WASHINGTON -- The Democratic Party as a whole, and most of its presidential candidates, are making three consistent mistakes in their otherwise generally fair critiques of Bush administration policy in Iraq. These mistakes should be corrected; if they are not, Democrats will be less effective as constructive critics of President George W. Bush now, and will probably fare worse in national elections next fall.
The first mistake is to argue that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were not a serious concern before the war. The second is the the claim that somehow the Bush administration unilateralism has been the principal cause of our current problems on the ground in Iraq. And the third is the assumption that the Iraq mission will remain just as difficult as it is today right through general election time next year.
On the WMD issue, some Democrats have gone so far as to claim that the alleged threat was a fraud invented by the Bush administration to justify a war it wanted regardless of whether Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons or not. Democrats are right that the administration hyped the weapons issue, especially the possibility of Hussein making rapid progress toward a nuclear capability. But the party must remember that virtually everyone in the United States, the United Nations system, Europe, former Clinton administration ranks and elsewhere believed that Hussein still had chemical and biological weapons given his track record on the subject.