Hindsight Casts Harsh Light on Use-of-Force Resolution

It’s too soon to call it an outbreak, but on the eve of a possible war, several unconfirmed cases of sweaty palms have been reported here in the nation’s capital.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has suddenly raised more questions about Iraq in the past week than the entire Democratic Party has asked in six months, and she’s particularly nervous about possible use of nuclear arms by the United States.

Parroting similar concerns are several Democratic presidential wannabes who, entirely by coincidence, rose up from the dead the very moment President Bush’s popularity began to dip.

And what were these people doing last October, when their nervous queries and grave concerns might have done some good?

Some of them, including Feinstein and four of the presidential dreamers, were voting to authorize the use of military force against Iraq. It’s a ticket Bush seems determined to punch, regardless of the lack of allied support, and despite the possibility of disastrous consequences at home and abroad.

I’d have sweaty palms too, if I had my fingerprints on this. A cynic might even suggest that Democrats who gave Bush the keys to the car are hedging their bets now, in the event the president has a horrible wreck.

“You can see within the Democratic Party that there’s some sort of internal debate about where to take this,” says Jennifer Duffy, a congressional watchdog.

“Maybe somebody like Feinstein got on the bandwagon too early when they voted for the resolution. They really didn’t want to be seen as voting against this, and now it’s left them in a place they never really wanted to be.”

On Tuesday, I dropped by her office to see what Feinstein had to say for herself. As we walked from a news conference to a meeting, I told her one observer suggested she has been all over the place on this issue.

“That’s nonsense,” she said.

In her defense, I don’t think the charge is entirely fair.

Feinstein argues that she’s been consistent in certain views about the war as the situation has evolved.

But she did get a commendation from a peace group in August, then voted Oct. 11 to authorize force despite some reservations, and now is horrified by what Bush is doing with the authority she and others signed over, as if any of it should have come as a surprise.

“Specifically,” she said in a scathing speech here last week, “the administration’s focus on unilateral action, its dismissal of international law, treaties and institutions, and its apparent emphasis on military power to the exclusion of other policy options, has created serious concerns both here and abroad....

“And, in the long run, I believe that this new strategy undermines U.S. security and will make the world more dangerous, not safer.”

Feinstein was particularly worked up about a Pentagon document calling for the development of a new generation of nuclear warheads. The document listed situations in which the U.S. would drop a nuke as a first strike against North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria or Libya.

As the senator suggests, it might be difficult to explain nuking Iraq and killing tens of thousands of people as a statement against nuclear war.

Feinstein told me she doesn’t regret her vote to authorize military action, because she thinks it was a necessary first step in getting the weapons inspectors into Iraq.

She wants Saddam Hussein disarmed, and isn’t against war as a last resort.

But she said she has always been against the go-it-alone invasion that could now begin any day, at an unknown cost, with a murky post-Saddam plan and an uncertain impact on the world as we know it.

That should have been the argument from the beginning, but now we’ve moved past the eleventh hour, and sweaty palms are becoming the norm.

“I don’t want this to end up as a clash of civilizations,” Feinstein said. “Which could happen.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@ latimes.com.