims CIA Director George Tenet assured him absolutely that Bush wasn't lying about WMDs. I guess it never dawned on Gephardt that Tenet lied for a living. (Oddly, a majority of Democrats in the House weren't as easily taken in as their leader.) Now Gephard says, about supporting-- even ENABLING, Bush, "It was a mistake... I was wrong." Now he says that trusting this Administration was a mistake. (Did he not notice that what he refers to as "this Administration" lied, cheated and stole its way into power in the first place? At what point and WHY did Gephardt ever think the Bush Regime could be trusted?) He says there were two big mistakes. The first was that "we" never comprehended the complexity of the undertaking. "I didn't. None of us did." Is that so? Many of us did. Gepardt didn't seem to have a problem calling me and bugging me to come to his hotel-- knowing 100% that I was a die-hard, unshakable Dean supporter-- and then tricking me into shaking hands with Terry MacAuliffe. But he wasn't interested that I was very much aware of the complexity of the undertaking, as well as the futility and sure-fire catastrophic nature of it. And it wasn't "none of us were" in my world; it was ALL OF US WERE (except "A"); he could have asked any of my friends or colleagues and OVER HALF OF HIS OWN COLLEAGUES. But who did Gephardt mean when he said "none of us were?" The grown-ups? The Inside the Beltway assholes who think they know better than anyone else? The GOP Establishment with their faithful DLC counterparts? Yeah, you can see how impressed I am with Gephardt's mea culpa. Oh, yeah-- and the second big mistake (which he says was the bigger of the two): He says Bush "has never been honest about the sacrifices required... the lives lost, the eyes blown out. Bush fails the first test of leadership: 'Can you be honest with the people you lead?'"

According to Kagro X, Gephardt told him that "in the national interest, in a time of crisis, our side played its cards face up -- and they held cards up their sleeves. They knew what they wanted, and they played on our patriotic idealism and earnest statesmanship to freeze us -- 'the opposition' -- in untenable positions."

Gephardt failed miserably as leader of that opposition. He had no choice but to go away and leave the public stage. I'm glad he's willing to speak out a bit now but it's too late for too many thousands of Americans and Iraqis. If war crime trials ever come, Gephardt will have to face Justice along with the other conspirators in this disaster.