Bill Clinton Calls War 'A Big Mistake'

Bubba and Bush 41 yuk it up
Originally uploaded by wonderbread74.

BILL'S SUMMER FROLIC WITH BUSH 41 ENDS; BACKLASH FOLLOWS

Thanks, Bill. Where were you when we needed you the last two years? Playing golf with George H.W. Bush in Kennebunkport, that's where.

Bubba and the elder Bush must have had a falling out over Clinton taking too many mulligans because he finally spoke the truth about the situation in Iraq.

President Bill Clinton told a group of college students in Dubai that the war in Iraq was "a big mistake"

It's a little too late for Clinton to lead the Democrats against this war today. Where was his leadership when the war president was throwing his post-9/11 weight around in 2003? Why didn't he cite the very quotes that Republicans are using against him and his party back when Bush and Cheney were frightening Americans with visions of atomic winter?

We'll probably never know. If anything, it probably stems with the peculiar neutering of the Democratic Party back then when the party leadership was more afraid of preposterously being called unpatriotic than of the actual terror threat.

If Clinton would have stood up then and said that his administration believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and put it in its proper context; being that he was a risk to the region and in no way a threat to the continental U.S. then many of the questions still lingering today might have been dealt with in the run-up to war.

Instead of hemming and hawwing with the Bush family in Indonesia and countless dinner dates in Maine, Clinton could have called for an extension of his own and the U.S. policy of containment through diplomatic circles rather than becoming complicit by his inaction.

Tim Grieve from Salon makes a good point that the heavy hitters of the party are now vehemently calling for the end of the war. First Sen. John Edwards and now President Clinton.

If Bill is calling the war folly, will his wife be next?