Six months later, the same officials reported that Iraq was two to three years away. Soon after 9/11, Jeffords was told that Iraq was less than a year away. By the time the Iraq resolution was in motion to approach a vote these same officials told him that Hussein could develop WMD any minute. "What made it all the more unbelievable was that their intelligence didn't change, only the estimate," Jeffords said. "They were obviously lying. And that's why I voted against the resolution."

 That was Jeffords' reasoning. Good old-fashioned lie detection. It was the same reasoning that millions of Americans used to conclude that invading Iraq was a really bad idea. It was a conclusion that anyone could have come to if they had  even superficially followed the national news during the months building up to the invasion. And of course millions did. What makes Jeffords' Nay vote and the reasoning behind it so  stunning is the contrast it offers to the floor speeches we  heard in the House and Senate from hundreds of elected representatives. If you  go back over and read the House and Senate speeches surrounding the resolution, you'll see that nearly every representative and senator who voted Aye stated their justification in the potential that Iraq might develop, use, or share weapons of mass destruction. You won't find talk about liberation or the spread of democracy.

 Democrats who'd been in Congress long enough to spot exaggeration and lying from the White House from a mile off somehow saw something different than Jeffords and much of American citizenry. Long-time California  Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein in her speech before voting for the Iraq resolution based her vote on the premise of the existence of WMD: "If Saddam Hussein achieves nuclear capability, the risk increases exponentially and the balance of power shifts radically in a deeply menacing way. As I said on this floor in earlier remarks, I believe that Saddam Hussein rules by terror and has squirreled away stores of biological and chemical weapons." And so did Missouri Democratic Representative and ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee Ike Skelton: "[T]he question before the House is this: Shall we stay the hand of the miscreant, or permit the world's worst government to brandish the world's worst weapons? I believe that, Mr. Speaker, difficult as it is, there can be only one answer. I support the resolution."

 It was a mixture of things. In part they were caught in the strange post-9/11 psychology that saturated the atmosphere in Washington. In part they were cowed. The New Patriotism that emerged in D.C. required an Aye vote on Iraq. The gigantic PR effort from the White House and national media was overwhelming.  Iraq was made to be the issue in D.C. for the better part of a year. That explains some of it. The other part is of course much harder to forgive. The Democrats who voted for the war did so also because of political calculations. Feinstein, Skelton and the others knew that the vote  was based on a lie. And just as the war has failed, so too is the idea that voting  for it would turn out to be good politics. The Iraq resolution vote slew just about every prominent D.C. Democrat in 2004. Support for the invasion killed the political careers of Kerry and Edwards, Daschle and Gephardt, and a host of others. By contrast, all seven senators who voted against the resolution and faced re-election this past November won, and they did so with an average margin of 30 percent.

 The Democratic Party is in its death throes. It's a spectre of the New Deal era. Calls for a new Democratic Party vision are everywhere.  But why not start with honesty? Who wants a future envisioned by a Party that was only half honest on one of the biggest choices in its history?

 Admitting that they lied to their constituents on the Iraq resolution war vote would be the best place to start. For one, that vote was easily the biggest of their lives. Senator Hillary Clinton called it in her floor speech "probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make." And while there were hundreds of votes cast in the recent political era by Democrats for or against bills for reasons that can only be called corrupt, destructive to the republic, or advancing the cause of empire, none defined the direction of the nation more than the Iraq resolution. For one, it was emotionally the country's response to 9/11 . Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, none of those came close to being The Response to 9/11 that the invasion of Iraq did.

 An apology for the Iraq resolution would set the Party on a path of honesty about about the nightmare scenarios the country faces.  

 Going back to Jeffords, it's worth noting the context of his explanation  to his fellow Vermonters. The group had taken a bus together from the towns of Middlebury and Rutland on a freezing January morning to canvas voters in Concord, New Hampshire for Howard Dean (I was there because I was working for Dean's campaign). They were sitting together in an office building board room having breakfast before they went out to knock on doors, and someone asked Jeffords why he had endorsed Dean and not another candidate. Aside from their being fellow Vermonters, Jeffords said his reasoning was based on Dean's opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

 Dean's candidacy was of course almost entirely launched by his opposition to the war, but Dean wasn't being totally honest when he'd declare that he was against it from the beginning. Dean supported the Biden-Lugar amendment in the early phase of his candidacy when he was only fractionally more relevant  than Al Sharpton. The Biden-Lugar amendment added up to exactly the same thing as the Iraq resolution Congress voted on and sent to George W. Bush. The only difference was that with Biden-Lugar, the President would have had to send a letter to Congress notifying its leaders that he was going to invade.

 So the most prominent political leader among the Democrats who was against the invasion hasn't been totally honest either. And now he's the one at the helm of the party. What better first step for Howard Dean to confess that he was caught up in the 9/11-soaked political atmosphere, and that he timidly supported the invasion of Iraq before his conscience -- or perhaps his politics -- got the better of him? Forget state party infrastructure or the internet. How about getting to the truth on the biggest crisis  the country faces: What the hell are we going to do with Iraq? It will make it all the easier for the rest of the compromised D.C. Democrats to confess when a leader of their party does it first. And eventually they and the rest of Washington will have to anyway if they want to stay in office.

 The Democrats who apologize their misbegotten dreams of empire and their horrifically shallow political choice will be embraced like family by the ones who were openly against it all along and  set  the party on a course to face reality. This will inevitably lead to a discussion  of when, not if we withdraw our troops from Iraq, but that discussion is inevitable anyway. Empire-worshiper and editor of The New Republic Peter Beinart recently conceded to the New York Times that "there is no question that the war is going very, very badly." And Beinart was editor of the liberal magazine that fomented  a discourse making it OK -- even courageous -- for senators like Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden to promote the war. The U.S. Army's official historian of the Iraq war has concluded that the U.S. "lost its dominance" shortly after we invaded. Take away the words "its dominance" and we're much closer to the truth. And the number of dead soldiers, the money we have already spent on the Iraq war, are nothing compared to the aftershocks on their way back to this country even  if all 300 million Americans and elected Washington apologized tomorrow.

While a liberal alliance crows about its apparent success in halting Social Security privatization, the imperial project in Iraq continues unfettered.  Hardly an eyebrow gets raised to the appropriation of money for a multi-hundred million dollar embassy fortress complex in Baghdad, the Pentagon continues to whistle its way through planning for building military bases around Iraq to add to the half dozen under construction or completed in the region, and a jingoist like Max Boot openly suggests the hiring of foreign mercenaries to fight our wars in the opinion pages of a major American newspaper with no rebuttal.  

 Concluding her floor speech on the Iraq resolution, Hillary Clinton said that her vote was not "for any new doctrine of preemption or for unilateralism or for the arrogance of American power or purpose, all of which carry grave dangers for our Nation, the rule of international law, and the peace and security of people throughout the world." But her vote did exactly that and more, and if she didn't know it then, she most certainly knows it now. One hopes it's something eating at her  and the rest of her colleagues who voted for the war, and not something they are proud of. Should Democrats like Hillary  be allowed to vie  for even higher office without even apologizing for the biggest mistake of their lives?

 Currently we're not even close to beginning the process of withdrawal from Iraq. It won't start until one of the political parties gets honest  about why many of its members voted the war in the first place. Collectively, a unified party can then push for an answer to the question which the public still does not have an answer for: the real reason or reasons we invaded Iraq in the first place. Only then can we get to the next stage of answering whether that basis is still worth fighting for.