The headlines were dramatic. Quoting testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee by David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, the front pages of newspapers around the country declared, "We were all wrong."

Unfortunately, the headlines were wrong as well.

Kay's acknowledgment that the case President Bush and his aides made for invading Iraq was based on bad intelligence and wrong assumptions was certainly worthy of the highest level of media attention. And Kay's call for an independent investigation of how inflated claims about the threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were used to guide the United States into an unnecessary war should, of course, be heeded.

But if that investigation is to have any value whatsoever, it is important to begin it with the understanding that not everyone was wrong. International leaders, members of Congress and tens of millions of citizens of the United States and other countries considered the so-called "evidence" that was presented by the Bush administration and its allies and concluded that basic standards of proof had not been met.

It should be noted that in October 2002, when the Bush administration was tossing around some of the wildest claims about Iraqi weapons programs and the prospect that these weapons posed a threat to the United States and its interests, the majority of Democrats in Congress and a handful of independent-minded Republicans asked the right questions and came to the right conclusions.

Notably, both U.S. Sen. Robert Graham, the Florida Democrat who then chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, and U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who then chaired the Armed Services Committee, voted against the "use of force" resolution. They did so, they said, because they were not convinced that Iraq posed an imminent threat.

Graham and Levin were joined by Wisconsin's Russ Feingold and other senators who refused to serve as rubber stamps for an administration that appeared, even then, to be playing fast and loose with the facts. Graham, Levin and Feingold were not part of the "all" that got it wrong.

Neither was U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, an early and outspoken critic of the administration's scheming to launch a pre-emptive war. So, too, were 125 other House Democrats, Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, and thinking Republicans like Iowa moderate Jim Leach.

Baldwin, Sanders and Leach were not part of the "all" who got it wrong.

Neither were the thousands of Madisonians who marched in protests against the rush to war, nor the tens of thousands of Wisconsinites who joined those protests, nor the millions of Americans and the tens of millions of people around the world who last Feb. 15 poured into the streets of cities around the planet to chant, "No Blood for Oil!"

It is right to investigate how - and more importantly, why - the Bush administration got it all wrong. It is right to question why Democratic Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts, John Edwards of North Carolina, and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, all of whom supported the "use-of-force" resolution, got it all wrong. And it is certainly right to try to figure out what is wrong with this country's intelligence gathering and analysis. But the investigation and questioning will be meaningless if it fails to recognize that it was always possible to get right the fundamental question of whether the case had been made for war.

That case was never made. And it ought never be forgotten that those who rushed this country to war did so by choice - not necessity.

Copyright 2003 The Capital Times

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