Would Dems Really Deliberately Drive Into a Ditch?

I have given proper applause to Pennsylvania Senate candidate Bob Casey (D) for raising questions about the Iraq War in his 2006 race for the U.S. Senate against Rick Santorum. But I must say, I was disturbed when I read today about his Kerry-2004-style position on the Iraq War vote itself.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that "on the major Iraq votes - authorizing force and funding the operation - Casey said he would have supported those measures, just as Santorum did." Now, you can make a credible argument that his position on the Iraq war funding vote is honest, as the logic is, at least, defensible: once the troops were over there, the argument goes, we had to fund their armor and equipment. That's fine.

But to say that knowing what we know now - which is that Iraq had no WMD (the very reason we were told we were going to war) and didn't pose an imminent threat to America - you still would have voted for the Iraq War is just plain silly, regardless of whether you support a withdrawal now or not. That is sort of like getting out of your wrecked car after making a wrong turn into a ditch and saying knowing what you know now about there being a ditch there, you'd still have made that wrong turn, destroyed your car, and gotten it stuck there.

The fact that there are only a few Democrats who are willing to say the obvious - that the country was misled and people who voted for the war made a mistake - transcends the war itself and cuts to a deeper and more damaging problem for the party: the public perception that Democrats are so afraid to stand up for anything, they openly embrace policies even after they've been proven to be terribly misguided.

But even beyond the illogic of this "still would have voted for it knowing what I know now" position is the fact that it has been road-tested and shown to be politically dumb. Kerry said the same thing in August of 2004 - and in doing so, effectively took the war off the table for debate in the 2004 presidential election. Do Democrats really think that was a winning strategy? And do they really think it will be a winning strategy with polls showing Americans are even more opposed to this war now than they were in 2004?