In fact, many of the same Democrats who spent the last six years of the Bush era beating up the president over Iraq were the very ones pounding the drum for regime change when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

A cursory review of quotes over the past decade and a half illustrates just how aligned the most powerful Democrats in Washington were with George W. Bush when it came to the threat they thought Saddam Hussein posed to America. The Democratic quotes also show how short our collective memory is as a nation.

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Two years before Bush was even elected to the White House, his predecessor told Americans that their purpose should be to “seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD program.” President Clinton saw Iraq as a major threat.

Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, called the ability of states like Iraq to use their weapons “the greatest security threat we face.”

Clinton’s national security adviser agreed.

Sandy Berger stated with certainty that “Saddam will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983.”

Other Democratic leaders, such as Edwards, Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller also encouraged military action against Saddam Hussein if it was necessary to eliminate his weapons programs.

One of Bush’s harshest critics during the war, Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spent the first years of the George W. Bush administration warning the new president of Iraq’s grave threat. In 2001, Levin told Bush that “Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.”

In 2002, Hillary Clinton also warned that Saddam was working to rebuild his nuclear program and had “given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.”

Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also said in 2002 that “there is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons in the next five years.”

Bush’s 2000 opponent, Al Gore, was quoted in that same year saying that “Saddam has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country” and that finding them would be “impossible for as long as Saddam is in power.”

Bush’s 2004 presidential opponent, John Kerry, also vouched for Iraq’s WMD programs when he told the Senate, “I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction are in Saddam Hussein’s hands and is a real and grave threat to our security.”

Even the president’s harshest war critic, Sen. Ted Kennedy, told fellow senators that “we have known Saddam Hussein has been seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction for some time.”

The New York Times joined the Democratic chorus by grimly warning of the threat posed by Iraq in the final years of the Clinton administration. The Times expressed grave concerns over the dictator’s attempt to develop weapons and warned U.S. leaders that negotiations could be ineffective, since “it is hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.”

On the eve of President George W. Bush’s first Inauguration, The Washington Post was even more apocalyptic, calling Iraq’s weapons program the greatest threat facing the new president.