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The difference is that public opinion of the Iraq War was never really based on the presence or absence of WMDs. I don't know how old you were in the run up to the war in 2002/early 2003, but this was never really a huge selling point among the American public. It was the official justification, and it was the one Colin Powell pushed in front of the UN, but I don't remember anyone who really felt like that was the best justification. Most of the people who would fervently denounce the war later were denouncing it before it even started. Most of the people in favor of the war were pushing some muddled narrative about how since Sadaam was a bad, anti-American Arab actor in the Middle East he was somehow responsible for terrorist activity including 9/11. They all mentioned the WMD angle when they were arguing in favor of the war before it actually happened, but few of them flinched when the evidence turned out to be underwhelming. And lest you think that there was some middle ground where pro-war Democrats lost faith in the war after they saw how flimsy the initial justification was, they didn't exactly back off right away. Even the 2004 election, largely viewed as a referendum on the war at the time, didn't really have any war-related policy angle. John Kerry had no plans on withdrawing and didn't claim that he did. He claimed that it was a mistake in retrospect but that didn't translate into any concrete proposals.
What happened was that the people who had always been opposed to the war started pointing to the lack of WMDs as proof that it was built on a faulty foundation, and as the years went by this narrative became more prominent. The real problem with the Iraq War was the unexpected insurgency and inability to deal with the sectarian tensions that bubbled to the surface in Sadaam's absence. The problem with the war in 2004 was that a year on from Bush proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" the war continued to drag on with no real end in sight. If the US had gone in in 2003 and installed an effective government the no one would really care about the lack of WMDs. The outcome would have been used as an object lesson that most of the unfree people in the world simply desire democracy and the US military can make their dreams come true by simple removing whatever impediments are preventing it. Afghanistan had already started to shatter that illusion, but it was easy to gloss over Afghanistan because it had been relatively anarchic to begin with and was considered absolutely necessary by pretty much everybody, given that they were responsible for an attack on our country. Iraq was seen as optional. There's also the fact that casualties were much higher in Iraq; annual casualties in Afghanistan measured in the tens, while casualties in Iraq measured in the thousands. These casualties were also higher in the insurgency than they were during the initial invasion. Even accounting for the fact that there was a good 2 1/2 months of 2003 before any action started, 2004 saw by far the highest casualty totals of the war. There were fewer than 3,000 total casualties in 2003; in 2004 there were over 8,000, and the following 3 years would see casualties in the 5,000–7,000 range. The totals plummeted in 2008, but by this time even the war's former supporters had to distance themselves from it. There was no doubt that whoever the Democratic candidate was would have to unequivocally commit to ending the war in his (or her) first term, and John McCain's support of the war (he was actually one of the few people in government who advocated for sending more troops to Iraq) was viewed as a major impediment to his electability.
The general, but the Democratic primaries were dominated by the question. Howard Dean's raison d'etre was opposition to the war.
In the end, though, the majority of Democrats shrugged, and John Kerry got the nomination. And his position was, at best, muddled, sometimes calling for withdrawal early in the new term, sometimes suggesting increased troop presence. (You actually can come up with a coherent statement of his position beyond "Bush bad," but it's clearly synthetic and mostly because he was very reticent when it came to committing to any particular concrete policy.) And, in fairness to the politics at the time, him adopting a strong anti-war stance would have probably lost him votes; his issue was waffling badly, not waffling itself.
Yep, that's me. And to add a bit of color, although I would tactically deploy arguments about WMD when convenient, in all honesty I didn't give a shit: finding anything short of a nuke wouldn't have phased me, and even with a nuke I would have probably just gone quiet for a month. I still think that's the correct perspective, but the matter of WMD was just a pretextual battlefield for the larger question of whether the war on Iraq was good or bad. And I'm pretty sure that's not unique to me.
You mean "fazed". The way you spelled it is a hypercorrection.
Good catch, appreciated.
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I voted for Bush in 2000, and one of my biggest reasons for supporting him was when he explicitly disavowed nation-building. 9/11 and the explicit arguments that Saddam was an imminent threat was enough to shift me out of my isolationist position. The subsequent walk-back on WMD infuriated me beyond belief, and led to me going hard-blue for the next decade and change, to the point that I left the country for a couple years.
Certainly I'm not the majority, but there has always been a significant isolationist position within the Red Tribe, and they were not okay with the Forever Wars or the lies told to secure them.
See also Pat Buchanan.
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