On Iraq, Bayh would vote differently now

The latest on Evan Bayh's decision to go to war with Iraq from the Indy Star:

Saying that he relied on inaccurate information, Sen. Evan Bayh said today he would not have voted in 2002 to authorize President Bush to go to war in Iraq if he had known then what he knows now.
“Of course I would have done things differently knowing what I know today,” Bayh told reporters at his Indianapolis office.

But, he added, “I did what I thought was right at the time. Now it turns out that some of the facts were inaccurate. There were no weapons of mass destruction. We didn’t realize that this undertaking would be carried out in some ways as incompently as it’s been carried out.”

But Bayh, a Democrat exploring a run for the presidency in 2008, quickly added: “We do support freedom, we do support democracy, we don’t support dictators. And we want to assure the troops who are representing us in Iraq that they have our unwavering support.”

If the Senate were faced with such a vote again, Bayh said, “of course we’re going to insist on better intelligence next time; of course we will have, God willing, a better understanding about the complexity of nation-building in a society as complex as Iraq..... A list of tragic mistakes were made in the way this was conducted.”

Bayh said President Bush “took a step, but not all the steps” that need to be taken toward a resolution of the Iraq conflict in his Wednesday speech.

Bayh said that while no specific timetable should be given for American withdrawal from Iraq, a series of goals and strategies should be outlined to measure progress.

“We need to say how much this is going to cost, what it’s going to take, how we’re going to measure progress and some general time-frame for how long we think that might take,” he said.

While specific dates would be inappropriate, he said, “it just can’t be open-ended, forever and ever.”