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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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