A Butterfly

Robert Byrd has metamorphosized from a small time petty local politician worm into one of America's great statesmen. Here he warns his colleagues about being led by the nose down a path they should absolutely be wary of:

"Every foreign adversary is not the devil incarnate. We know now that Saddam Hussein was militarily a paper tiger. The intelligence that suggested he was an imminent threat was flat wrong. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had not attacked our country. Saddam Hussein was a ruthless tyrant, but he was not an imminent threat to U.S. national security. And now we hear the same scare tactics and simple analogies trotted out again,this time with Iran. Analogies can be dangerous things; they risk oversimplifying complicated situations, and can lead to erroneous conclusions. While there may be some superficial similarities between Hitler and Ahmadinejad, it does not mean that our only option is to start World War III.

We are now more than four years into a war that was launched by false fears and scary hyperbole, and here we are again, being led down a path by chest-pounding rhetoric, without a clear idea of where that path is taking us.

As the philosopher George Santayana once said, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"Are we condemned...?"

Senator Robert Byrd