Senator Feingold on his reasoning for voting against the invasion of Iraq, “Given what we knew about Saddam Hussein (and we knew quite a lot), the important thing was whether it made any sense for him to coordinate with the likes of Osama bin Laden or to guarantee his own destruction by launching an independent WMD attack on the Unites States. These were sincere questions to which I wanted sincere answers from the administration. Instead what we got from August [2002] until the vote in October [2002] and then right up until the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a deliberate attempt to manufacture the notion of a Hussein-bin Laden connection and a reckless distortion of the likelihood of a direct WMD attack by Iraq. Actually, what helped persuade me to doubt Saddam’s WMD capabilities and intentions was the obvious fabrication behind the efforts to pretend that Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11. In the end, it was this dishonesty that turned me from a merely likely opponent of the war into the most vocal critic of the invasion and our continuing presence in Iraq long after Saddam was toppled. As false as the claims about WMD proved to be, it was the scam of the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda that outraged me the most. Without that ploy, played out in an environment of fear, both literal and political, the invasion of Iraq would have never been authorized by the Senate.”
– Russ Feingold, While America Sleeps, Page 78