WASHINGTON – Just back from Iraq, Rep. Adam Smith says he is encouraged by the progress U.S. troops are making there. But Smith, one of two House Democrats from Washington state to vote in favor of the war, said Friday if he had to do it over, he would change his vote.
“I wanted to give our commander in chief a certain amount of trust,” Smith said of his October 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq.
“I decided we are at war, Saddam needs to be held accountable and I will trust the president,” Smith said. “I feel like that trust turned out to be misplaced. If I had to do it all over again, I would not give it to him for that reason.”
Smith’s comments came a week after Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., who also voted in favor of the war, said he now believes the war was a mistake.
A longtime defense hawk, Dicks said last week he believes the prewar intelligence was “doctored” and the White House did not prepare for or deploy enough troops for the insurgency. He said he would “absolutely not” have voted for the war if he knew there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, as the administration claimed.
Smith, who returned Thursday from a five-day trip to Iraq and three other countries, said Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials should be held accountable for overstating the case for war and the presence of catastrophic weapons.
But he stopped short of saying that anyone in the administration had lied. “They showed a reckless disregard for the truth as they made the case,” Smith said from his home in Tacoma.
Even so, Smith said he disagrees with critics who call the war effort a failure.
“In the last year, there’s been significant progress on … security, nation-building and transitioning to Iraqi control. It’s a shame that we weren’t prepared for it in the first place, but (U.S. troops) are making up for it and doing their best,” he said.
Smith, a member of the House Armed Services and International Relations committees, was in Iraq on Monday and Tuesday, along with five other House members from both parties. Smith met several times with small groups of soldiers from Washington state.
While morale is good, most troops now say they want to come home, Smith said – a sharp contrast to his last Iraq visit in June 2004.
“They believe in what they are doing and what they have done, and believe they have made a difference, in terms of security and a civil society,” Smith said. “But the second part of that is they are ready to go home.”
Smith said he supports a plan by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who called for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, so that by the end of 2006 there are less than half the 160,000 troops now in Iraq.
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