"Singing Our Birthday Song ..."

Well, a whole year's gone by since the first Cautious Man random thought hit the ether. And what was my first brilliant insight? "Going forward, I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about the approval, by the House and Senate, of resolutions authorizing military action in Iraq." Other than the fact that the resolutions are being used against Senator Kerry, and not President Bush in this election, I couldn't have been more wrong.

I just don't understand why more attention is not being paid to the fact that the Iraq invasion did not meet the criteria set by Congress. Remember, the President was authorized to use force ONLY if not doing so "will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq". Since then, we've learned that the alleged weapons of mass destruction, which we were imminently threatened with, were not there; and, that Colin Powell was given a completely phony set of arguments, to present to the U.N. Security Council in February of 2003. As I noted at the time, the sad and tragic fact is that Secretary Powell surely believed it when he said, in that February speech: "My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens. We have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote [Resolution] 1441 not in order to go to war. We wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give Iraq one last chance."

The other criterion in the authorization to use force was that an invasion would be "consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." Despite the many recent efforts of the Administration to conflate Iraq and Al Qaeda, the 9/11 Commission established and the fact remains that there clearly was no connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11.

So, this time last year I was annoyed that the President could not support either justification for the course of action he chose in Iraq. And one year later, we're up to over 1000 soldiers dead, in a war which everybody can see was launched without any proper authorization.