Poll-watching pols now say no on Iraq

Joan Vennochi of The Boston Globe writes:

AS GO the polls, so go the pols.

According to the most recent CNN/Gallup/ USA Today survey, 63 percent of Americans disapprove of the situation in Iraq. In essence, the question Cindy Sheehan tried to ask President Bush in Crawford, Texas, last August -- why did my son die in Iraq? -- is resonating across the country.

And so, the time has come for America's politicians to line up bravely behind the public.

John Edwards, the former US senator from North Carolina who hopes to run again for president, began a recent Washington Post opinion piece about his vote to authorize war with these words: ''I was wrong." Also last week, the Republican-controlled Senate voted to press the White House to provide more public information about the course of the war in Iraq.

Senator John Kerry spent much of the 2004 presidential campaign trying to rationalize his vote to authorize war with Iraq. Finally, last month Kerry called for troop withdrawal, echoing a demand made last January by Senator Edward M. Kennedy to harsh criticism.

Kennedy voted against the Iraq war resolution, called Iraq ''George Bush's Vietnam," and pressed the White House long before the polls turned sharply downward on the president.

The three Massachusetts congressmen who also voted ''yes" on the Iraq war resolution -- Edward Markey, Martin Meehan, and Stephen Lynch -- also said recently that if they knew then what they know now, they would not have done so. (Earlier this year, Meehan called for a troop withdrawal schedule.)

In his recent speech at Georgetown University, Kerry said, ''The country and the Congress were misled into war. I regret that we were not given the truth." In his Washington Post opinion piece, Edwards also submitted the new mantra of the change-of-heart crowd: ''The information the American people were hearing from the president -- and that I was being given by our intelligence community -- wasn't the whole story."

Interestingly, this argument could run into flak from those who opposed the Iraq invasion from the start.

For example, Michael Capuano of Somerville -- one of seven Bay State congressmen who voted against the Iraq war resolution -- said some colleagues who voted ''yes" now contend they were lied to or misled. But Capuano sees the situation differently. Sure, the Bush administration marshaled intelligence to make the case that Saddam Hussein had WMDs; but even so, he argues, the White House never presented a strong case, publicly or in private briefings with Congress. ''They never came close. There was never any real hard proof," said Capuano.

Recalling a White House briefing by Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, Capuano said: ''They never had an ounce of evidence in my mind. The best they could give me was a picture of a tractor trailer, photos from a gazillion miles up, that they said was a lab."

Appreciating that he was ''low down on the totem poll," Capuano said that in the run-up to the vote, he asked ''every senior Democrat I could find, 'have you guys seen something we haven't seen?' Everyone said no."

So, were some ''yes" votes influenced by polls? ''At the time, sure, some were," said Capuano, speaking generally, not specifically, about any individual vote.

Of course, all ''yes" votes were not cast in bad faith. The Iraq war resolution vote was taken in October 2002, a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Emotions and patriotism ran high, as did support for Bush in the aftermath of his decision to invade Afghanistan. In that context, Bush got the benefit of the doubt and the votes in Congress.

And today a politician's decision to voice regret for that vote represents more than capitulation to public opinion polls. It is an important and necessary recognition of reality in Iraq, even if it falls short of the Tip O'Neill standard.

In 1967, the Democratic congressman from the Eighth District broke with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. According to John A. Farrell's biography, ''Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century," the Cambridge Democrat told the Democratic president in the Oval Office: ''I don't want to leave you, but I think you're wrong." With those words, O'Neill was ahead of the curve, the polls, and his blue-collar constituents.

In 2005, belated spine is better than no spine. But it should never be confused with real political courage, the kind that stands up to presidents when it is unpopular to do so.