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U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to
authorize a war against Iraq. "If I had known then what I know now, I
would have voted against it," Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. "I have
admitted that my vote was wrong."
The Democratic-led Senate
approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S.
House approved a similar resolution.
"The decision got made before there was a
whole bunch of intelligence," said Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on
the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I think the intelligence was shaped.
And I think the interpretation of the intelligence was shaped.
"We had this feeling we could be welcomed
as liberators. Americans don't know history, geography, ethnicity. The
administration had no idea of what they were getting into in Iraq. We are
not internationalists. We border on being isolationists. We don't know
anything about the Middle East."
Rockefeller also said he is disturbed at
the failure to involve the United Nations in creating a new government and
finding peace in Iraq.
Many of the senator's feelings were
strengthened last week during a weeklong trip with four other Democratic
senators to Iraq and four other Middle Eastern nations.
In Iraq, the senators visited a team of
researchers investigating the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
"They have three million pieces of paper," Rockefeller said. "But
it is a sham. There is nothing to point to any weapons of any kind."
Rockefeller said the influence of terrorist
groups, such as al-Qaida, is growing in Iraq. He estimated that only about
5 percent of insurgents in Iraq are recent arrivals, with the rest
"homegrown."
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