I keep hearing the suggestion from my Republican friends that recent Democratic criticisms of this president's Iraq policy are really nothing more than a cynical admixture of 20/20 hindsight and election-year politics. So I thought this might be a good time to remind people of precisely what we Democrats (in this case, then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden) were saying in early 2003, well before the first boot hit the ground in Iraq. [Note: The Hardball with Chris Matthews transcript quoted below leaves a great deal to be desired, but what's a simple blogger to do?]

MATTHEWS: Senator Biden, a big question, a lot of people, and you know more than I know, you know a lot and you probably can’t tell us, but it looks like we might be going to war next month, that’s February, late in the month. What evidence do you need to see from the president that will say to you as the representative of this state, we’ve got to go to war.

BIDEN: I’ve seen the evidence the president has. What I think we have to do is make sure that we go to war, if we go to war, with the support of the United Nations and the reason for that is not that we’d need them to win the war, but we need them for the decade after the war. Most people don’t realize this is going to cost us tens of billions of dollars.

Mark my words; we’re going to have somewhere between 75 and 100,000 American forces in Iraq for a minimum of three to five years. Initially the president said, no, that won’t be it. Now his military is saying at least 18 months. People-look, the thing-one thing I learned from-when I was here at the university during the Vietnam era is that no matter how well formulated the foreign policy, it cannot be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. [...]

MATTHEWS: The commander in chief thanks to the votes of many Democratic senators and Republicans, including yours, has the authority to decide this without your approval. He can simply sign the provisions of the resolution passed by the United States Senate last fall that he can take any actions which protects U.S. security vis-a-vis Iraq. Can he, do you believe politically, make this move without the support of the United Nations? Can he go it alone?

BIDEN: He can, but he shouldn’t.

MATTHEWS: Does he know that?

BIDEN: I think he does because, remember, — do you remember-I literally remember talking about this on your show. Everybody was saying we’re going to go to war last summer. Because remember Rumsfeld said we would not go to the United Nations. We would not go to Congress. That is when I held all those hearings, remember, and remember the polling data started to change and then Dick Lugar.

And I were beginning to work very closely with the president, trying to make the case that Paul was making to him. The president has made the right decisions, although sometimes belatedly, to do it the right way, and that is under international consensus. That’s a wise way to go and not because we couldn’t do it by ourselves, but because after the fact, we do not want to inherit the wind.

I just came from northern Iraq. I’m one of only two United States senators, Congress or anybody, who has ever been up there. Let me tell you something. This is going to be like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. There is a town called Mosel (ph) where all the oil is. Guess what? They’ve been trying to Arabize it, kicking all the Kurds out for the last 20 years. Guess what? The Kurds want back. This is going to make (UNINTELLIGIBLE) look like a picnic. I don’t want us inheriting all that ourselves.

But Saddam Hussein, if we leave him unfettered, leave him unfettered for another five years, he will with that billion, $200 billion a year, have a nuclear capacity. This is a guy, remember now, this is a guy who started a war of aggression. He got beat after crossing the border and doing damage to another independent country.

The condition for him staying in power, the treaty in effect he signed with the whole world was he would get rid of his nuclear weapons. Now what do you say in the future if, in fact, we, the world, do not enforce that? What do you and I say? It’s just like you sign a peace agreement. You clearly violate it. The whole world knows it and you are doing bad things. Now, what’s the deal here? The deal is this is the world’s problem. We should be smart enough to keep it the world’s problem. And if we keep it the world’s problem, we’ll get this done the right way. [...]

STUDENT: What kind of foreign policy would you have for 2004 if you were the president?

BIDEN: If I were the new president’s secretary of state, I would be talking about being strong enough to engage the rest of the world. I would have, for example, in Afghanistan, not told the Germans, who risked their election on providing for troops to go to Afghanistan, stiff arm them, say we don’t need them. I would include people. I would make sure that we — look, if we ask people around the world to join us when we have a serious issue at stake and it’s less serious for them, we have to be prepared to understand when things are more important to us but more important to them.

We should respond. The middle east, big problem for a whole lot of the world. Kyoto, a big problem for a whole lot of the world. All these issues that we sort of summarily dismiss and say, look, we write the agenda, that’s it. We should always be prepared to go it alone if our national interest is at stake. But there is the ability to lead and part of leading is leading the world, leading people to join us.

See? The criticisms and cautions above are entirely consistent with what we're hearing from Biden and the Dems today. Not to mention pretty damned prescient. In fact, this president's failure to learn anything from the folks who actually knew what they were talking about before the war makes it more than a little difficult to square Mr. Bush's current and rather strenuous reelection efforts with his longstanding (and quite correct) opposition to the whole idea of social promotion.

POSTSCRIPT: And as long as we're engaged in a little friendly score-keeping anyway, this might also be a good time to review Biden's Brookings speech from July of last year.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Yes, I was the guy behind the remarkably ineffective Draft Biden for President website.

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