Dovish Republican nails Democrats on the war

As you may remember, Lincoln Chafee lost his U.S. senate seat from Rhode Island last year. While he was the lone GOPer to oppose the Iraq war resolution, he tells the Providence Journal that his defeat was logical since Democrats wanted to take control of Congress. He has a new book, Against the Tide, that contains the following damning portrait of Democrats in the runup to the war (as excerpted by the Journal): "The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were. They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom."

Chafee writes of his surprise at “how quickly key Democrats crumbled.” Democratic senators, Chafee writes, “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?”