Graham Seen As War Seer

By WILLIAM MARCH The Tampa Tribune

Published: Jun 7, 2007

TAMPA - As a presidential candidate in 2003, Bob Graham took a lonely and unpopular stance against going to war in Iraq - it helped curtail his shot at the presidency and end his long political career.

But Sunday night, when Democrats now running for president debated the war, much of the discussion focused on the evidence Graham cited in 2003, and why they and much of the nation had failed to see that he was right.

"The real winner of that debate," said South Florida Democratic political operative Derek Newton, "was Bob Graham."

If so, the victory comes four years too late for Graham, whose campaign sputtered to a halt before 2004 even began.

In an interview this week, Graham declined to express the bitterness many people might feel in his place.

He said the failure of Democratic candidates to accept his views at the time and vote against authorizing the war doesn't disqualify them from running for president today.

Instead, he said those who voted for the war-authorizing resolution can't be faulted for having believed what the Bush administration told them.

"Hindsight is always a good thing to have," Graham said. "But a lot of people, including some who are now running for president, took the position that 'if the president of the United States tells me something is truthful, I have the right to accept that without having to verify it.'

"That's not an unreasonable position," Graham said. "And it's not a position that disqualifies someone from being president of the United States."

Even in the Republican debate Tuesday night, candidates criticized the increasingly unpopular war.

Several sought to distance themselves from Bush - John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney said the war has been mishandled, and Tommy Thompson said Bush's record wouldn't make him a good U.N. representative.

Only one Republican criticized Bush's decision to start the war, dark horse Rep. Ron Paul; Romney ducked the question. Nor did the GOP candidates praise Graham for prescience on the issue, as did Democrat Barack Obama, who wasn't in the Senate at the time of the vote.

Obama noted that a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was one of the reasons Graham voted against the war, "So obviously there was some pertinent information there."

Candidates Didn't Read Full Report

Graham had urged his colleagues to read the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, which dealt with whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The alleged existence of those weapons was the administration's main justification for the war at the time.

But of the presidential candidates who were in the Senate at the time, none had read it fully, according to their debate statements and news accounts of their campaigns' responses to questions.

That includes Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, along with McCain and Sam Brownback. Biden said he read and was briefed on crucial parts of the report, and others said they read an executive summary. All voted for the war resolution in October 2002.

In 2002, Graham was chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

Graham said in the interview, as he had in his 2004 book "Intelligence Matters," that he was astonished to find, as the nation neared entering the war, there was no NIE on the subject.

"The NIE is the highest-level document the American intelligence community produces," he said. "Here we are about to go to war, and we haven't done something that is normal procedure for decisions of much less significance than a war."

An NIE is a summary of the best conclusions from the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, ranging from the CIA and military intelligence to the State Department and Department of Energy.

Produced at the request of Graham's committee and its House counterpart, the NIE on Iraq delivered what Graham called a "consensus" conclusion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - but with dissents from agencies Graham said he considered most knowledgeable on the matter, including the State Department and Department of Energy, which is responsible for producing and maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons.

Revision 'An Undiluted Call For War'

To read the 90-page report, including the dissents, members of Congress had to go to a secure room in the Capitol with armed guards and sign in. They couldn't take notes, and they couldn't send representatives.

Graham also asked for an edited, nonclassified version of the report that could be made public. He said the CIA responded with a 25-page document that omitted the dissenting information and included material not in the original NIE - and that appeared to have been produced well before the NIE, he said.

"It was an undiluted call for war," Graham said. He said he later learned that the document was the result of a request from the Bush administration months earlier for a summary of all evidence in favor of going to war.

In an Oct. 8, 2002, caucus three days before the vote, Graham "forcefully urged" his Democratic Senate colleagues to read the full report and vote no on the war resolution. But a Washington Post account said only about a half-dozen senators signed into the secure room to view the report; only 23 senators voted no.

Falling From Favor, Even In Florida

In 2003, Graham's war opposition hurt his popularity even in Florida, where he had served two terms as governor and three as senator. Republicans lambasted him for statements accusing the Bush administration of misleading the public on Iraq and for suggesting there was as much ground to impeach Bush as there had been for President Clinton.

A July 2003 poll of Florida voters showed his popularity had dropped below 50 percent for the first time since 1986.

Today, with national polls showing 65 percent to 70 percent disapproval of Bush's handling of Iraq, it's possible that would be different.

But Graham said of the decisions made then: "Nobody can feel anything other than sadness at this tragedy that our country has fallen into in the last five years. I'm disappointed that there wasn't greater caution and candor on behalf of people making the decisions, and our nation has suffered enormous losses as a result of it."

He said he hopes the candidates learn from this experience "that their statements as president are not just campaign slogans - the American people and Congress are going to give them the presumption of being truth."

Graham said he hasn't taken sides in the Democratic primary and isn't certain he will.

The overall lesson he takes from the events, he said: "We need to be more humble in our judgments, and we need to try to learn from our mistakes."

Reporter William March can be reached at (813) 259-7761 or wmarch@tampatrib.com.