The Love Song of Barack, Hillay and John
Rob Price

Sreets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question..."

The 2008 presidential election already is shaping up as a series of tedious arguments that nevertheless lead, like the streets in T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," to an overwhelming question.

It boils down to how the candidates, particularly the Democrats, justify their 2002 positions on President Bush's request for Congressional authorization to use force in Iraq.

The arguments seem to be grouping themselves in three main groups:

The first, exemplified by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, claims the justification for going to war was threadbare even in 2002. There was no evidence Saddam Hussein was partnering with Al-Qaida and the evidence presented by the Bush administration that Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction was unconvincing.

The second and third arguments, exemplified by former Sen. John Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton respectively, are similar but differ in a key respect.

Edwards, who voted in favor of authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq, has subsequently apologized for his vote, insisting the information relayed to him by the administration was inaccurate. In retrospect, he says, he was wrong to accept it.

Clinton too has said if she knew then what she knows now, she would never have voted to authorize war. But she has declined to apologize for her vote, preferring to focus her criticism on the Bush administration's prosecution of the Iraq occupation.

Edwards seems to be betting an apology clears the air and puts the 2002 vote behind him. I have my doubts about that. Apologies are useful up to a point, but Edwards' particular apology follows an uncomfortable logic: I made a mistake in what was the crucial vote of my Senate career. Sorry! Now let's move on. Well, we might answer, considering the magnitude of that mistake, let's just NOT move on.

Clinton, for reasons difficult to fathom, has drawn a line in the sand when it comes to the apology issue. Does she refuse to apologize because she is emotionally incapable of admitting she made a mistake? Or does she refuse to apologize on the grounds there was nothing wrong with her 2002 vote, given the evidence at the time.

The latter possibility is certainly defensible. We all make judgments based on the evidence before us. If we make a serious effort to assess that evidence, and base our subsequent judgments on that effort, there should be no need to apologize if subsequent events turn the basic premises under which we were working on their head. In that case, we may feel intense regret for our acts, but there is no need to apologize for them. Anyone in our position would have acted similarly.

Which brings us back to Barack Obama, who opposed the 2002 vote as a state senator from Illinois. We might ask, did Obama know something Clinton and Edwards did not?

That seems unlikely, if we're just talking about military data. However - and here's the overwhelming question, or at least series of questions - is it possible Obama possesses some judgment, some degree of wisdom, that allowed him to see through the fog of data that had obscured the truth for people like Clinton and Edwards?

Or, on the other hand, was Obama acting on the basis of some uninformed judgment that subsequently turned out to be correct? If that were the case, Clinton and Edwards' votes are still understandable, even justifiable. And, if Obama was simply articulating some illinformed judgment, what should we expect of his future judgments?

It's an interesting situation, and it's also a particularly Democratic situation, since the two leading Republican candidates at this point - John McCain and Rudy Guilliani - were hawks in 2002 and still appear to be hawkish.

Once again, it seems, the Democratic party is about to have one of its knockdown drag-out fights over foreign policy, with the party's relatively hawkish side represented by Hillary Clinton, and Obama and Edwards vying for ... let's just say the rest.

It's going to be an entertaining conflict, and if the stakes weren't so high I would be happy to sit back and crack a joke, like the amusing narrator of Prufrock. Of course, he was speaking on the eve of a world war.